UNR Engineering Dean Publishing In His Own Predatory Journal

[larix]

The point of my original observation was that even if there are perfectly good other reasons for the hire (nepotism, politics, someones golf buddy, etc) and even if hiring bad deans is not an issue unique to UNR. The fact that folks in certain circles will immediately leap to the conclusion that it was DEI initiatives that led to this hire ergo all DEI initiatives must be bad should be cause for concern.

I actually suspect this is the main reason why no other news outlets beyond local news in Reno are covering this case.

It also wasn't just UNR that hired this guy. He has prominent positions at NSF and had a Fellowship with the National Academies. Again could be perfectly good reasons for those selections too, up to an including that maybe he just had really good letters and no one looked too closely at the CV.

[secundem_artem]

This guy is a genius.  No more problems with Reviewer #2.

[TreadingLife]

This guy is a genius.  No more problems with Reviewer #2.

This comment made me laugh a lot harder than it should have.

[bio-nonymous]

In case fora members didn't get to the P.S section of the Gelman link Para provided look at the link below, from an article by the Dean's co-author and new editor of the "journal". The "figures" made me do a spit-take.

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2024/02/12/torment-executioners-in-reno-nevada/

The figures look like they were drawn in crayon by an 8-year-old. How is this guy employed anywhere, much less as a dean? How does he have the gall to list these pubs, has he no shame?! Shocking...

[dismalist]

Interestingly,

... that folks in certain circles will immediately leap to the conclusion that it was DEI initiatives that led to this hire ...

This could be perfectly rational, depending upon the numbers. The probability that a non-minority is a DEI hire is zero, so the probability that a DEI hire is a Black person is very high, close to one. Multiply this by the ratio of the share of DEI hires in all hires to the share of Blacks in the population. [Bayes' Theorem]

Thus, even a small share of DEI hires out of total hires, because the share of Blacks in the population is only about 0.15, can easily have the ratio of the shares approach a high probability.

The lesson is not that people are are prejudiced. Rather, it is that DEI tars individuals who are not DEI hires.

Now, to figure out if DEI hires screw up with high probability, we should apply Bayes' Theorem again. :-)

[billtsherman]

The probability that a non-minority is a DEI hire is zero, so the probability that a DEI hire is a Black person is very high, close to one.

I'm kind of dense, so please explain to me how this *doesn't* mean "nearly all non-white hires are DEI hires."

Are you using "DEI hire" to just mean "non-white hire?"

[dismalist]

The probability that a non-minority is a DEI hire is zero, so the probability that a DEI hire is a Black person is very high, close to one.

I'm kind of dense, so please explain to me how this *doesn't* mean "nearly all non-white hires are DEI hires."

Are you using "DEI hire" to just mean "non-white hire?"

No, and no.

It depends on how large DEI hires are as a share of all hires. If that is large, the probability of the Black person being a DEI hire can get weirdly large, because Blacks are such a large part of the relevant DEI population and are such a small part of the general population.

To build intuition, try an extreme case. Suppose only Blacks qualify as DEI hires. Now assume DEI hires are an 0.15 share of all hires, while Blacks are 0.15 of the general population. Then all DEI hires would be Black, for there is nowhere to hire them from except from the general population.

I was thinking that most non-whites are Black for present purposes. But if the relevant share of the population considered for DEI placement is much higher than the Black share, being Black of course conveys less information, so my assumed numbers would overstate the probability of a Black being a DEI hire.

Anyway, the inference that a particular person is a DEI hire need not at all be attributable to prejudice. DEI paints non DEI hires.

[ciao_yall]

The probability that a non-minority is a DEI hire is zero, so the probability that a DEI hire is a Black person is very high, close to one.

I'm kind of dense, so please explain to me how this *doesn't* mean "nearly all non-white hires are DEI hires."

Are you using "DEI hire" to just mean "non-white hire?"

No, and no.

It depends on how large DEI hires are as a share of all hires. If that is large, the probability of the Black person being a DEI hire can get weirdly large, because Blacks are such a large part of the relevant DEI population and are such a small part of the general population.

To build intuition, try an extreme case. Suppose only Blacks qualify as DEI hires. Now assume DEI hires are an 0.15 share of all hires, while Blacks are 0.15 of the general population. Then all DEI hires would be Black, for there is nowhere to hire them from except from the general population.

I was thinking that most non-whites are Black for present purposes. But if the relevant share of the population considered for DEI placement is much higher than the Black share, being Black of course conveys less information, so my assumed numbers would overstate the probability of a Black being a DEI hire.

Anyway, the inference that a particular person is a DEI hire need not at all be attributable to prejudice. DEI paints non DEI hires.

Good thing all of us on this board are white people, otherwise you might really have offended someone. Because, G-d forbid, a non-white person being hired on merit alone?

[spork]

 ^ You don't understand dismalist's point. A real-world example from thirty years ago; I don't know what the situation is now:

The people leading the FBI regarded the low number of female special agent hires as problematic. So the FBI instituted a second set of criteria for evaluating only female applicants. Screening panels evaluated female applicants according to the old criteria that continued to be used for the entire pool of applicants, but if female applicants weren't hired from the general pool, their applications were then evaluated using the second set of criteria, which were defined differently.

