Those of you who know me are probably tired of hearing about my diversity pet peeves but it is a good place to start my rants blog. Like everyone else I of course think diversity in race, gender, and social outlook is a good thing. However, this surely does not mean any program to increase diversity is a good thing (shooting alot of white males for instance). Now I’m unsure how I feel about programs which relax standards for underrepresented groups and I think whether or not such programs are justified turns on subtle questions of aims and effectiveness.

However, regardless of why (or even if) you care about diversity some programs just don’t make sense. As an example consider the recruitment effort by UMBC for women and minorities in science, mathematics and engineering outlined in a recent article in Inside Higher Ed. Unfortunately programs like this seem to consume the majority of resources, time and attention in matters of diversity and ultimately waste resources and concern which could be placed to positive use Alright, so what is the problem with this program at UMBC? They put a strong emphasis on the search process actively seeking women and minorities. They run special retreats and encourage mentoring for women and minorities. They even apply for special grants to support diversifying the faculty. Finally they offer family friendly leave policies.

These all seem like effective measures to attract women and minority faculty in engineering and sciences to UMBC so what’s the problem? Well this would be a great program if the deficiency of women in these fields was due to competition with private industry over qualified applicants, or to some kind of burnout on the part of female academics. However, this simply isn’t the case.

A quick look at any graduate program in engineering, mathematics or the physical sciences will quickly reveal the primary problem is not in faculty recruitment. Of course the percentage of women and minorities faculty in these fields will be small when the percentage of women and minority grad students is small. In fact (at least in mathematics) studies have demonstrated that female faculty are as prevalent in the discipline overall as one would expect from their historically weighted percentage of graduate degrees.

In short no amount of recruitment is going to find women and minorities with appropriate Ph.Ds when they don’t exist. At best such programs expend resources to shuffle around the chips already on the table. Sure by offering particularly appealing programs or compelling recruitment programs universities like UMBC can steal female and minority faculty from other universities but this is hardly behavior to be lauded. Having a particularly large percentage of women and minority faculty in engineering, math and sciences at UMBC isn’t really a positive if it comes at the expense of students at other universities having fewer (or even no) female and minority role models.

It is well known that the loss of women and minorities to these quantitative disciplines happens primarily from middle school through HS (and perhaps some in college). Any intelligent policy to deal with this problem would thus target these groups. Policies designed to fight over the small pool of underrepresented faculty rather than expanding the pool are about the political and personal glorification of the people implementing it not about actually fixing the problem.

This isn’t that complicated a point. I just don’t get it how people keep being taken in by these things.