The trouble with diversity statements

Also featuring: platypus venom, statistical packages, & beach

Where I am writing to you from, in my mind

As part of the academic job application process (i.e. for tenure-track faculty positions), schools traditionally require applicants to submit 3 things: a fairly long cover letter explaining their work, perspective, and training; a teaching statement about their pedagogy and experience; and a diversity statement that discusses their contributions to diversity, equity, and inclusion. I’ve been working on the diversity statement this week.

People whisper that hiring committees merely glance at diversity statements and rarely think of them as an important part of their decision-making. (Others whisper that this is true of everything you submit in your application, but the diversity statement has a particular reputation for being insignificant). It is possible that schools don’t really care about diversity, equity, and inclusion as much as they care about other things, like funding, publishing, and efficiency. The alternative, though, is that hiring committees don’t carefully read diversity statements because they don’t gain much insight from them. I am not against diversity statements, per se, but I question whether they are the appropriate means to achieve the desired end (if that end is to hire faculty members who will contribute to equity advancement on campus and actively work to mitigate inequalities that have been perpetuated in academia since time immemorial). The trouble with diversity statements is multifold. First, how many good writers could craft a convincing diversity statement that does not reflect the way the writer truly contributes (or, specifically, fails to contribute) to diversity, equity, and inclusion? Second, if we believe diversity and inclusion really are as important as we say they are, shouldn’t there be ample evidence of this priority in the teaching statement, cover letter, and interview, rendering the diversity statement redundant? And third, what does diversity really mean? Has the term been overused such that it has lost some meaning? Is “diversity” about racial and ethnic identity? Is it more broadly about any identity-based descriptor? And, if diversity is even broader than external identities, does a one-page statement have a flattening effect on all that complexity?

On Vanderbilt’s webpage about writing a diversity statement, they quote their Vice Provost of Inclusive Excellence, who says, “If someone were to write — “I’ve been in environments that have not been very visibly diverse, and it is relatively recent that I have become aware of how important diversity and inclusivity are to fostering student success”— that would blow me away. I would be really impressed by someone able to be transparent about the process and their eagerness to continue growing…” I love the focus on honesty, though I wonder… Would I hire someone who admits to having only recently begun to realize the importance of diversity? I am genuinely not sure. I would probably think they have a lot of growth to do. Haven’t we been talking about the importance of diversity since we were kids?

I also reflect on the immense amount of diversity that might be excluded in this narrow definition of visible diversity. The diversity of thought, diversity of lifestyle, diversity of values. I remember back when I was writing about diversity for a college application, my mom joked that I grew up around my dad’s definitively ~unusual~ actor friends. I probably rolled my eyes at the time but I have to laugh now because she’s not wrong! That’s diversity, too. Not the stuff of an academic diversity statement, perhaps, but diversity that I highly value in my life nevertheless.

I am obviously a White, cis-gender, able-bodied woman who benefits from the status conferred to me for those traits. I must continue to work hard to be a force of change in the spaces that I enter. And, of course, that’s a far greater challenge than the challenge at hand, which is writing a diversity statement. Still, I’m working away in an attempt to finesse a short blurb that somehow says more than the required acknowledgment of inequality—that somehow speaks to grand, complex ideas while maintaining self-awareness and a humble perspective. I hope I get close.

LOCAL NEWS

• Upon realizing that it is, in fact, August and that the summer is slipping away like sand through our fingers, we took a random day off for our first beach day of the summer. It is amazing that we live 2 hours away from the most stunning blue ocean and scarcely make the effort to go. I am actually really bad at “beach” and got repeatedly pummeled by waves before giving up, dumping a pound of sand out of my bikini top and another pound out of my bikini bottom, and succumbing to a seaside nap while roasting in the sun. We topped off the trip with some seafood and a gas station Gatorade before heading back to reality.

  

• I’ve probably been added to some sort of FBI tracking list somewhere. I’m using a statistical programming package called mclust for my dissertation. The package is named mclust because it allows you to perform analytical techniques that fall into the category “model-based clustering” (therefore, the package is pronounced “m”-clust rather than the funnier, McLust™). I heard on the podcast Quantitude that people commonly learn how to do these analyses with an example dataset available online called Zoo Animals. The dataset is made up of one row per animal and the columns describe various animal traits, like the number of legs and whether they lay eggs. mclust helps sort these animals into clusters based on their traits. In the example, you find that the platypus is not sorted into any of the clusters, and this teaches about how to handle outliers. At least, so I hear. I wanted some more hand-holding throughout the whole experience, so I went ahead and conducted an innocent search.

  

  Truly and utterly failed by Duck Duck Go! Back to Google we go. Speaking of the platypus. Did everyone know it is one of few living mammals that produce venom??

CULTURE & ENTERTAINMENT

• I really enjoyed Wesley Morris’ writing in this piece celebrating the 50th anniversary of hip-hop.

• Listening to The Band in honor of Robbie Robertson this week.

  

BIRTH NOTICES

• Welcome to the world, Rihanna’s baby girl and the baby girl of one of my top readers and best of friends—both of whom arrived on the same day, if the paparazzi are to be trusted. I hope both mothers read this and are recovering well.

• New little doodads to add to my little doodad collection, care of the fleamarket near our house last weekend. The scooter dude is Mac Tonight, a distant relative of McLust.

  

  

IN MEMORIAM

• RIP to my old Irish dancing heavy shoes (pictured, right). They have been replaced with my new shoes (pictured, left), which I purchased in December of 2021 and resisted breaking in for nearly 2 years. The time has come and I am devastated. Send your best blister-busting tips! Note the difference in the taps, which is really throwing off my balance.

  

COMICS

via @ odeandiefreude

And one from Neal:

With love,

Claire