While the author notes that that they live in Alberta, they appear to be, unsurprisingly, an American, with an American fellowship, and posts that appear to be almost entirely about American...
People of African descent currently make up 3.3% of Alberta's population and most of those are first generation immigrants with no educational background.
While the author notes that that they live in Alberta, they appear to be, unsurprisingly, an American, with an American fellowship, and posts that appear to be almost entirely about American topics from an American perspective. And, unsurprisingly, they seem to be considering American demographics while discussing Canadian universities. This American cultural imperialism is pervasive and frustrating; it exists on both the left and the right, and comes not just from Americans, but also from people so influenced by American perspectives that they start repeating them without considering the changed context. I recall, for example, an Irish (in my opinion, ersatz-)Trotskyist group, who demanded an increased focus on BIPOC treatment in the country. What the 'I' was supposed to mean in this context was rather baffling, and ignoring that oddity, it would seem to make little sense to focus on demographics that were large and oppressed in the US, in a country where those demographics are extremely small, and what appear to be the most significant prejudices, against several white demographics—South Americans, Eastern Europeans, and Travellers—are pervasive, systemic, and almost seen as culturally acceptable to express openly.
If "representation matters" then our faculties should be dominantly white and east Asian which, unsurprisingly, they are.
Beyond this observation, the author and Peterson are making different claims. Interpreting the author's explanations, Peterson is claiming that young white academics in the US and Canada, especially male ones and presumably in the humanities and social sciences, will be at a considerable disadvantage. The author is claiming that current faculty demographics have skewed representation. Both can be true, and the first could well be true because of the second.
While I am in the physical sciences, I do have close connections with people in the humanities, in the US and Europe. In the US, faculty are, unsurprisingly, predominantly white (I am not so certain that they are predominantly male), beyond what demographics would suggest in an equitable society, and this is rightly seen as problematic (they are predominantly white in much of Europe as well, but that more closely matches European demographics). But academic hiring is a slow process, and faculty usually stay around for a long time, especially with lengthening lifespans: for the traditional academic, seeing scholarship as a vocation rather than a career, retirement often makes little sense, beyond an opportunity to teach less, and research and mentor more. Correcting representation by hiring more equitably would be an extremely slow process, one that could well take several decades.
So I have the sense that US universities are taking the approach of using only their new positions to try to quickly correct their overall demographics. Doing that means that their new hires must have demographics skewed far in the other direction, so that the small number of new positions overall will compensate for the large body of established faculty. And, whether it is good or bad, it can mean that young, white academics have significantly reduced career prospects because of their skin colour. Yes, from a population perspective, the strategies seem reasonable. But at an individual level, these strategies could be seen, in essence, as telling young white graduate students that, because people with their skin colour on hiring committees in previous generations were oppressive and prejudiced, in order to keep those previous generations in comfortable positions, their future prospects will be crippled instead, in a field that is usually much more one of passion than of profit, such that going into something else is unlikely to be fulfilling. The speed of changes in hiring and the length of US PhD programs, also mean that white students who entered programs with reasonable prospects now have far fewer, and are instead being bombarded with 'professionalization' seminars that try to suggest to them that they will all fail in academia because they are not professional or diligent enough, and that they should plan on going into something else instead.
I don't have a quantitative or first-hand sense of the job market in the humanities and social sciences in the US, but hearing from graduate students, while they are, as you point out, dominantly 'progressive' in a certain sense, and certainly in favour of more equitable representation, they are quite concerned by these changes at a personal level. They'll point to departments where essentially all established faculty are white, and essentially every new hire has been non-white and studying specifically non-white topics (again, since established faculty predominantly ignore those topics), with the exception of people with under-represented gender and sexual identities (ie, not LGB) studying related topics. They'll point to postdoctoral fellowships that are ostensibly open to anyone, but have not had any white recipient in years, and relate being told that, as they were researching marginalized, but white, groups, they would have better chances at European positions, where much of this does not apply.
