Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I find myself needing to write a "Statement of Past and/or Planned Future Contributions to Advancing Diversity and Inclusive Excellence" (a.k.a. a DEI statement) in order to apply for a university teaching job.
My understanding is that this is a kind of ideological litmus test, designed to make sure that applicants at least know and are willing to state the approved beliefs. I'm fairly conservative, so I'm not sure I actually know the correct lingo to use and what the minimum viable essay would look like.
If you have been in my position, how did you approach writing it? Does anyone know of any current examples of acceptable submissions I can study for wording and content? Ideally I would be able to deliver my actual beliefs (or a subset of them) in a way that passes scrutiny from the people reviewing it, but I'm not above just parroting the approved lines (I need the work).
Oof. I only tried to thread that needle one, many many moons ago, and I've mostly avoided engaging with bullshit people who demand such bullshit things ever since. It's real icky, and you will respect yourself a little less and hate them a little more for a long time. So, my first line advice would be that if you can think of literally any other options that allow you to avoid it, do those things instead and never look back.
(FYI: I didn't get the one thing I did try for; one interpretation could be that I'm just a hater for not getting it, though TBH, in hindsight, if I had gotten it, it would have been quite minor in terms of meaningful change to my life; but I am at least avoiding the alternate interpretation that could happen if I had gotten it, where someone could accuse me of asking others to make sacrifices that I didn't or whatever; there's never going to be any winning if people want to shit on you. Anyway.)
I don't think I didn't get it because of the DEI thing; I think their biggest negative was on something unrelated (which was annoying in itself, but that's a story for another day). But even so, I didn't personally think that my approach was remotely convincing, anyway. But I think that, in practice, my thing was actually just assessed by a bunch of profs from a bunch of different universities, with a much higher chance that they were really just assessing science stuff and totally ignoring the DEI stuff. I know from experience with the inside of quite a few different academic selection processes that in many cases, it just gets completely ignored. But of course, it's always a difficult challenge to figure out whether this university will mostly ignore it or pay close attention. I don't know of any strategies here other than having made friends with someone who has served on a faculty search committee there and had some sense about how seriously they thought the 'higher ups' took it. Of course, any particular department can also be more/less committed to the cause, but that's even harder to get good info on.
Up to this point, it's all reasons to run or to not care, which isn't super satisfying to you. My last suggestion will be the least satisfying. If you really want to still apply, and you really think you need to have something that is somewhat conforming, just use ChatGPT or pay someone to write it. They'll probably get the job done as good or better than you could do, and you'll feel slightly less icky, not having had to literally squeeze the words out of your own mind. At a minor cost of increased involvement, but to get slightly increased personalization, prompt it with anything about yourself that might be relevant or look for any area-specific DEI-sounding orgs on campus. It's cheap and easy to say you're going to engage with "[DEI Group] In [Academic Discipline]" or whatever that already exists on campus, and they're probably not going to follow-up to make sure you've actually done so. That said, I probably need to check in with some of my folks who either just went through their tenure review or are about to in order to see how much they seem to care about this BS stuff at that point. It's really hard to know if you're signing up to an organization that is going to make you constantly grovel to the golden calf or just pay a little lip service from time to time.
Thanks for sharing your experience.
I'm managing to struggle through the writing of it. Maybe I'll regret it in the future.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link