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David Rozado has crunched the numbers on whether colleges emphasize Demographic Diversity or Intellectual Diversity on their websites:
First Online: 12 June 2019
The term diversity can be operationalized demographically (in terms of physical or external characteristics such as race, gender, ethnicity and nationality) or intellectually (in terms of mental phenomena such as viewpoints, beliefs, ideas and political opinion). This work examines the context in which the concept of diversity is used by 50 US elite universities in their online institutional presence. Distributional semantics theory is leveraged to quantify semantic similarity between linguistic items based on their distributional properties in a large sample of language data taken from universities’ online profiles.
From eyeballing this graph, the only two colleges to emphasize intellectual diversity more than race/gender/gayness etc. diversity are Caltech and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, both science and engineering schools. Next is Emory in Atlanta, followed by Rice (another S-E oriented college), Columbia (which has always been surprisingly traditionalist considering its location), Michigan, UC San Diego, and then maybe Stanford. In case you are wondering, Chicago is less woke than average but not in the first tier.
Obviously, there are differences between Internet appearance and reality (is Cornell really the #1 most woke school?), but this list seems fairly plausible.
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Hebrew
Hindi
Italian
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Swedish
Recent Caltech grad here. Just leaving a comment because of the mention here and in other posts.
Test results and pure STEM emphasis aside, the woke culture there is slowly growing. The Center of Diversity has recently been expanded and while the number of non-white/Asian students remains small, the resulting “woke” network on campus is tight-knit and strong and relatively dominated by grad students (whereas undergrads are so overworked they can’t spend as much time devoted to propagating it). Recent unrelated changes in the administration have also pushed campus culture towards more infantilization – my guess is they will probably feed into some of the woke energy.
Always knew something was off about Case Western Reserve University.
I’d really like to see what the methodology is, in detail, but I don’t have 35 Euros to take a peek at the pdf of the paper. I really don’t quite understand what
means.
And the bit about
is underwhelming.
Of course they do. Universities don’t use, in their online promotional or informational material, the word “diversity” a whole lot in relation to the breadth of their course offerings or research focus. They use it to describe their student body.
Lastly, I suspect Cornell is an outlier more because of its unique structure, as a very large combination state and private Ivy league school.
This might explain why the demographic diveristy score is high.
But, despite my observation above, it doesn’t explain why Cornell’s intellectual diversity score is so low. Its structure also means that it has an unusually wide range of both undergraduate majors, and areas of research. The methodology should be picking up on that, based on my admittedly very superficial understanding of the underlying math from the Wikipedia article on Word2vec.
Did you ask the author for a PDF? How did you see past the abstract?
Sci Hub:
http://sci-hub.tw/
OT
Should Britain Abolish Private Schools?
After the country elected its 20th Etonian prime minister, some are questioning whether its education system is the solution to the country’s stagnant social mobility—or the problem.
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/11/britain-labour-party-plans-abolish-private-schools/600412/
Pretty interesting reading for Americans on how the UK’s primary/secondary education differs from ours.
Of course, nowhere is it mentioned that some people think that the lack of social mobility comes down to the fact that social status is correllated with IQ, IQ is heritable, IQ is certainly genetic to a great extent, and the sorting of high IQ individuals, and assortative mating, have resulted in many of the good jobs going to graduates of Eton and other private schools, and that accounts for the lack of social mobility.
There is a thing called “contextual admissions” in the UK, the article says. Contextual admissions takes into account the socioeconomic status of the kids, so it’s affirmative action. Eton, for instance, has an admissions test (plus interview and recomendations). And they have full and partial scholarships. So if a poor kid is getting a contextual admission, that means his standardized test score was not up to snuff. This sounds like a mismatch problem in the making.
It’s just so insane that none of this stuff can be mentioned or discussed. The article quote people saying that, in effect, talk of destroying Eton and the others has widened the Overton window. I think it needs to widened just a wee bit more to take into account human biodiversity and the cognitive levels of the kids in different schools.
a) Go Rensselaer!
b) Rather than parse words in the brochures, wouldn’t it be better to look into how many positions there are for Deans of Diversity, Assistant Deans of Diversity, Assistants to the Deans of Diversity, etc.? In addition, a “researcher” could look into and compare the total enrollments in all of the grievance studies departments.
I know that would be a bunch more work than getting a computer program to find these phrases on web pages, but sometimes you gotta get up and off the computer. At least make some phone calls, for cryin’ out loud.
More pithily, diversity of peoples trumps diversity of thought.
The term ‘trump’ is actually quite useful in discussions of wokeness … who could have though that?
I say that graph is mostly statistical noise.
Mostly Ivies, near Ivies, Science/Engineering and large state schools in Liberal parts of the country.
Wonder if upper tier state schools in less liberal parts of the country would look different. U of Texas, Florida?
I’m close to an RPI grad. Shirley Ann Jackson is the current president of RPI. Her Wiki page is pretty amusing.
She seems genuinely intelligent, but is milking RPI for all it’s worth and then some.
She’s the highest paid college president in the US. She took home over 7 million in 2015.
I’d be aggressively short selling RPI stock if it were a business.
