UF has fired all staff in positions related to DEI.

And this highlights my problem with the myopic view of "personal responsibility" that so many of the people who use it as a buzzword seem to possess. The only thing it requires of them is doing what's best for themselves in order for them to achieve personal successes. I happen to disagree with that view of "personal responsibility." As citizens, I believe we have a responsibility to our neighbors, community, and country. That means not just doing for ourselves, but also doing for others.

So even if you believe you personally aren't erecting barriers for anyone (and I'm not implying otherwise), what are you doing to help tear the existing barriers down?

There are a lot of studies that control for these other factors and still find that racial disparities persist. Why? Because race is itself a major factor. As long as some people in our society blind themselves to that and actively obstruct efforts to change it, we're not going to get anywhere.

While you may not have had a conniption, the people who championed and support SB 266 certainly did.

 

One last thing I want to add - there are major units at UF that have DEI initiatives imbedded in what they do every day. The Division of Student Affairs, The UF Graduate School, the Center for Teaching Excellence, Clinical and Translational Sciences, and others - these are all units with highly educated and trained individuals that go to work every day trying to make things better for people. It's not always perfect - Student Affairs has been a literal dumpster fire of leadership for a few years now, and until the new dean took over a few years ago, the grad school was garbage (much much better the last 2 years under new leadership), but there are other champions on campus that have probably done far more, realistically, to support DEI, than anyone in the Office of the CDO.

So although those units don't have the same impact as the CDO office does from an optics perspective, like they aren't units you can point to and say, that unit is dedicated to this ONE cause, they are still out there doing good work in the DEI space.

So, maybe I am underestimating the harm that is being done. But I feel like there are still good people out there trying to help make things equitable and inclusive. Maybe just not as visibly as they were doing it before.

 

You're just like a bundle of strawman arguments . . . and you still have yet to provide any substance or hint of evidence.

 

I'm certain there are. I know some of them. But it's hard to do a lot of good when you are essentially being forced to hide it and have lost the funding you previously had.

 

I had NONE of those advantages. And I didn't expect people with those advantages to be penalized, nor did I claim victimhood and demand "equity".

Resources will never be 100% equally allocated. However, how about we award scholarships to incoming freshman based on race, gender, ethnicity, first in family to college, or other qualifiers, etc. How about waivers of the fees for SAT-prep classes and for fees charged to take the test itself? All of those things already exist. But the REAL answer isn't more handouts....it's society starting to celebrate academic achievement as much as we celebrate success in sports or other areas, and emphasize those things with our kids from Day 1.

 

We're actually not that far apart in our thinking, I don't believe. If I see a true barrier that I can help take down, I'm all for helping to do that. However, I just find that most "barriers" are caused by factors far outside of my control or sphere of influence. I'm not blinding myself to anything (which is probably what most blind people say ) nor obstructing any efforts on this front from either side of the equation. I just don't agree that disparities are inherently bad, nor that most disparities are caused by factors susceptible to remedy by mandated DEI. We can agree to disagree.

 

Then can opportunity ever be 100% equally allocated?

So...affirmative action? Or only once admitted and we ignore the barriers in opportunity before that?

Colleges can't really "waive" those. SAT-prep classes are mostly taught by for-profit companies. And College Board is not controlled by colleges. Are you suggesting that the government have programs that provided those companies with money for prepping people of certain racial groups or who meet some other criteria? Because you have to take the test prior to admission, meaning that you wouldn't have a college to wipe it out until well after taking the test (and assuming that you performed well enough on it to get into such a college).

They largely don't exist (not at any sort of scale, at least). But if the answer isn't more "handouts," why open with a bunch of programs paying for stuff?

I don't think there has been a point of time in which academic achievement is more pursued than it is now. Heck, you change the framing around the notion of "academic achievement" and you end up with the threads complaining about how it is too hard to get into UF now. The only anti-academic push in modern society that I have seen is when a bunch of college-educated people whose kids will go to college start talking about how not everybody needs a college degree and trying to get other people's kids to become plumbers or welders or whatever.

 

Fair enough. I don't think DEI is a magic bullet or flawless. But it's an attempt to make things better. I'd rather fix what's not working and continue striving for more equality than stop trying because it's imperfect. Unfortunately, our governor and state legislature prefer the stop trying and pretend the problem doesn't exist approach.

