Over the years, I’ve noticed a steady increase in the number of minority students in my classes, which is great…but strangely, there hasn’t been any increase in the percentage of minority faculty over the same period. One possible explanation is that since the tenure of faculty is so much longer than the tenure of students, student numbers are going to be more responsive to current demographics. But I can’t help but feel that there’s more going on. That we current faculty are not doing our part to create a professoriate that reflects our culture.

Here’s a blunt assessment of the problem. Why don’t we hire more faculty of color? Because we don’t want them. The author lists a whole series of excuses we white faculty make, and I’ve heard them all.

First, the word “quality” is used to dismiss people of color who are otherwise competitive for faculty positions. Even those people on search committees that appear to be dedicated to access and equity will point to “quality” or lack of “quality” as a reason for not hiring a person of color.

Typically, “quality” means that the person didn’t go to an elite institution for their Ph.D. or wasn’t mentored by a prominent person in the field. What people forget is that attending the elite institutions and being mentored by prominent people is linked to social capital and systemic racism ensures that people of color have less of it.

This is slightly less of a problem in my current liberal arts, teaching-focused institution, but boy, I heard a lot of it in the big state schools I worked at before. I knew faculty who went through job applications looking only at the name of the institution/faculty member they worked with on the first pass, and if they didn’t come from a Name university or worked with a Name scientist, they were round-filed.

Second, the most common excuse I hear is “there aren’t enough people of color in the faculty pipeline.”

It is accurate that there are fewer people of color in some disciplines such as engineering or physics. However, there are great numbers of Ph.D.’s of color in the humanities and education and we still don’t have great diversity on these faculties.

In biology, we have a reasonable number of minority faculty applying for jobs — there are historically black colleges, like Howard University, that have excellent biology programs and turn out a good number of well-qualified black biologists. We just don’t hire them.

Third, I have learned that faculty will bend rules, knock down walls, and build bridges to hire those they really want (often white colleagues) but when it comes to hiring faculty of color, they have to “play by the rules” and get angry when any exceptions are made.

Let me tell you a secret – exceptions are made for white people constantly in the academy; exceptions are the rule in academe.

Oh man yes. Faculty tend to resent rules — this is a job that encourages independent thinking — and are accustomed to using the rules to get what they want. There is a kind of adversarial relationship between faculty and administration, and I suspect deans have all kinds of stories about how faculty try to work the system.

Fourth, faculty search committees are part of the problem.

They are not trained in recruitment, are rarely diverse in makeup, and are often more interested in hiring people just like them rather than expanding the diversity of their department.

True confession: I’m on the search committee for a tenure track cell/molecular biologist this year — we meet with our human resources person next week for the mandatory diversity training, which I have been through several times now. We still tend to hire our fellow white people every time. I will try to pay more attention to minority applicants, and will avoid insisting that faculty at UMM must fit the Lake Wobegon stereotype.

Fifth, if majority colleges and universities are truly serious about increasing faculty diversity, why don’t they visit Minority Serving Institutions — institutions with great student and faculty diversity — and ask them how they recruit a diverse faculty.

Now that is a really good idea. We should be sending out our job ad specifically to minority serving institutions with strong graduate programs in biology, which would also enrich our applicant pool significantly. Please do suggest such places in the comments and I’ll be sure to add them to our mailing list.

Of course, once we hire a diverse faculty, there’s the next problem: community and university attitudes. Science just ran an article on doing science while black.

But my experiences with the larger scientific community still made me feel like I didn’t belong. A few years after becoming a professor, for example, I went to a social event at a society meeting with an international, multiracial group of colleagues. I was the only black researcher among them. When we walked into the room, the crowd fell completely silent, apparently uncomfortable with my presence. I considered myself a scientist with great potential, but that experience made me feel that, to others, my skin color was more important than the quality of my work. The next year, as I was starting a sabbatical in a lab at another institution, I asked one of the researchers in the group whether the PI was in. “Are you delivering a package?” he asked. “I can pass it on to him.” These and other encounters imply that, no matter how productive my research is or how professionally I present myself, I and other black scientists do not belong in academia’s hallowed halls.

