I'm not the one misrepresenting things. The entire nature of Stanford's word list has been misrepresented up and down this thread by those freaking out that it's some sort of blacklist of "forbidden words" (as one poster put it).

Also I'm in academia so I'm not woefully uninformed about what goes on in academia and how it works. I think the SV tech workers here on HN are the ones who are uninformed about how academia works.

> Isn't it Berkeley where 80% of applications for faculty positions are filtered on their diversity statement

Have you ever read such a statement? They are very important for academia, because classrooms are very diverse. It's important for applicants to state their philosophy on teaching people with different (dis)abilities, because that's the nature of the job. As an instructor, you will face the range of disabilities in students from mild dyslexia all the way to students who are bound to a wheelchair and communicate through a computer voice system. How does the instructor handle those situations? What techniques or practices do they employ?

Also, classroom conflicts do exist. For CS there aren't so many, but in other classes that touch on contentious issues, the question for the instructor is: how do they balance the views of all students in a constructive way that is conducive to learning? It's not easy, and so requires some explanation on the part of the applicant.

Filtering on diversity statements means advancing candidates who have put genuine thought into these issues, because again, they are important for the job.

The other part of the diversity statement plays is that is forces the candidate to reflect on their community service work. Did you know that service is part of the job description of a professor? The job is research, teaching, and service. We ask them for a research and a teaching statement, so what's wrong with asking for a diversity statement? Would you rather it be called a "service" statement?

The filtering process selects for candidates who are serious about service and who have thought deeply about how to teach a diverse classroom (because that's the job). I don't see a problem with that; even if you disagree with DEI initiatives, you still have to teach a diverse classroom. This whole idea that we can't ask job candidates how they handle situations which will arise on the job to which they're applying is strange to me.

> Or consider Stuart Reges being disciplined by UW for not putting the boilerplate land acknowledgement on his course's syllabus.

This is a misrepresentation. The land acknowledgement for UW is in fact optional on the course syllabus. What Stuart Reges did was put his own land acknowledgement statement on the syllabus which veered from factual statements and was a political statement.

So he was using his platform in an engineering course to push his own personal political agenda. A syllabus in particular is regarded as a contract, sometimes binding, between student and professor. It's not the place for off-the-cuff political statements. If Stuart Reges is allowed to put his political statements on his syllabus, that opens up the door for all professors, which makes the syllabus a political platform. Apparently he was very vocal about the land statements outside of the syllabus and that is fine for UW, but it just didn't belong in the syllabus.

I don't see a problem with that, do you? If you want to include the UW land statement, that's fine. If you don't want to include the statement, that's fine. But what's not fine including your own statement because you're personally politically against land statements or what the UW statement has to say. I mean, if you take a course, do you care to see it colored with political statements from your instructor that are wholly unrelated to the course content?

As for how he was disciplined... what happened to him exactly? They asked him to take down the statement, he refused. Yet his salary was uninterrupted and he still works at UW to this day: https://www.cs.washington.edu/people/faculty/reges. So the sum total of his discipline was what, exactly?

According to the lawsuit Reges filed, he didn't even claim material damages. His lawsuit was about being butthurt because he felt like a pariah, which reading the situation, is as much his fault as anyone else's. In fact, the party that was materially impacted was the department; they had to open another section of the course because he was so acerbic to the students. That costs serious money and time from all of his colleagues. Honestly for that alone I would have fired him, but I guess UW is more forgiving than me.