 A story in the Economist, not a news story. This is a story we talked about on one of my shows, I don't know, a few months ago, but it made The Economist magazine. That's unusual for this kind of woke domestic US story to make The Economist that's unusual. But what The Economist is reporting is something that I think we all know and again, we have explicitly talked about on the show in the past. And that is the University of California now. University of California schools are explicitly requiring faculty when applying for jobs to fire a statement, outlining their understanding of diversity, their past contributions to it, and their plans of how to engage with it in the future. So every candidate for a job at University of California system has to let the administration or let the hiring committee know of their attitude towards diversity. Now UCLA does this and they do this pretty quietly and pretty much all jobs now involve these kind of statements. University of California Berkeley is doing this out in the open and they're talking about it and they're discussing it and they're presenting this so they feel no shame about this. We're talking here about every position including positions in the sciences. So there is an open position and director of cell culture, fly food. I guess that's flies, food for flies in a lab, media prep, that's not media prep in terms of media out there but media for in a bio lab and uncalled glass washing facilities. So this is like a director of a lab in a lab. They need an advanced degree. They need a decade of research experience. They have to submit a curricula VEDA and a cover letter and a research statement. Yeah, I mean all of that sounds like it's related to the job of kind of being a director in a lab as well as their contributions as to advancing diversity, equity and inclusion. In some positions, I think I reported on this last time we talked about this issue. They just screen out all the ones that have really, really bad DEI. They don't even look at the rest of the resume. They might be future Nobel Prize biology winners. They don't even look at them. They, you know, the first screen is the DEI. If you don't qualify DEI. Now, one of the arguments here is that because University of California is prohibited from using race to make hiring and even decisions with regard to student placement, there was a ballot initiative in California that made it illegal to use affirmative action at the universities. This is just a replacement for that. It'll be interesting if California, and interesting, every time that ballot initiative comes up to be challenged, you think leftist California, they'll, of course they want affirmative action. It fails, that is, this is policy, anti-affirmative action California. It continues to be reinstated by significant majority of voters, that is, even leftist Californians don't want affirmative action, affirmative action, which is, I think, interesting in and of itself. So the universities, given that the universities as leftist California is, given that the UC system is further to the left than the average Californian, they keep finding different ways to figure out how to create affirmative action without actually having the affirmative action. And they do this, I guess, through these DEI statements. You see this throughout, now, I'm not that worried about the California school system doing this because at the end of the day, what is going to happen? Two things I think happen. One is people figure out how to game the system. I'm sure already today, you can ask Chad GPT to create a DEI statement for you and Chad GPT will do a pretty good job and submit that statement. In other words, I'm sure that you can look up online to find a generic DEI acceptable statement and then modify it a little bit to make the case and I'm sure almost everybody's submitting basically the basic stuff that they need to in order to get it. So one is it becomes a perfunctory standard hurdle that you have to pass but no big deal beyond that. But let's say that isn't the case. Let's say they're really taking the seriously and this is a big deal. Well then, California universities will become, will start hiring based on something insignificant, the quality of their research and the quality of the science will decline and the California institutions like Berkeley and UCLA and other state institutions under the University of California, Umbrella will just decline in quality. Less people will wanna go work there. They will have a few sophisticated scientists but the good scientists are gonna find places to work. They might go to MIT, they might go to other universities that don't use DEI statements. DEI is diversity, equity and inclusion. They'll go to other universities that don't use DEI statements. They'll go to, I don't know if Stanford uses them or not. I wouldn't be surprised if they do but there are lots of universities. Maybe they'll go to the University of Texas system or the University of Florida system or other places. The better scientists will find jobs, the better scientists will have access. What you'll see is a decline in the University of California and increase elsewhere. This takes time, it's unfortunate, resources would be wasted. It's sad to see California schools which are some of the best in the world declining but that is the consequence of the actions. In many ways, much more scary than this is the fact that now government, the federal government, federal government which is a massive allocator of funds for basic research are starting to use DEI statements. For example, the Department of Energy which funds research on nuclear and plasma physics, nuclear and plasma physics will require all grant applicants to submit plans on quote promoting inclusive and equitable research. I mean, we all know that plasma physics is riddled with racist policies, riddled with racist research and non-inclusive research, anti-inclusive research. So it's a real relief that now when you apply for a grant for plasma research, we can get now, well now that research will now be more equitable and less, I mean, this is absurd and this is truly insane. Since 2021, the Brain Initiative at the National Institute of Health has required prospective grantees to file a plan for enhancing diversity perspectives because we know that different races have different perspectives on issues of, I don't know, brain biology. Teams must be diverse to do this investigation. Now note that this has multiple effects. One is it