Ouch. That’s going to be another difficulty here in the blindingly white Minnesota farm country.

Oh, hey, the other committee I’ve been assigned this year is to serve on the multi-ethnic experience committee, which works to promote “campus-wide understanding of racial and ethnic minorities”, despite the fact that I am made of doughy Wonder Bread and was raised in the same kind of Scandinavian-American household that just about everyone grew up in around here. You might notice that I’m trying hard to educate myself on these phenomena.

We actually thought about going out to the Standing Rock camp to show our support a few weeks ago, but ultimately decided against it — I didn’t want us to be that pair of white tourists showing up to nod appreciatively at the spectacle, and getting in the way of the protest. I also last had training in peaceful protesting a couple of decades ago, which was recently enough to know that it is a very serious business with its own rules and discipline, and long enough ago that I wouldn’t take it for granted that I knew what I was doing. So we stayed home, and I made a donation instead.

Caine describes how some people are Not Helping at the protest. Now I’m even more relieved that I didn’t go and be another meddler in the way. Guess I’d better make another donation.

(By the way, Caine also mentions how she doesn’t have the stereotypical Indian look, and is easily mistaken for European. I know about this as well, and it’s important not to go the other way: UMM has a significant percentage of Indian students, and you learn fast that “Gee, you don’t look Indian” is not a compliment, and that you shouldn’t assume that someone with a German last name, for instance, isn’t Indian. It turns out that Indians look…human.)

And she’s feeling the pain of the murder of Keith Lamont Scott by the police of Charlotte, North Carolina.

Give a young man way too much money, and they turn into instant assholes. That’s what I conclude from the story of Palmer Luckey, who was one of the people behind the VR headset Oculus Rift, which he sold for over $2 billion dollars. He’s now worth $700 million (what happened to the other 1.3 billion?), and he’s got to do something to better humanity with that that money.

So he’s funding a company that’s backing Donald Trump.

Oculus founder Palmer Luckey financially backed a pro-Trump political organization called Nimble America, a self-described “social welfare 501(c)4 non-profit” in support of the Republican nominee.

A social welfare organization? Well, that sounds nice. Except, here’s what it’s really all about.

We’ve proven that shitposting is powerful and meme magic is real. So many of you have asked us, how we can bring this to real life. We wanted to do it in a way that was transparent and had purpose. Not just sell t-shirts to sell them, but to sell t-shirts to shitpost. We’ve worked with lawyers and RNC consultants to advise us on how to establish the proper entities to do this right, and we’ll be transparent with all financial activity from Reddit. We’ve also worked with the Reddit admins to make sure all of our activity operate within their guidelines.

Announcing Nimble America, Inc., a social welfare 501(c)4 non-profit dedicated to shitposting in real life.

Oh, hell no. How can someone grow up to think that “shitposting” is the great cause to which they will dedicate their life and fortune?

But wait! There’s more! What do you think the lofty goal of virtual reality programs might be?

Someone in the audience asked Palmer Luckey a rather odd but revealing question: Why did he and his chief technology officer, video game pioneer John Carmack, often speak of a “moral imperative” to bring virtual reality to the masses?

“This is one of those crazy man topics,” Luckey answered, “but it comes down to this: Everyone wants to have a happy life, but it’s going to be impossible to give everyone everything they want.” Instead, he went on, developers can now create virtual versions of real experiences that are only enjoyed by the planet’s privileged few, which they can then bestow to the destitute of the world.

He is so generous.

Well, then, I say we should give Luckey what he wants, and condemn him to spend the rest of his life with an Oculus Rift shackled to his head, and free access to all the VR he wants, while he lives in a shack and works 16 hours a day assembling expensive electronic gadgets in a Chinese factory.

It is a shame, though, that the Oculus Rift looks like a nifty toy, but now I’ll never buy one.

It’s name is Scott Lewis. He has “borrowed” over $30,000 from various people by telling tales of financial misery, getting pitying contributions, and then turning on his donors.

