> Not sure how you can say this with such assurance
I'm wondering if you're willing to tell us how many faculty DEI statements you've actually read. I'm very sure that if we forced the posters here to disclose the same, the median across this thread would be 0 or 1 (that one being the first hit that could be found searching Google).
Personally I've read dozens upon dozens in my role as an educator, and thwayunion has been spot on in their assessment. As for this:
> given we can see countless examples of DEI gone wild at the Ivies or Stanford or Wellesley
There's always going to be examples of things going wrong in a chaotic and distributed process. Pointing them out doesn't prove much. That said, a lot of the "gone wild" examples that people can bring up are also based in the same ignorance as people complaining about DEI statement who haven't read a single DEI statement. The recent Stanford word list that you probably have in mind is just one example; in that case, the freakout was over some overzealous members of an IT department publishing their internal content guidelines. It was probably misguided, but the ensuing freakout on the internet was overblown and rooted in a deep ignorance at how organizations like Universities operate.
So as far as this conversation goes, thwayunion's perception is properly calibrated. It seems to come from experience.
I'm wondering if you're willing to tell us how many faculty DEI statements you've actually read. I'm very sure that if we forced the posters here to disclose the same, the median across this thread would be 0 or 1 (that one being the first hit that could be found searching Google).
Personally I've read dozens upon dozens in my role as an educator, and thwayunion has been spot on in their assessment. As for this:
> given we can see countless examples of DEI gone wild at the Ivies or Stanford or Wellesley
There's always going to be examples of things going wrong in a chaotic and distributed process. Pointing them out doesn't prove much. That said, a lot of the "gone wild" examples that people can bring up are also based in the same ignorance as people complaining about DEI statement who haven't read a single DEI statement. The recent Stanford word list that you probably have in mind is just one example; in that case, the freakout was over some overzealous members of an IT department publishing their internal content guidelines. It was probably misguided, but the ensuing freakout on the internet was overblown and rooted in a deep ignorance at how organizations like Universities operate.
So as far as this conversation goes, thwayunion's perception is properly calibrated. It seems to come from experience.