 

Oh, great, so you're admittedly anti-welder! BIAS! DISCRIMINATION! EQUITY FOR WELDERS!

 

You could have simply admitted you have no viable source. Instead you show a complete failure to exhibit logic, since you jump to a stupid false assumption, making you seem dim as well as lacking credibility. Sigh.

 

I don’t know who you are responding to. My guess is @gator_lawyer. Waste of time. You are spot on. They only care about agitating. There are White/Black/Hispanic/Asian/Name the Race…Male/Female…that grow up with barriers others don’t have. People like lawyer are not interested in solving problems. They want to agitate and spout off nonsense. I might be wrong but $20 says I got who you were responding to lol…

 

I also don’t care for anything but the best medical personnel working on me and my family. I didn’t read, let alone digest, all the studies you shared but I did scan through one right through to the end. It wasn’t clear in the first part of the study that it only included white folk as the “problem” but that suspicion was cleared up in the epilogue. All non-white potential participants were specifically excluded and not given an opportunity to perform as “poorly” as the whites did. A better study would have compared how whites and non-whites misinterpret pain in black patients, and why. Not gonna plow through the other studies. In summary, the one study I reviewed has no information whatsoever to point to better health care (for any race) because of diversity. Maybe the other studies are chock full of proof?

 

I'm uncertain what point there is in trying to have a discussion with somebody who openly admits that he's not going to bother reading the studies I post in support of my points. (Hell, you could just read the abstracts and at least be decently informed.)

As for your critique of the one study you did read, I'm not sure how members of other races also believing dangerous myths about Black people would undermine my point that it is important to train medical students and doctors to eliminate these sorts of biases.

 

Don’t know what the UF DEI office actually did, but I agree with the rest of your post. I had the same thought about legal staff being the arbiters on discrimination issues. That’s how it’s done in the real world. Legal is who I went to when I experienced a manager that was obvious (around white males) how he felt about women and non-whites. Some staff felt uncomfortable based upon some decisions made without hearing what I had heard. Legal and HR did an investigation but the women and non-whites interviewed were apparently too uncomfortable to fully verify any inequity. End result was that the “perp” figured out I was part of the reason for the investigation which didn’t help my relationship with that person. I, however, outlasted that person by years and left the employer feeling that I had done my duty. My staff appreciated what was done; legal staff not so much.

 

Different institutions approach things differently. But you don't want your office of general counsel handling all aspects of federal anti-discrimination compliance. Because they are your in-house counsel if somebody sues the university for unlawful discrimination, it creates conflict of interest issues and can get you in hot water. Generally, OGC plays a role in compliance, but there are other offices in a university that are involved too and take on certain roles.

 

I'm devastated that my failure to provide a link to a random website of my choosing has upset you to this degree. However, I am impressed with your ability to pack four insults into one post. Well played.

 

I didn’t find any info in the first study, so I stopped and very shortly will move on to better pursuits. That study did not back up your assertion. I usually can get what I need from an abstract but the pain study withheld that it only studied whites in the abstract. From the abstract I guessed that was what it did and continued through it to try to find out. My suspicion was confirmed correct. I thought that was too close to dishonesty by omission and that is another reason I didn’t read the other studies. It was more disappointment than laziness.

I agree that all med students and even experienced doctors should be trained to avoid racial (and other) prejudices. If you really want to convince me of your theory, post a study that shows when medical professionals all have the appropriate training that non-whites outperform whites and therefore diversity is requisite to all patients receiving the best care. Please don’t read anything into that last sentence other than exactly what the words mean. There is no there there between the words.

 

At Uf depending on your role discrimination goes to hr first. In the academic world probably Dean of students or the ombudsman if a student. If you’re a paid student TA it’s a strange middle ground. There is also an office of compliance but they get involved in more regulatory stuff and I doubt they would ever touch a race issue but I guess it’s possible depending on circumstances. There is also a title ix office that would be a place that would take on certain discrimination issues. So really a whole army of people that tackle those before a lawyer ever gets involved.

 

Good point.

 

Dang. If all those offices are at UF then I suggest we need to combine them all into one and hire back a third of the drop-kicked DEI staff and we should come out ahead. Sounds like they all are in the same field of effort and that there is too much redundancy.