Columbia’s pretty lefty, but I think the alumni make them keep that Core Curriculum around, which from what I hear is pretty superficial (a few lousy courses) but at least you have to read pieces of the Great Books once.
I don’t know why it’s still there in the current year.
Cornell seemed pretty woke even before wokeness was a thing. I remember protests on September 12, 2001 demanding no retaliation. There were commie recruiters on ho plaza, lots of Palestine-related marching around with megaphones, PETA’s holocaust on your plate. The faculty was about what you would expect as far as I could tell. The one art history class I took was taught by a communist lady that tried to use Freudian psychology to make sense of Jackson Pollock drip paintings, cuz ya know they revealed his unconscious self or something. I vaguely remember anthropology 101 professors introductory lecture about how we call it a tube of toothpaste but its not really so there is no Truth. I took only one class there, but there is a college at Cornell called Industrial Labor Relations, which is close to explicitly Marxist. Of course, Marxism seems weirdly quaint today, doesn’t it.
I remember that nothing really seemed odd to me. Anthro man with his toothpaste was probably thinking he was saying something really shocking, but I didn’t know enough to be shocked. Oh, I also remember a TA in that anthropology class used Lewontin’s fallacy to explain that race doesn’t exist.
Take another look at Caltech on the graph, Steve.
Cornell is quite likely to be the wokest. When I graduated in 1996 its official culture was as parodically woke as Evergreen and Oberlin are right now.
The only recent innovation in ruling-class leftness is saying “folks” and “y’all” in a Valley Girl voice. Millennials brought that. The rest is the eternal boomer, boomin’ on.
Your insistence that this stuff isn’t really real (and if it is real, that’s a stunning new development—and surely not at Harvard!) is incredibly weird, Steve. It’s been current_year for a long time. Academic life hasn’t changed at all during my adult lifetime. The world already ended. You know.
No data for BYU, TCU, Notre Dame, etc.? The stats on some Christian/Catholic schools would have been interesting.
Be interested to see Hillsdale College.
Time to recalibrate the “elite”. How would St. John’s classics curriculum compare?
“Awaken?”
O’Sullivan’s Law is in effect everwhere, even in places you would never expect.
STEM colleges are not immune. My local “Technology” college is more interested in liberal arts expansion these days. Hard sciences are focused more on schools for video gaming and you don’t hear much about MEs or EEs anymore.
We all know about the rapid shift to Woke Corporations. Funny seeing the MI Complex embrace the insanity. Which leads to the worst example…our military, the last place you’d think the rot would set in.
How much of this should be blamed on women? All, most, a third?
Paper is available on libgen (.is is alive right now). DOI is 10.1007/s12115-019-00362-9
Their methodology is to select representative bags of words for different subtypes of intellectual and demographic diversity (see Figure 4). Also remember that they are looking at the online presence of the universities. How well that reflects reality on the ground is a worthwhile question to ask.
Then they use cosine similarity between those subtypes and the diversity terms (“diversity” and “diverse”) to relate the relative strengths of connection (see Figure 7). I think giving the rank ordering (most similar to least) of the diversity subtypes by their similarity to the diversity terms gives a good idea of the revealed priorities for the colleges overall.
ethnicity, sex/gender, race, sexualOrientation, nationality, religion, disability, views, intellectual, ideology, values, socioeconomic, preferences, politics
The big surprise for me was how low “socioeconomic” was ranked.
Another observation from Figure 7 is that “religion” is counted as intellectual diversity. I think that it straddles both (intellectual and demographic) concepts. Often in a context dependent way.
I’m having trouble deciding how much of what they observe is real and how much might be an artifact of the idiosyncratic way words like “diverse” and “diversity” are used in the Current Year.
Probably noisy, but I think it is showing something real. It would be interesting to compare this research to data for the respective diversity of each of their subtypes at the university itself.
Some possible metrics:
– Racial balance
– Socioeconomic distribution
– Variety, range, and membership of student groups
– Sex balance, both overall and across majors
– Variety of majors and numbers enrolled
– Sexual orientation
In some ways I think the methodology of the paper is superior to student/university data because the paper is showing what the university is aspiring to.
Amusing that RPI tops the list as they have a very successful black president who gets paid a load of money (but apparently she is so good at fundraising that she’s worth every penny).
I guess they walk the talk by having an actual “diverse” president so they don’t need to talk the talk as much?
I’m not sure what these graphs indicate, either, but when I as an undergrad in the mid ’90s ran into the then-new president of Cornell, Hunter Rawlings, he openly scoffed at the idea of increasing intellectual diversity by having more conservative professors.
Cornell had a dominant faction of the extremely, psychotically woke even then. It was altogether a pretty miserable place with all the terrible winters and downstate New Yorkers, anyway, and a large proportion of the faculty were not only avowed Marxists but further identified themselves as Socialists, Maoists, Trotskyites, etc., on top of all the feminist, pervert, racial, social-justice and other progressive insanity from the students.
Rawlings was recently acting President of Cornell again, so I doubt anything has changed for the better.
Interesting that of all the schools, Cornell is probably the farthest geographically from any sizable concentration of diversity.