This generated a new problem: at the FBI Academy, no one knew which female applicants had been selected via the old criteria (i.e., top-ranked applicants regardless of sex) or via the new criteria (top-ranked among the smaller set of just female applicants). So people just assumed that all of the female hires had been selected using the second method. Male hires didn't encounter this assumption.

[Langue_doc]

ciao_yall, why would you assume that

all of us on this board are white people, otherwise you might really have offended someone. Because, G-d forbid, a non-white person being hired on merit alone?

Don't you have colleagues who aren't white? Why would anyone assume that forumites are all white? Here in the city, I recall several non-white colleagues--faculty--as early as twenty years ago.

As for DEI hires, several of them appear to be the result of the institution virtue-signalling. See for instance, the DEI websites for Harvard and Cornell, for instance. Columbia, on the other hand, appears to have given some thought to what DEI includes, and has therefore chosen its diversity officer based on the needs of more than one group.

[ciao_yall]

ciao_yall, why would you assume that

all of us on this board are white people, otherwise you might really have offended someone. Because, G-d forbid, a non-white person being hired on merit alone?

Don't you have colleagues who aren't white? Why would anyone assume that forumites are all white? Here in the city, I recall several non-white colleagues--faculty--as early as twenty years ago.

As for DEI hires, several of them appear to be the result of the institution virtue-signalling. See for instance, the DEI websites for Harvard and Cornell, for instance. Columbia, on the other hand, appears to have given some thought to what DEI includes, and has therefore chosen its diversity officer based on the needs of more than one group.

Sorry, forgot the /s.

[Langue_doc]

The sad part of the misplaced emphasis on DEI is that people who were hired because of their qualifications are now lumped with some of the recent hires who got their jobs because they checked certain boxes. Claudine Gay comes to mind.

[bio-nonymous]

The sad part of the misplaced emphasis on DEI is that people who were hired because of their qualifications are now lumped with some of the recent hires who got their jobs because they checked certain boxes. Claudine Gay comes to mind.

I agree 100%. Anecdotally (note this was a decade ago), I had a postdoc friend that was hired from the NIH diversity supplement. She was EXTREMELY annoyed that she felt she needed to work incredibly harder than everyone else to prove she deserved to be there and wasn't just a DEI hire. The PI of the lab confided to me that they would likely never hire a white male postdoc again because the economics didn't pan out... It was the system rewards themselves that drove the issue, and inadvertently perhaps drove further inequity and racial strife.

[fizzycist]

The probability that a non-minority is a DEI hire is zero, so the probability that a DEI hire is a Black person is very high, close to one.

I'm kind of dense, so please explain to me how this *doesn't* mean "nearly all non-white hires are DEI hires."

Are you using "DEI hire" to just mean "non-white hire?"

No, and no.

It depends on how large DEI hires are as a share of all hires. If that is large, the probability of the Black person being a DEI hire can get weirdly large, because Blacks are such a large part of the relevant DEI population and are such a small part of the general population.

To build intuition, try an extreme case. Suppose only Blacks qualify as DEI hires. Now assume DEI hires are an 0.15 share of all hires, while Blacks are 0.15 of the general population. Then all DEI hires would be Black, for there is nowhere to hire them from except from the general population.

I was thinking that most non-whites are Black for present purposes. But if the relevant share of the population considered for DEI placement is much higher than the Black share, being Black of course conveys less information, so my assumed numbers would overstate the probability of a Black being a DEI hire.

Anyway, the inference that a particular person is a DEI hire need not at all be attributable to prejudice. DEI paints non DEI hires.

There is so much drivel to pick on here, I dunno where to start.

WTF is a DEI hire anyway?

If it means someone who was hired based on physical/cultural attributes with no merit whatsoever, then I think you are looking at a miniscule fraction of hires. The UNR Dean, for example, had a PhD, prior faculty experience, was an NSF rotator, started companies, etc. Clearly there was some merit, at least on paper, and this is already an extreme case.

If it means someone who is hired that isn't the dominant physical/cultural demographic of the field (women in STEM? Latinos, Filipinos, Thai, African, Indonesian, African American, Indigenous in any field?), then most hires are "DEI hires" and labeling it in that way is odd and really insulting.

[Wahoo Redux]

There is so much drivel to pick on here, I dunno where to start.

WTF is a DEI hire anyway?

This describes it this way:

DE&I stands for diversity, equity and inclusion. As a discipline, DE&I is any policy or practice designed to make people of various backgrounds feel welcome and ensure they have support to perform to the fullest of their abilities in the workplace. This kind of environment is created by following all three aspects of DE&I. 

Diversity is the presence of differences within a given setting. In the workplace, that can mean differences in race, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age and socioeconomic class. It can also refer to differences in physical ability, veteran status, whether or not you have kids — all of those are components of diversity.

Which sounds very clean, safe, sane, and ethical.

I've posted my own limited anecdata on this policy several times on The Fora which suggests that people are not automatically hired because of physical or cultural attributes alone, but "DEI hires" do not necessarily hire the best person for the job either; rather, DEI proponents set out to hire someone with the necessary qualifications but privilege race or some other demographic over hard, objective criteria. 

To suggest this----

based on physical/cultural attributes with no merit whatsoever

----is a strawman and something no one has argued is happening.  Certainly you don't believe people believe this.   I suspect you are exhibiting the typical frustration of someone who thinks it is fine to privilege certain physical/cultural attributes over pure merit.