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Dorian Abbot's avatar

I like your proposal about improving outreach and education. We included that in the original MFE article. Maybe we should add a paragraph to this chapter. Thank you!

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Marie Kennedy's avatar

I definitely agree an alternative framework to DEI is overdue. Personally I’m not quite willing to throw out the idea that DEI might actually be workable if it committed to the fullest senses of the words Diversity (of backgrounds and perspectives), Equity (fairness), and Inclusion (of everyone). But I work as an engineer in industry, not academia, and we have been much more conservative about DEI efforts—if I were in academia I could imagine concluding the whole enterprise is unsalvageable.

My concern with your proposed MFE framework is that it fails to address or even acknowledge the root problem that DEI claims to care about resolving, namely: why are we seeing racial and gender disparities in high-status fields and to what extent is it due to bias, individual or systemic? A rigorous, STEM-informed approach to the problem would admit that we do see disparities and it is worth some amount of effort to address potential root causes BUT within the bounds of “fairness.” For example, outreach efforts to low-income schools to expose kids to STEM and encourage careers in STEM is Fair, and would increase Diversity of background in the field. To hyper-focus on Merit might lead one to throw up one’s hands and say “well it’s not my fault there aren’t enough qualified Black high school students to admit to our program.” Truly it’s not a university’s *fault,* but there is room to improve Fairness in becoming prepared and aware of opportunities that some students do not have Equal opportunity to access. “Equity” done right means proactively providing opportunities to students who don’t organically get them, BUT it doesn’t mean all the students who need extra access are Black and all the students with a jump start are White. The fatal flaw of DEI (ok, one of many) is presuming that access to opportunity is 1:1 correlated to skin color. A STEM-informed approach to DEI would be laser-focused on understanding true causality of disparities and addressing the true root causes that violate principles of fairness, while acknowledging a residual level of disparity will remain due to free will and cultural clustering of life choices, and that’s ok.

On that note, I do not think “treating all humans equally” is compatible with “meritocracy.” Some people are born with more innate STEM abilities than others, and it’s ok to treat people differently on that basis. But we know STEM abilities are also nurtured by high-quality education, which correlates strongly with family wealth. Do we want to admit students from, say, lower quality schools, or first-generation college applicants, who show high potential but maybe score slightly lower on standardized tests than kids from elite prep schools? I think we should, so long as we’re willing to invest in helping them succeed. But that’s not the same as using skin color as a selection factor! Of course, once a person has graduated from university and is applying for jobs in academia, it’s a different story, and one could argue that the playing field should probably be considered pretty-well leveled.

Long rambling, but again, I applaud the effort to not just poke holes at DEI but offer a substantive alternative!! Best of luck.

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