To my eyes, it looks like there is one other: Caltech, where the blue dot is significantly higher than the red dot (i.e., 12th school from the left).
The main part of being a college president is fundraising, so if you can find a Diverse person who is a fundraising dynamo, that’s great.
A lot of it is just PR spin, but the results are reasonable.
Accepting federal financial aid funding comes with certain strings attached. Even if a college wants to stand for free speech or ideas on principal, they have to reject federal financial aid to do so.
Here is what the Wikipedia says:
The gender ratio is a diversity warning flag (extracted from the Wikipedia article):
91% men in the 1980s
83% men in the 1990s
72% men in 2009
68% men in 2016
But I think a lot of engineering schools are hurriedly ramping up the women, because I guess that’s just the right thing to do. I know the University of Illinois has financial incentives for women to join the computer science department, and I think their goal is also 50% women. They are almost there already.
Here’s the U of I page dedicated to promoting women:.
It’s all Asian, except one white woman.
Maybe reaching the 50% level, just means bringing in more Asian women. This helps your diversity scores in two ways. Awesome!
Give Caltech some time – it’ll get there. I’m surprised about RPI given that it’s full of Indian graduate students. Perhaps their quality of admitted students filter is still in working mode.
Often you don’t even need to parse words, just count up the faces in the brochures and other promo materials. I got a community college brochure that was so out there I counted — maybe three white guys out of 26 smiling students and teachers.
Also check out the university image ads on college football games. Yesterday Notre Dame had strong brave wimmin doing some kind of science project out on the African veldt, and also breaking bread with smiling salt-of-the-earth natives. Doesn’t get more woke than that
OK, KF, that gives a clue that management of the U wants to signal this PC crap, just as with this guy’s phrase-counting method. However, that doesn’t mean it’s really that bad on campus. Same with the football game TV ads. No, they don’t care about pissing off the alumni, because the alumni are so cucked in order to hang onto their Bread & Circuses, that they’d take it in the ass FOR DA’ TEAM!
I’d still really want to know the things I stated in my comment. Money talks.
I do hate to see those brochures and ads, as you noted, but I’m not shopping for a college, and I don’t watch TV, so there ya’ go.
Boy, that’s not a very good diversity of Asians, though, Ziggurat. I don’t see many Russians from east of the Urals, no Arabian Peninsularians, or Kamchatka Peninsularians, or Turkmenistanese, or Siberians, and precious few Sherpa guides. Asia is a big continent. This incontinence must be ended for Diversity’s sake!
In general, higher education is a woke wasteland, with the most expensive 4-year schools being the worst.
Save your money and go to a community college or vocational school.
If you want to learn the Western canon, you can borrow books from the library for free and learn more accurately without the woke filter on everything.
Bonus: You don’t have to spend the exorbinant cost of room and board (i.e., hole in the wall with a complete stranger, along with thin gruel).
Cornell is a head-scratcher. These rankings look pretty random to me. Methodology issues, perhaps?
Gurbanguly Mälikgulyýewiç Berdimuhamedow is keeping all of his women at home making sandwiches, God bless him!
Sorry to say, but the Catholic schools are a sad joke and have been for years.
Cornell is where black students in the 60s armed with guns took over a dorm and took white prisoners. The administration refused to allow the police to go in, but instead capitulated to all of the militants’ demands for separate dorms, lower standards, grievance studies departments etc. No arrests were made.
It’s one of the most beautiful campuses I’ve seen, though. Pity.
Maybe a silver lining is that it will be easier for the nerds to get laid? Most of the girls will need help with their homework, so if this results in more STEM-kid kids then that’s a plus.
Good. Now does that cover Ceylon, Burma, and Diego Garcia? Thanks for being inclusive enough to mention people from the Sandwich Islands. They’ve been margarinalized lately, due to the New England Journal of Medicine‘s crusade for heart-healthy spreads.
YES, methodology issues. When you do “research” by simply sitting on your ass at the computer for 2 hours, parsing out phrases on brochures, well, you’re gonna run into methodology issues.
Count Emory out, Steve. It’s about as rainbow, in creed and look, as one can imagine. Think lots of Jewesses from the northeast and a gaggle of south Asians. Sprinkle in a the odd mulatto from an Ohio or Illinois prep school and that’s about it. Emory would love to have them some local chocolate, and they matriculate the darlings every year. The diversity jackpots, though, trickle out to local, ‘historical black colleges’ by their junior years. The Federal jobs program don’t require the little bit of extra effort Emory does, why do the work?
Meanwhile, the white graduates of Emory – think ages 45 – 65 – send their children to places like Auburn University, UGA, Clemson or smaller venues such as Sewanee. White is not welcome at Emory unless you’re female in, say, the classics department.
I have a few RPI grads in my immediate family. I would say Jackson’s tenure has been mixed – the engineering rankings have slipped quite a bit compared to where they were in the mid-1980s when I was applying to schools.
Unflattering article about Jackson here.
Catholic schools seem to be the wokest of all. Jesuit-run Boston College employed this piece of work for years. She declined to allow men in her non-intro classes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Daly
Speaking of Columbia, does anyone here know how things worked out for Julian von Abele?