There's no easy answer to this problem. It doesn't seem right to dismiss the complaint (that young white academics in the US will have difficult career prospects) by pointing to the demographics of established faculty. At the same time, simply hiring equitably doesn't seem like it would be nearly enough to correct the problems of representation in a reasonable amount of time.
Don't know about the last thing, but I often wonder about the relation between demographics and representation. Some places just have a lot of white people 🤷 Edit: On another note, liberal arts is...
Don't know about the last thing, but I often wonder about the relation between demographics and representation. Some places just have a lot of white people 🤷
Edit: On another note, liberal arts is always progressive. But there's a lot more than liberal arts on a university, no?
More tangential than that, germany is importing a lot of the rethoric around social justice straight from the US. (For no good reason, imo. We've got our own academia on the matter. Read a book or...
More tangential than that, germany is importing a lot of the rethoric around social justice straight from the US. (For no good reason, imo. We've got our own academia on the matter. Read a book or something, I don't know.) The result is a focus on a negligibly small black population that is generally not too heavily disadvantaged either, while we have much more heavily disadvantaged eastern european (white! The horror!) and turkish minorities. The george floyd protests were pretty much copied here. And while I get that as an expression of sympathy with US blacks, the messaging was applied to german police too. Who are of course not above criticism, but the underlying dynamics are so drastically different, regarding violence against and by police, gun ownership and who the disenfrachised are, it's not even funny.
I should say this only really applies to social media activism. I don't think this has infected academia or politics much.
Last year, the local green party launched a university offshot (for context, in Austria every party has a "university version" which is focused and staffed and focused on younger people, and for...
Last year, the local green party launched a university offshot (for context, in Austria every party has a "university version" which is focused and staffed and focused on younger people, and for most professional politicians, their launchpad for their career).
Their party statement was pretty hilarious, as among open discrimination against men (requiring them to leave the room if a "minority" wanted and declared a safe space and also making sure that during meetings, men only got to talk like every 3rd time, requiring minorities to be in between), requiring a quota for FLINT people (Female, Lesbian, Intersex, Non-binary, Trans), and most importantly, a "focus on supporting students and scientist with migrational backgrounds, black, indigenous and people of colour", when I read that I felt extremely funny because in the context of an Austrian university, who the fuck is an indigenous person? Someone from Tirol? It reeked of American perspectives.
I see. I never really thought universities where only meant to do research related activities. I assume by your vocabulary that you're referring to the US and/or Canada, maybe your idea of...
I see. I never really thought universities where only meant to do research related activities. I assume by your vocabulary that you're referring to the US and/or Canada, maybe your idea of university is distinct from the one I'm familiar with.
Edit: in any case, I'm pretty sure there's good research in business school. Seems like a good place to study the intersection between finance, psychology, and social sciences.
I suppose it depends on how you think of "Business" as a group of professions. As someone who is within that constellation, I agree with Loire. Most people with a higher degree in a...
I suppose it depends on how you think of "Business" as a group of professions. As someone who is within that constellation, I agree with Loire. Most people with a higher degree in a business-related field are purely executing processes developed by other people and following the instructions of higher management for a productive purpose. For all there's a social difference between an accountant and a plumber, they're both mostly just executing the same old tasks every time without expecting or attempting to move their respective fields forward. I'm not going to defend this stance super hard, but I can see why business education could be grouped with other trade professions.
Aren't most engineers mainly concerned with practical matters as well? In any case, the academic field "Business" is not called by an equivalent to the word "business" in my language. I won't say...
Aren't most engineers mainly concerned with practical matters as well?
In any case, the academic field "Business" is not called by an equivalent to the word "business" in my language. I won't say how we call it to avoid localizing me too much, but I can say that it is a broader term.
The engineers among my friends group (both mechanical and computer) seem to have jobs that skew more heavily towards cleverness and testing new ground, though that's entirely anecdotal. They're...