Scott Lewis tells many persuasive tales of woe involving former partners and/or friends designed to appeal to his current target’s compassion and desire to make a difference in his life. In hindsight, it should have been an obvious red flag to us that he seems to have an alarming number of these stories. By connecting with each other, we have now realized that many of the stories we had heard about each other were in reality blatant lies, crafted by Scott Lewis presumably to dissuade us from contacting each other. As author Lynn Fairweather puts it, “…an abuser’s prospect becomes an even better potential victim if she’s willing to listen to his tale of woe and offer him sympathy and encouragement, because then he’s hit the jackpot: He’s found a “saver,” a nurturing woman who compulsively takes in troubled souls, blind to the inherent risks to her own well-being”. Each of us have wanted to be “better than all the previous people” when we first entered his life.

Scott Lewis deliberately maneuvers his new target into disliking all his ex partners and previous friends. This is also why we have been silent for so long; for a very long time we were too scared to reach out to anyone else, or speak about what he did to us. We knew that he would always craft his narrative to portray himself in the best possible light while making us look vindictive, petty, and delusional. We were scared that he would reach out to mutual friends first with his own version of the story, to further isolate us and make his deception and abuse less likely to be called out. Since connecting with other victims of Scott Lewis’s abuse, we have been able to see exactly how he distorts the things that he does; the way he minimizes his own role, plays the victim, and pins all the blame on the actual victim instead. We were surprised to realize we each experienced the exact same cycle of abuse at his hands.

I used to be so optimistic about human beings.

I know most of you heard about the explosion in New York that injured a score of people and led to Trump using it to foment fear and hatred to bump up his poll numbers. We also had an incident in Minnesota, in a St Cloud mall (I’ve been there many times!), where a man went on a stabbing spree, and shouted something about Allah. Eight people were injured, and the guy wielding the knife was killed — which goes to show that it is kind of helpful to get guns out of the hands of these bad people.

But here’s the thing…Minnesota does have a substantial population of Muslims, largely Somali immigrants. They don’t have a violent reputation. But when the St Cloud police chief went on Fox News, of course the Foxites assumed we had a terrible race/immigrant problem here, and tried to stir up some inflammatory racist assumptions and remarks. Chief William Blair Anderson would have nothing to do with it, and actually made a helpful reply.

“I can tell you that the vast majority of all of our citizens, no matter their ethnicity, are fine, hard-working people, and now is not the time for us to be divisive,” he said. “We already have a very cohesive community, and I expect that this will draw us even closer together. But at the end of the day, our job is public safety, period.”

Anderson then went on to say that developing relationships with Somalis in his community was vital to rooting out potential extremists.

“We actually work very well not just with our East African community, but all of our community,” he said. “We meet regularly with any number of people, whether they are advocates for a specific ethnicity or different cause. It’s one of things that makes St. Cloud a wonderful place to live, and I know that might sound corny, but it’s the truth. We have established and maintained a very good rapport with our East African community and our community at large.”

Go away, race-baiters. The less we see of you, the better we’re doing.

That’s also the kind of responsible attitude I like to see in the police.

It’s because they’re blatantly misinterpreting them, and incorrectly telling me how I’m using them. Miri explains it all.

What’s gaslighting is when we say, “We need trigger warnings in order to be able to engage with content rather than automatically shut down,” and you respond, “You’re just trying to avoid engaging with difficult content.”

If people are telling you that they are trying to engage with trauma-related material and you insist that they’re actually saying that they want to avoid it–or literally ban it from being taught–you are gaslighting them. You are insisting that you know better than they do what’s inside their own heads. You are pretending that they said something other than what they actually said, making them doubt their own thoughts and words.

Exactly! When I’m going to talk about icky stuff, I warn people “We’re about to talk about icky stuff,” and then…we talk about icky stuff. It’s incredibly annoying when obnoxious people try to tell me that we use trigger warnings to avoid talking about the icky stuff, when it’s exactly the opposite.

I can’t say that I’m being successfully gaslit, though, because I’m confident that I know what my own intent is, and I mainly come away feeling that the complainer is full of shit. It does seem to be effectively persuading a lot of bystanders who just want to despise anyone who has respect for the experiences of the people they are teaching, though.

Fred Clark discusses the insulting intent of “SJW”. It’s very good, in particular in shooting down the defense that the people using it intend it sarcastically.

