Thread by @lpachter

This speech by @FareedZakaria is a litany of misinformation. There is much to improve at US universities, but his claims are false and unhelpful.

A rebuttal: 1/🧵

https://twitter.com/FareedZakaria/status/1733927077085143263

The speech begins with the claim that the public has been losing faith in universities because universities are pushing political agendas instead of catering to excellence. But he provides no evidence of a link.

Hypothesis: the main factor is cost. 2/
foxbusiness.com/economy/colleg…

He says that in 2016 70% headed for college vs 62% now. But provides no evidence that it's because of "American universities abandoning focus on excellence... to pursue... DEI".

America is an outlier among all advanced nations in cost of education. 3/
businessinsider.com/how-much-colle…

@FareedZakaria says that DEI started with the best of intensions. That universities wanted to ensure people felt comfortable on campus.

Actually, DEI started in in the 18th century. 4/washingtonpost.com/made-by-histor…

His framing of DEI as being about "safe spaces, trigger warnings, and microagressions" is also a gross misrepresentation. If we're going to talk about DEI in Ivy League schools let's talk about Yale first admitting women in 1968, Princeton 1969, Dartmouth 1972. 5/

Let's talk about rampant sexism in academia in the ensuing years, at every level, from undergraduate admissions to faculty hiring. A glimpse of what academia looked like in the 1980s: 6/washingtonpost.com/archive/opinio…

As for those "microaggressions" that @FareedZakaria dismisses out of hand... let me give one example: the first group meeting I attend was at @LBNLresearch when I was a postdoc in Berkeley. The professor yelled at a student presenting so loudly that he brought her to tears. 7/

Her sin: he didn't like the colors in one of her figures. He was screaming so loudly that you could hear him down the hall.

DEI at universities means many things, including normalizing behaviors that are conducive to study and research for all. That is a very good thing.
8/

@FareedZakaria scolds universities for issuing statements after the George Floyd murder. So are we to just accept this kind of terrorism?

Is this the "excellence in academia" he yearns for?
9/time.com/4568806/univer…

He asserts that the recent Supreme Court decision on that race based admissions shows they have gone too far. With such faith in the courts, and concern for Jewish students (he claims they don't "count" for DEI) does he support this call for genocide? 10/reuters.com/legal/governme…

The reality of universities is that ensuring students are "physically safe but intellectually unsafe" (@FareedZakaria quoting @VanJones68) is difficult. Universities try. Sometimes they get it right, sometimes they don't. 11/insidehighered.com/news/2016/08/0…

And that includes @Harvard, a university, like all others, trying to figure out DEI every day, as it should.

Certainly at times universities go too far. Sometimes not far enough. And leaders are not always up to the challenges at hand. 12/npr.org/sections/ed/20…

But @FareedZakaria also says that lack of political diversity is NEVER addressed, implying that a) universities are not politically diverse and b) they try to maintain that. Has he looked at the courses offered by @Stanford's Hoover Fellows recently? 13/hoover.org/stanford-cours…

Oh, and these are mostly taught by white men. Bringing me to another false claim of @FareedZakaria. He says a white man studying American presidency doesn’t have prayer of getting tenure. Is he worried about Adam McMahon? 14/rider.edu/about/faculty-…

Or Jon Rogowski? 15/


Or any of the other myriad white male professors recently hired to study the American presidency at US universities?iq.harvard.edu/people/jon-c-r…

Maybe he thinks tenured professors such as Charles Cameron didn't get tenure in the first place?

Or Stephen Skowronek? 16/politics.princeton.edu/people/charles…
politicalscience.yale.edu/people/stephen…

Speaking of Yale, @FareedZakaria claims grade inflation is rampant. Perhaps there is a problem, I haven't studied the issue carefully. But maybe also the students are just getting MUCH better.

Yale admissions rate in 2003: 13.8%. In 2022 it was 4.5%

17/yale.edu/about-yale/yal…

Which of course is also why SATs are mostly optional now. First, they are mostly *optional* (not ignored as @FareedZakaria claims). 87.5% have made them optional. And it's not because of DEI. It's because of the pandemic, which made it difficult to administer them. 18/

Yes, 64.7% of schools required SAT pre-pandemic. 34.3% now. But the fact that they are mostly optional means the students from poor background who do well can still use them. Of course, @FareedZakaria doesn't mention that rich students use them to feign qualifications. 19/

The cost of tutoring? In some cases several thousand dollars, and that was years ago.

And BTW, last year something like 30,000 students applying to @UCLA had a 4.0 GPA. This is not the 80s anymore (@FareedZakaria graduated from Yale '86).

20/foxbusiness.com/features/is-sa…

So are DEI initiatives the evil that @FareedZakaria makes them out ot be? I will say that I've seen failed policies in some schools, and mistakes made. But overall there have been many positive aspects to DEI efforts at universities, especially during the past few years. 21/

For example, the formalization of review policies, procedures and rubrics has helped to reduce the effects of sexism and racism in hiring. I was on a hiring committee a decade ago where male faculty would say "I like him, because he was my friend in grad school. He's smart".. 22/

... Now such ad-hoc assists by old boys for their buddies have a check via DEI procedures that require actually evaluating scientific competence. That is really what DEI means in universities right now. With all due respect to @FareedZakaria, I think he is wrong. 23/

I started by noting there is much to improve in universities. We have a huge gun problem that makes learning / teaching at a university terrifying. See
or @UNC just this year
24/cnn.com/2023/03/10/us/…
unc.edu/discover/lates…

Of course we are far from living in a country where every kid, regardless of background, family status, etc. has a fair shot at attending a good university. The moral arc of our universities is riddled with bullet holes. Literally. But it's bending in the right direction. 25/25