basically involves massive waste of money. People are gonna be hired just so they can have a diverse research team. That means research teams will decline in quality. It means that money will be allocated not very effectively. The government doesn't do a great job allocating money anyway, but now it'll be even less effective. This is one of the main reasons why in my argument to change the American Constitution to have four separations, one of the separations is separation from state and science. The state should not be involved in science, should not be giving scientific grants, should not be involved in determining what science is good, what science is bad. The state does not have an opinion about science one way or the other and should not be funding any of it. You know, that goes together with the separation of state from education. But so you get less efficient, as bad as government funding of science is it now becomes worse and then you get bad teams. And then, you know, on top of that, what you get is a complete politicization of science. What you get in this is DEI becoming just part of the culture, being everywhere, people getting jobs based on it and it becomes to dominate everything we do. And that is a recipe for America to become, to dramatically decline in terms of science, technology, in terms of everything that we do. This is a way for us to clearly lose whatever it is that has made America special. Now, I mean, maybe one of the positive things is most scientists, over 50% of scientists in the STEM areas are immigrants. So maybe they fit into DEI categories, although many of them are probably Asians and that probably disqualifies them. So it's just bewindering and mind-boggling, right? That this is an issue that what we should really be concerned about is the efficiency of government funding of science, which is very low. And we should be finding ways to increase that efficiency because future technological progress depends at least to some extent on basic research being done today and sadly, almost all basic research is government funded. So this, it would be good if the funding was as good as it could be. You know, in the Harvard Law Review, encourages prospective editors to submit alongside the application. This is students, right? A 200-word statement to identify and describe aspects of your identity, including, but not limited to racial or ethnic identity, socioeconomic background, disability, physical, intellectual, cognitive, neurological, psychiatric, sensory, developmental or other and gender identity. And the list goes on. I mean, this is intersectionality as applied to hiring. The lower down on the tone of poll you are in terms of the more oppressed you are than the more likely it is you to be hired by the Harvard Law Review and other such places. This is egalitarianism in action. This is the elevation. And it's the more miserable, empathetic and oppressed you present yourself as being the more virtuous you are and the more deserving of a position and a job and dollars and money you become. And this is a way of America to become irrelevant. Now, there is a huge backlash of this, of course. And part of that backlash is a Republican-led state legislatures are forcing eradicating this whether it's Florida Stop Walk Act, which is probably massive overreach by the state government. But the elimination of DEI, which I think it makes a lot more sense. I think what state legislatures can do is they can prohibit universities from using DEI. If it's true the DEI matters, they're taking it seriously at places like UC, that would lead talent to ultimately be hired at places that where DEI is not used, maybe University of Florida or Texas systems, you would expect to see a brain drain from one place to another. We'll wait and see. On the other hand, this could be very much as a fad. So this is what Janet Haley from a professor of law at Harvard of all places says. She says, bureaucratizing ideology saps in sincerity. She says, people will utter the hocus pocus. They know what they're being required to put on an act. And that's going to create cynicism about the very values that the people who put these requirements into place care about. For speech and viewpoint discrimination is a first amendment issue. The courts are probably going to rule against it. It's probably going to be broken up. The court is probably going to make race-based admission into college illegal. The Supreme Court will probably do that very soon. It could very well that the courts make DEI hiring illegal as well in the future. Who knows? So I can't see this continuing. And I see the damage hopefully minimized. But it is creating just a crazy, and I'd hate to be somebody in the job market right now being forced to write a stupid DEI statement in order to get a job. I mean, when I was offered a job in, this is 1993, interviewed in 1992 and 93, all this was relevant even back then. So we always think, whoa, oh my god. I was basically told by the department that ultimately hired me that they couldn't offer me a job immediately. Because there was a black female candidate on the job market that in order to satisfy the administration, they had to offer her a job even though they wanted me over her. But they had to offer her a job because they needed to at least show that they tried to hire a black or a woman. And I mean, she was the dream because it was a black and a woman. But then the guy, the chairman of the department told me, don't worry because everybody's offering her a job. She is the most desired candidate on the job market this year. Not because she's the best, but because she's a black female. So they offered her a job. She declined it. She landed up, I think, going to Ohio State or something like that, a much more prestigious university in terms of finance. And this is the finance department. This is Santa Clara University, a Jesuit university. So this kind of stuff has been going on forever. It just disguises itself in different ways and they go through different rituals and they play different games. It's just sickening. It's sickening. And it's gotten to the point where it's even crazier now than it was back then. Thank you for listening or watching the Iran Brook show. If you'd like to support the show, we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me. You get value from listening. You get value from watching. Show your appreciation. You can do that by going to iranbrookshow.com. 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