Friday Reading List. 23/12/2022

Every Friday I will post EDI and related articles that I’ve read through the week or have been sitting in my stash of articles.

Tonight’s entry is short, with just two articles. Subsequent entries will be substantially longer.

Aryan Karimi, “How equity, diversity and inclusion are becoming a tool for capitalism,” The Conversation, December 22, 2022, https://theconversation.com/how-equity-diversity-and-inclusion-policies-are-becoming-a-tool-for-capitalism-196534, accessed December 23rd, 2022.

• Aryan Karimi is an associate professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia (UBC). In this article, Karimi argues that Diversity has been rendered another ranking metric for universities at the expense of equity and inclusion.

Cory Clark and Bo Winegard, “Sex and the Academy,” Quillette, October 8, 2022, https://quillette.com/2022/10/08/sex-and-the-academy/, accessed December 23, 2022.

• Social psychologists Cory Clark and Bo Winegard ask how women are changing academic culture in Western liberal societies. The two conjecture that women’s and men’s evolved psychological preferences might come into conflict in the academic setting, the former tending to social justice and the latter to academic freedom. If true, then there should be predictable patterns to the influence of these different preferences on the priorities of science and higher education. The authors say we ought both to “identify and try to understand” these patterns and to “note they will lead to predictable downstream consequences.” Why? Because, as Clark and Winged say, “A new and more female-oriented era is here for the foreseeable future.”