The engineers among my friends group (both mechanical and computer) seem to have jobs that skew more heavily towards cleverness and testing new ground, though that's entirely anecdotal. They're solving new problems, as opposed to performing the established steps. I suppose the engineer whose job it was to hit nuclear facilities with a hammer (to make sure all of the concrete was still good) mostly engaged in rote labor, but... I suppose my personal experience does not a trend make. :D
I see. You know, as much as I dislike major corporations I wouldn't go as far as saying that there's no cleverness or testing new ground in business. Maybe you're making a distinction between...
I see. You know, as much as I dislike major corporations I wouldn't go as far as saying that there's no cleverness or testing new ground in business.
Maybe you're making a distinction between epistemologies which are scientific by necessity, and those who don't (which doesn't mean that they cannot be scientific, but they're not as bound to science as others). They're both knowledge, but of a different kind. I mean, by those standards, wouldn't the arts also be unworthy of a presence in academia? Or large swaths of the humanities?
Law is applied social science, and most people go there to, well, learn a trade. It's eminently practical. Should law be thaught in trading schools as well?
I'm not saying that there's no cleverness or testing new grounds in business, but that it's not so fundamental to the profession. As far as the distinction I'm fumbling towards... it's not so much...
I'm not saying that there's no cleverness or testing new grounds in business, but that it's not so fundamental to the profession. As far as the distinction I'm fumbling towards... it's not so much Scientific, specifically, as exploratory. Personally I think that the arts are eminently worthy of their place in academia, as they more than most are about reaching for something that says or shows us something interesting or new. I do agree that law is, for most people, just another trade and better grouped there than in its current rarified heights.
It's probably valuable to understand that universities serve practical purposes, and so do classifications. Disciplines like law, despite being eminently practical, probably require a...
It's probably valuable to understand that universities serve practical purposes, and so do classifications. Disciplines like law, despite being eminently practical, probably require a university-like environment to be learned. This has to do with many factors, such as the ability to attract (and pay for) talented and experienced professors and provide all kinds of support needed by the students.
I'm certain there are many fields with a trade orientation which require, nevertheless, being part of a university.
Finally, what is university anyway? It's pretty hard to draw lines of demarcation using a more or less abstract cathegorical logic. These things have to exist in the real world, you know? And I'm not even sure that universities should be defined only as places of research and experimentation in the first place.
But much of the issues you're describing aren't ones of technical requirements regarding the pay and professors and whatnot. They are matters of the low social standing and economic viability of...
But much of the issues you're describing aren't ones of technical requirements regarding the pay and professors and whatnot. They are matters of the low social standing and economic viability of trade schools as opposed to universities. That said, I'm really tired of the "What is a university and what should it be" debate. We could split professional training a whole lot of different waslys, and I don't know that some other way would actually be better.
While the author notes that that they live in Alberta, they appear to be, unsurprisingly, an American, with an American fellowship, and posts that appear to be almost entirely about American topics from an American perspective. And, unsurprisingly, they seem to be considering American demographics while discussing Canadian universities. This American cultural imperialism is pervasive and frustrating; it exists on both the left and the right, and comes not just from Americans, but also from people so influenced by American perspectives that they start repeating them without considering the changed context. I recall, for example, an Irish (in my opinion, ersatz-)Trotskyist group, who demanded an increased focus on BIPOC treatment in the country. What the 'I' was supposed to mean in this context was rather baffling, and ignoring that oddity, it would seem to make little sense to focus on demographics that were large and oppressed in the US, in a country where those demographics are extremely small, and what appear to be the most significant prejudices, against several white demographics—South Americans, Eastern Europeans, and Travellers—are pervasive, systemic, and almost seen as culturally acceptable to express openly.