To describe this use of “SJW” as sarcasm would entail mockery directed at the insufficiency of the “social justice warriors’” battle for social justice. It would require an affirmation of an agreed-upon framework that regards “social justice” as a good and noble, desirable thing, and truly being a “warrior” advocating for it as an honorable, praiseworthy trait. If it were sarcasm, the scorn would be directed at the “SJWs” for being only so-called “SJWs” — for posing as SJWs while actually failing to be the true, genuine article, the steadfast advocates for social justice that we all agree we all ought to strive to be.

But there is no such shared framework. And that is not the target toward which the scorn here is directed. What is being scorned, rather, is the very idea and standards of that framework — the idea that “social justice” is, in fact, a Good Thing. Their attempted mockery of “SJWs” is an attempt to mock the very idea of social justice itself.

Isn’t it obvious when so many of the people who sneer at “SJWs” are anti-feminists and racists that it can’t be because they’re mocking keyboard warriors who aren’t very good at supporting equality? They’re against egalitarianism.

Next up, Clark should discuss the popularity of the word “cuck” among these same people. There’s something psychologically strange going on there, too.

The alt-right is outraged at being called “deplorable”. They’re right. The term is utterly inadequate. How about “despicable”? How about abhorrent, abject, abominable, awful, contemptible, detestable, disreputable, hateful, heinous, ignoble, ignominious, loathsome, low, mean, odious, reprehensible, shabby, shameful, and vile?

A spokesman for the alt-right just had a press conference, led by Richard Spencer, head of the National Policy Institute, an openly racist, white supremacist organization. He also had a couple of speakers to help him out — speakers who are known entities in “scientific” racism.

Spencer invited two prominent members of the movement to join him. One was Peter Brimelow, the founder of the website VDARE.com, which the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as an “immigrant-bashing hate site that regularly publishes works by white supremacists, anti-Semites, and others on the radical right.” (Brimelow freely admitted during the event that he publishes white nationalists.) The other was Jared Taylor, a self-described “race realist” who explained why the white race is superior to all others (except for East Asians, he said, who are superior to whites). The audience was a mix of reporters and what appeared to be alt-right members and fans.

Good god. What did they have to talk about? Basically how wonderful Donald Trump is for their goals, and what a glorious leader he is.

Spencer continued, “It really is about him and it’s about, in a way, projecting onto him our hopes and dreams. There’s something called ‘me magic,’ and that is a self-fulfilling prophecy…We want to make Trump; we want to imagine him in our image. And that is maybe—you can see that in a meme of Trump as a Napoleon or Trump as some figure out of the Dune novels in an arcade of the future in a robotic suit of armor fighting enemies. All of that stuff is silly, all of that stuff is ridiculous, but it actually gets at something real and that is that we want something more, we want something heroic, we want something that is not defined by liberalism or individual rights or bourgeois norms. We want something that is truly European and truly heroic.”

Then they argued about whether Jews would be allowed to continue to live in the Aryan States of America. No, really.

What would this utopia look like? Spencer said it’s too far off to get into specifics. But he and Taylor, whose role at Friday’s event was to give academic assurances that the races of the world are not equal, disagreed on whether Jews would be welcomed into the white utopia homeland. Spencer took the position that they were not “European” and therefore would take their place in their own ethno-state. Taylor countered, “I don’t think that if a Jewish person identifies with the West and with Europe than that’s something that we should deny.” As Spencer acknowledged, the alt-right has yet to sort out these mere details.

“Mere details”. Poison gas, or bullets? Details.

It’s not all negative, in their minds.

But Spencer did offer up a vision of an alt-right society. “If the alt-right were in power, we would all have arrived here via magnetic levitation trains,” he said. “We would have passed by great forests and beautiful images of blond women in a wheat field with their hands, running them through the wheat.” The audience tittered. “It would be a wonderful sight.”

Jesus fuck. OK, what about the brunettes? Will they be deported to their own “ethno-state”? Will redheads be sequestered somewhere? I don’t even want to think about the fate of black women in Spencer’s utopia.

Like I said, “deplorable” is an unsatisfactory word to apply to Trump supporters. How about “Nazi scum”?

I think we’re well past the stage of needing to mince words anymore.