I watched the event from SHEAR2020 and didn't see anything unusual beyond poor visuals or optics. You grossly exaggerate what happened. The alleged racial slur used to be the name of a national football team. Indigenous people when polled objected to it at very low rates twice over two decades (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Redskins_name_opinion_polls ). Elites decided it had to go and within a week it became a slur that people were afraid to write out and dare not name.
America is 65% white and the generation of older leading scholars was up to 80%. To not expect that you would occasionally have all-white panels from senior scholars (especially given path dependence from history!) is to exhibit basic innumeracy. That's just basic probability and this is a specious issue of public relations hysterics. I expect intellectual societies to resist the fear-mongering whirlwinds of their day or they aren't worth being called intellectual. Outreach, mentorship, scholarships - these are all fine ideas as long as there is not a mentality of filling ethnographic boxes for their own sake.
What we do have is a larger problem with the feudal system known as employment in higher education. That system sits atop a society of increasing wealth inequality. That, unfortunately, is a monumental externality problem that can’t be addressed by universities. But endogeneity can. And ironically part of the internal problem is that schools can’t hire more quality faculty and pay them a decent salary because they are bloated with “Bozo explosions” middle management and useless CYA pseudo-academic programs as well as expensive recruitment flair extracurricular monstrosities. The CYA programs are generally weak methodologically and endanger the future lives of the young people who partake in them because of their low earnings potential. We all know what these programs are. As well, we all know the deleterious effect of middle management with nothing better to do than to play hall monitor.
The waste of human and financial capital is a cancer on the university. When quality education and scholarly output are no longer the priority the system eventually collapses. Go ahead and keep running in circles in fear of the Twitter harpies. You produced them through your own CYA programs. The products of these so-called disciplines are young people who have no actual skills (you gave them none!) beyond cultish rhetoric you taught them. These sophist Frankenstein monstrosities from your own basement will catch up to us all eventually until we realize they are intellectual wraiths - insubstantial. Like the name that we cannot speak, most of us do not care. (“Take 2018 public opinion research (https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5a70a7c3010027736a22740f/t/5bbcea6b7817f7bf7342b718/1539107467397/hidden_tribes_report-2.pdf) by Stephen Hawkins, Daniel Yudkin, Miriam Juan-Torres, and Tim Dixon. With a representative survey of 8,000 Americans, as well as hour-long interviews and in-depth focus groups, the study discovered a massive majority of Native Americans (88 percent), Hispanics (87 percent), Asian Americans (82 percent), and African Americans (75 percent) agreed with the statement “political correctness is a problem in our country.”” https://arcdigital.media/the-whispered-left-wing-dissent-on-cancel-culture-234d0aaa9107 ) Stop being afraid! Listen to the majority who just want their kids to be able get good jobs and to help restore the middle class! Stand up for quality. Stand for our long term horizons.
I watched the event from SHEAR2020 and didn't see anything unusual beyond poor visuals or optics. You grossly exaggerate what happened. The alleged racial slur used to be the name of a national football team. Indigenous people when polled objected to it at very low rates twice over two decades (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Redskins_name_opinion_polls ). Elites decided it had to go and within a week it became a slur that people were afraid to write out and dare not name.
America is 65% white and the generation of older leading scholars was up to 80%. To not expect that you would occasionally have all-white panels from senior scholars (especially given path dependence from history!) is to exhibit basic innumeracy. That's just basic probability and this is a specious issue of public relations hysterics. I expect intellectual societies to resist the fear-mongering whirlwinds of their day or they aren't worth being called intellectual. Outreach, mentorship, scholarships - these are all fine ideas as long as there is not a mentality of filling ethnographic boxes for their own sake.
What we do have is a larger problem with the feudal system known as employment in higher education. That system sits atop a society of increasing wealth inequality. That, unfortunately, is a monumental externality problem that can’t be addressed by universities. But endogeneity can. And ironically part of the internal problem is that schools can’t hire more quality faculty and pay them a decent salary because they are bloated with “Bozo explosions” middle management and useless CYA pseudo-academic programs as well as expensive recruitment flair extracurricular monstrosities. The CYA programs are generally weak methodologically and endanger the future lives of the young people who partake in them because of their low earnings potential. We all know what these programs are. As well, we all know the deleterious effect of middle management with nothing better to do than to play hall monitor.
The waste of human and financial capital is a cancer on the university. When quality education and scholarly output are no longer the priority the system eventually collapses. Go ahead and keep running in circles in fear of the Twitter harpies. You produced them through your own CYA programs. The products of these so-called disciplines are young people who have no actual skills (you gave them none!) beyond cultish rhetoric you taught them. These sophist Frankenstein monstrosities from your own basement will catch up to us all eventually until we realize they are intellectual wraiths - insubstantial. Like the name that we cannot speak, most of us do not care. (“Take 2018 public opinion research (https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5a70a7c3010027736a22740f/t/5bbcea6b7817f7bf7342b718/1539107467397/hidden_tribes_report-2.pdf) by Stephen Hawkins, Daniel Yudkin, Miriam Juan-Torres, and Tim Dixon. With a representative survey of 8,000 Americans, as well as hour-long interviews and in-depth focus groups, the study discovered a massive majority of Native Americans (88 percent), Hispanics (87 percent), Asian Americans (82 percent), and African Americans (75 percent) agreed with the statement “political correctness is a problem in our country.”” https://arcdigital.media/the-whispered-left-wing-dissent-on-cancel-culture-234d0aaa9107 ) Stop being afraid! Listen to the majority who just want their kids to be able get good jobs and to help restore the middle class! Stand up for quality. Stand for our long term horizons.