About 20 of America’s self-described smartest people spent more than 2.5 years counting faculty noses at MIT and tabulating by skin tone, producing a 150-page report complete with four-color cover: “the report of the Initiative on Faculty Race and Diversity”. If you’d always wanted to know what percentage of faculty in MIT’s Urban Planning department described themselves as “Asian”, this is the document you’ve been waiting for. If you worried about how many dark-skinned MIT employees were born in the U.S. compared to how many immigrated from overseas, the answers are here. President Hockfield was so proud of this report that she made sure that all alumni were spammed about its availability.
Considering that this was prepared by a group of people who work with numbers all day every day, the statistical errors are remarkable. For example, the percentage of Hispanics in the U.S. population is compared with the percentage of Hispanics on the MIT faculty. An underlying assumption of this report is that it is important to have more native-born Hispanics teaching at MIT; immigrant Hispanics are disfavored for some reason. What’s wrong with comparing the prevalence of Hispanics in the overall population to the prevalence on the MIT faculty? The median age of a native-born Hispanic in the U.S. is 17 (source); the median age of an MIT professor is somewhere between 55 and dead (and likely to go to “beyond the grave” now that we’ve melted down all U.S. retirement assets). If a 15-year-old Hispanic girl is not teaching at MIT, can we infer ethnic bias?
My favorite part of the report is “An example from a peer research institution is the University of Michigan, where highly respected non-minority faculty were engaged as both consultants and advocates to address and champion diversity and excellence across campus.” In Gratz v. Bollinger, this exemplar institution was found guilty of unconstitutional race discrimination by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Question One is why the Ku Klux Klan was not hired to produce this report. Like the University of Michigan, the Klan has been convicted of race discrimination in a variety of federal courts. The Klan has always had a passionate interest in skin color and ethnicity. The Klan is also committed to advancing the interests of native-born Americans over immigrants (source). The Klan would probably have charged a lot less than the committee of PhDs and would no doubt have included a bonus section on the number of Jewish faculty members in different departments.
Question Two is why the report does not consider whether MIT is unfairly underpaying professors of color. The report states that black, American Indian, and native-born Hispanic professors have more value to the school than white and Asian professors. Yet there is nothing in the report about professors “of color” (the report’s term) being paid more than their less valuable colleagues. If a black professor is paid the same as a white professor, he or she is being exploited. The report also complains that MIT has an insufficient number of professors of color. Certainly there are plenty of black, Hispanic, and American Indian professors around the world. If they’ve chosen to work at some school other than MIT it might be because that other school recognizes their value and compensates them accordingly. Were MIT serious about increasing the number of professors with a particular skin tone, it would offer to pay such workers more.
[Suppose that a clothing manufacturer in Maine had the same problem. The only people who applied for jobs as models were white and the company wanted to be able to sell its products to people with different skin colors. The company would not wring its hands and cluck disapprovingly for decades. Nor would it pay 20 PhDs to spend 2.5 years writing a 150-page report. The company would raise the price it was willing to pay for models “of color” and, within a few days, a diverse group of models would find it worthwhile to drive up from New York City.]
“If a 15-year-old Hispanic girl is not teaching at MIT, can we infer ethnic bias?”
The answer is of course, yes. Yes, we can.
And upon further reflection, this is also indisputable proof of age bias as well.
I have never understood why discrimination in the present is so often championed as the cure for discrimination in the past.
“In Gratz v. Bollinger, this exemplar institution was found guilty of unconstitutional race discrimination by the U.S. Supreme Court.”
Not that it hurt Lee Bollinger at all. This “note legal scholar of the First Amendment” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Bollinger) parlayed his way into the Presidency of Columbia University.