Beyond this observation, the author and Peterson are making different claims. Interpreting the author's explanations, Peterson is claiming that young white academics in the US and Canada, especially male ones and presumably in the humanities and social sciences, will be at a considerable disadvantage. The author is claiming that current faculty demographics have skewed representation. Both can be true, and the first could well be true because of the second.
While I am in the physical sciences, I do have close connections with people in the humanities, in the US and Europe. In the US, faculty are, unsurprisingly, predominantly white (I am not so certain that they are predominantly male), beyond what demographics would suggest in an equitable society, and this is rightly seen as problematic (they are predominantly white in much of Europe as well, but that more closely matches European demographics). But academic hiring is a slow process, and faculty usually stay around for a long time, especially with lengthening lifespans: for the traditional academic, seeing scholarship as a vocation rather than a career, retirement often makes little sense, beyond an opportunity to teach less, and research and mentor more. Correcting representation by hiring more equitably would be an extremely slow process, one that could well take several decades.
So I have the sense that US universities are taking the approach of using only their new positions to try to quickly correct their overall demographics. Doing that means that their new hires must have demographics skewed far in the other direction, so that the small number of new positions overall will compensate for the large body of established faculty. And, whether it is good or bad, it can mean that young, white academics have significantly reduced career prospects because of their skin colour. Yes, from a population perspective, the strategies seem reasonable. But at an individual level, these strategies could be seen, in essence, as telling young white graduate students that, because people with their skin colour on hiring committees in previous generations were oppressive and prejudiced, in order to keep those previous generations in comfortable positions, their future prospects will be crippled instead, in a field that is usually much more one of passion than of profit, such that going into something else is unlikely to be fulfilling. The speed of changes in hiring and the length of US PhD programs, also mean that white students who entered programs with reasonable prospects now have far fewer, and are instead being bombarded with 'professionalization' seminars that try to suggest to them that they will all fail in academia because they are not professional or diligent enough, and that they should plan on going into something else instead.
I don't have a quantitative or first-hand sense of the job market in the humanities and social sciences in the US, but hearing from graduate students, while they are, as you point out, dominantly 'progressive' in a certain sense, and certainly in favour of more equitable representation, they are quite concerned by these changes at a personal level. They'll point to departments where essentially all established faculty are white, and essentially every new hire has been non-white and studying specifically non-white topics (again, since established faculty predominantly ignore those topics), with the exception of people with under-represented gender and sexual identities (ie, not LGB) studying related topics. They'll point to postdoctoral fellowships that are ostensibly open to anyone, but have not had any white recipient in years, and relate being told that, as they were researching marginalized, but white, groups, they would have better chances at European positions, where much of this does not apply.
There's no easy answer to this problem. It doesn't seem right to dismiss the complaint (that young white academics in the US will have difficult career prospects) by pointing to the demographics of established faculty. At the same time, simply hiring equitably doesn't seem like it would be nearly enough to correct the problems of representation in a reasonable amount of time.
Don't know about the last thing, but I often wonder about the relation between demographics and representation. Some places just have a lot of white people 🤷
Edit: On another note, liberal arts is always progressive. But there's a lot more than liberal arts on a university, no?
More tangential than that, germany is importing a lot of the rethoric around social justice straight from the US. (For no good reason, imo. We've got our own academia on the matter. Read a book or something, I don't know.) The result is a focus on a negligibly small black population that is generally not too heavily disadvantaged either, while we have much more heavily disadvantaged eastern european (white! The horror!) and turkish minorities. The george floyd protests were pretty much copied here. And while I get that as an expression of sympathy with US blacks, the messaging was applied to german police too. Who are of course not above criticism, but the underlying dynamics are so drastically different, regarding violence against and by police, gun ownership and who the disenfrachised are, it's not even funny.
I should say this only really applies to social media activism. I don't think this has infected academia or politics much.
Last year, the local green party launched a university offshot (for context, in Austria every party has a "university version" which is focused and staffed and focused on younger people, and for most professional politicians, their launchpad for their career).
