Different at the U

UW Chancellor Blank sent around an email about "Addressing Racial Inequities on Campus." Since I gather this is a public document I assume I can quote freely.

One bullet point is "Enrollment and Recruitment. We must continue efforts to increase the diversity of campus by expanding enrollment and employment among underrepresented groups."

The very next bullet point is "Campus History. Understanding our past is important to changing our future. ... A central part of this project involves confronting and discussing the history of racism and other forms of exclusion/marginalization on campus."

Imagine how much more enticing a campus will be to prospective black engineers when one of the main topics of discussion is how racist the campus has been.

And students will have to take an orientation explaining "culture, identity, and difference." I assume that eventually the faculty and staff will have to take it too. To appreciate the full absurdity of this, remember that UW-Madison is a reasearch university, and recruits students and faculty from all over the world. Wet-behind-the-ears students may not have experienced much "difference," but I guarantee the faculty and staff have.

I'm not tenure bound, so this isn't going to bother me, but do I need to explain what can happen to research groups? "This past spring each Divisional Committee added new language to tenure guidelines that recognizes the importance of community engaged scholarship and scholarly activities in support of diversity, equity, and inclusion as noteworthy endeavors to be considered as part of tenure and promotion." Virtue signalling is cheap, and quite a bit easier than research.

Granted, outreach is a good thing, and not that easy. The people I know will keep doing the same things (which reach diverse groups of students already, albeit the subset of students who are already curious about science), and modify the bookkeeping to keep track of ethnicity counts instead of just the total number of students.

I don't see 95% of the University students or staff. All I know about frats is what I read in the papers (and am thereby misinformed) and from conversations with a scientist who used to be in a frat. If you told me they were hotbeds of racism, I'd be surprised (and dubious), but couldn't contradict you.

What I have seen at the U is about as free of racism as you can get. If you can do the work, you're in: no matter whether your ancestry was from Western Europe, Eastern Europe, China, Japan, Mexico... We've had very few blacks (one Nigerian), but nobody seemed to be walking on eggshells. If there's anything structural that stops blacks from being physicists, it isn't in the physics department. It's in high school, or if my intermittent elementary school demos are any guide, quite a bit earlier.

I get it that being the only one "of your kind" can be very uncomfortable. You stand out; you're not in any of the families/groups/cliques; you can't read people--and some of those people may not like you because of what you are and you have no idea which. In my case, I also couldn't always understand the language: I never did acquire skill with Liberian English and learned about 3 words of the tribal languages.

What was liberating for me in those environments was clear expectations. In a defined environment, your family didn't matter, what mattered was whether you could kick the ball into the goal (not well, it turned out), or whatever the matter at hand was. Outside of school, in purely social environments, I was at sea. To be clear, that was and often still is the case in any purely social environment. introvert

Insofar as the university is about education, it is easy enough to make clear expections in clearly defined environments in which students can find a way to learn. Punctuality and lab courtesy and course expectations are pretty simple to define.

If the student is there for an apprenticeship, it gets more complicated, but I still think we can spell out expectations. "Research is a social activity. You are expected to have lunch with your fellow-students at least twice a month. If somebody in your group is uncomfortable discussing some subject, don't bring it up again." etc

If the student is there to make contacts (and maybe look for a spouse), thing get more complicated.

If the student is there for the modern Grand Tour, it almost seems redundant to try to teach diversity; you would hope the experiences would be enough by themselves. (If not, why bother with the U?)

I don't want to worry about "the student experience." That form of entertainment seems to be a big selling point for universities, though.