Their party statement was pretty hilarious, as among open discrimination against men (requiring them to leave the room if a "minority" wanted and declared a safe space and also making sure that during meetings, men only got to talk like every 3rd time, requiring minorities to be in between), requiring a quota for FLINT people (Female, Lesbian, Intersex, Non-binary, Trans), and most importantly, a "focus on supporting students and scientist with migrational backgrounds, black, indigenous and people of colour", when I read that I felt extremely funny because in the context of an Austrian university, who the fuck is an indigenous person? Someone from Tirol? It reeked of American perspectives.
Why is that?
I see. I never really thought universities where only meant to do research related activities. I assume by your vocabulary that you're referring to the US and/or Canada, maybe your idea of university is distinct from the one I'm familiar with.
Edit: in any case, I'm pretty sure there's good research in business school. Seems like a good place to study the intersection between finance, psychology, and social sciences.
I suppose it depends on how you think of "Business" as a group of professions. As someone who is within that constellation, I agree with Loire. Most people with a higher degree in a business-related field are purely executing processes developed by other people and following the instructions of higher management for a productive purpose. For all there's a social difference between an accountant and a plumber, they're both mostly just executing the same old tasks every time without expecting or attempting to move their respective fields forward. I'm not going to defend this stance super hard, but I can see why business education could be grouped with other trade professions.
Aren't most engineers mainly concerned with practical matters as well?
In any case, the academic field "Business" is not called by an equivalent to the word "business" in my language. I won't say how we call it to avoid localizing me too much, but I can say that it is a broader term.
The engineers among my friends group (both mechanical and computer) seem to have jobs that skew more heavily towards cleverness and testing new ground, though that's entirely anecdotal. They're solving new problems, as opposed to performing the established steps. I suppose the engineer whose job it was to hit nuclear facilities with a hammer (to make sure all of the concrete was still good) mostly engaged in rote labor, but... I suppose my personal experience does not a trend make. :D
I see. You know, as much as I dislike major corporations I wouldn't go as far as saying that there's no cleverness or testing new ground in business.
Maybe you're making a distinction between epistemologies which are scientific by necessity, and those who don't (which doesn't mean that they cannot be scientific, but they're not as bound to science as others). They're both knowledge, but of a different kind. I mean, by those standards, wouldn't the arts also be unworthy of a presence in academia? Or large swaths of the humanities?
Law is applied social science, and most people go there to, well, learn a trade. It's eminently practical. Should law be thaught in trading schools as well?
I'm not saying that there's no cleverness or testing new grounds in business, but that it's not so fundamental to the profession. As far as the distinction I'm fumbling towards... it's not so much Scientific, specifically, as exploratory. Personally I think that the arts are eminently worthy of their place in academia, as they more than most are about reaching for something that says or shows us something interesting or new. I do agree that law is, for most people, just another trade and better grouped there than in its current rarified heights.
It's probably valuable to understand that universities serve practical purposes, and so do classifications. Disciplines like law, despite being eminently practical, probably require a university-like environment to be learned. This has to do with many factors, such as the ability to attract (and pay for) talented and experienced professors and provide all kinds of support needed by the students.
I'm certain there are many fields with a trade orientation which require, nevertheless, being part of a university.
Finally, what is university anyway? It's pretty hard to draw lines of demarcation using a more or less abstract cathegorical logic. These things have to exist in the real world, you know? And I'm not even sure that universities should be defined only as places of research and experimentation in the first place.
But much of the issues you're describing aren't ones of technical requirements regarding the pay and professors and whatnot. They are matters of the low social standing and economic viability of trade schools as opposed to universities. That said, I'm really tired of the "What is a university and what should it be" debate. We could split professional training a whole lot of different waslys, and I don't know that some other way would actually be better.
Oh, Im sorry, I don't think I ever debated that before. Im not tired just yet :P