Following publication of piece, discussion and debate ensues

Diversity statements are political litmus tests, according to an editorial notice published in the December issue of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) Notices penned by Dr. Abigail Thompson, a professor in and chair of the UC Davis Mathematics Department. This notice was later expanded upon and appeared as an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. Both articles have drawn varying reactions — including from the chancellor — and have garnered discussion on both a campus and national level.

When The California Aggie reached out to Thompson for comment, she said she was currently swamped with requests. The College Fix recently reported that Thompson would be writing a general response about her opinion piece and what followed from it, saying that she wanted to release the statement “hopefully in the next few weeks.” 

In October 2018, the UC Regents changed the Academic Personnel Manual, resulting in the consideration of “contributions to diversity” under “Criteria for Appointment, Promotion, and Appraisal.” According to Melissa Lutz-Blouin, director of UC Davis News and Media Relations, all tenure-track faculty at UC Davis must submit a “Contributions to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” statement. The statement is scored with a rubric and factored into the hiring committee’s evaluation of candidates. 

“Applications with ‘weak’ diversity statements may or may not proceed to the next step of hiring; this is left to the discretion of the recruitment committee,” Lutz-Blouin said. 

In the “Knowledge” section of the College of Engineering’s diversity statement rubric, a score of 1-2 — 1 being the worst and 5 being the best — is given to applicants with “little demonstrated understanding of diversity trends” and who are “unaware of personal challenges faced by under-represented groups.” The same score, in the “Track Record” section of the rubric, is given to applicants with “no participation in activities related to diversity and advancing inclusion.” The “Plans” section of the rubric states that a 1-2 score will be given to applicants who have “vague or no statements about what they would do if hired” and whose statements “describe only activities that are already the expectation of all faculty (e.g. mentoring, treating all students the same).” 

After seeing a similar rubric made public by UC Berkeley, Thompson, who is also a vice president of AMS, referred to these diversity statements as “a political test with teeth.” She said requiring faculty to submit such statements was political because it required faculty candidates to treat people differently according to their identity — a reflection of one’s belief about the way the world is organized.

“Faculty at universities across the country are facing an echo of the loyalty oath, a mandatory ‘Diversity Statement’ for job applicants,” Thompson wrote. 

Chancellor Gary May and Vice Chancellor Renetta Tull wrote a response to Thompson’s comparison of diversity statements to the loyalty oath.

“We disagree strongly with this premise,” the response said. “It is inaccurate, at once illogical and rhetorically inflammatory, and reminiscent of historical attempts to blunt substantive actions aimed at desegregation and broadening participation.”

The UC loyalty oath controversy happened between 1949 and 1950, during which time all UC faculty were mandated to sign a statement confirming they were not a member or supporter of the Communist Party. Thirty-one faculty members, including Edward Tolman, the leader of the non-signers and the namesake of UC Berkeley’s Tolman Hall, and David Saxon, a physicist who later became the UC’s president, were fired for refusing to sign. 

Dr. William Casey, a UC Davis chemistry professor, applauded Thompson “for her article about the reappearance of loyalty oaths at the University of California” in a statement published in the Wall Street Journal editorial section.

Casey recalled the Standing Order of the Regents 101.1d, which says that “no political test shall be required of applicants for jobs at the University of California,” as trying to eliminate viewpoint discrimination. 

“Why should your opinion on the right to life or gay marriage or electric cars — why should that have any bearing on your ability to discharge your abilities of teaching, service and research at the University of California?” Casey said.

Unlike the administration’s response, Casey said there was no position that would be the unified voice of the faculty. 

“In the first loyalty oath controversy, the faculty approved the oath by a factor of four to one,” Casey said. “So don’t look for unanimity in issues of free speech. It’s always controversial speech that needs protection.” 

The AMS opened up a response form to Thompson’s op-ed, which generated three letters. Two supported Thompson’s arguments and accumulated a total of 890 signatures. One that opposed Thompson’s arguments gathered 621 signatures. The letters were published online on Dec. 13, 2019, as part of the AMS Notices’ January 2020 edition. Additionally, the AMS Notices’ editor-in-chief posted a Twitter response acknowledging that Thompson’s piece was not representative of the views of AMS and apologized “to those who understood it as such.” 

One response in AMS Notices in support of Thompson directly addressed a response posted on the Institute for the Quantitative Study of Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity (QSIDE) site, calling it an attempt “to intimidate a voice within our mathematical community.” Authored by Chad Topaz, a Williams College mathematics professor, the response called for those who disagreed with AMS’s decision to publish the piece to contact UC Davis “to express […] concerns about diversity in the Department of Mathematics and about Thompson’s role as Chair.” It also encouraged faculty to direct students not to attend UC Davis.

Topaz, the director of QSIDE, submitted a preprint of a data science study that examines ethnicities, genders and other demographics of people who signed the three letters published in the AMS Notices. Using the platform Amazon Mechanical Turk, he and his fellow researchers crowdsourced the gathering of demographic and academic data of the signatories. 

They found that those who has signed on to what they termed Letter A — the letter opposing Thompson’s arguments — represented a broader range of institution types and levels of professional security and contained more women and members of minoritized ethnic groups. Those who signed both Letters B and C were “overwhelmingly inferred to be tenured white men at highly intensive research universities.”

Topaz said he hoped the research prompted people to reflect on mechanisms of power and added that he believed free speech, diversity, equity and inclusion were not in conflict.

“If someone doesn’t want to teach, they might not be appropriate for teaching positions,” Topaz said. “Just like if people don’t want to at least orient themselves toward diversity, equity and inclusion, for the relevant members of the university community, they might not be appropriate for certain jobs. It has nothing to do with speech. It’s a job qualification.”

Topaz identifies as a “social-justice-oriented professor” on his Twitter bio and said he started seeing how “discouraging” the mathematics landscape was after seeing the Society of Industrial and Applied Math’s announcement of their 31 fellows, 29 of which were men.

With regard to Thompson referring to diversity statements as political litmus tests, he said the way “political” has been used bothered him. 

“We could then say that insisting a candidate be good in a classroom is political,” Topaz said. “That doesn’t have anything to do with politics.”

UC Davis alumna Stephanie Chang, who signed Letter A, said her first reaction was one of shock. 

“I didn’t know what to say. I was extremely disappointed,” Chang said. “It was something I was shocked to see come from Davis itself. Diversity statements show people know we don’t live in a vacuum where we’re all born equal — it’s not just ‘if you work hard, you’re fine.’” 

Thompson has also received recent pushback when the Math Department, under her leadership, brought Yuval Peres, a math professor with a series of sexual misconduct allegations leveled against him, to speak at UC Davis. Peres’ lecture and Thompson’s op-ed made Chang feel that Thompson should be removed as chair of the department. 

“I’m not a huge fan, given her current opinion and her inviting him,” Chang said. “You’re saying that his work is more important than his character.” 

Chang, who now works as an engineer at GoDaddy, said she heard other opinions regarding the op-ed, where people agreed with Thompson’s sentiment but not her reasoning.

“I’ve heard that it can be hard for people who are struggling financially or mentally — who can’t do outreach because they don’t have time — to write a diversity statement that’s sufficient enough,” she said. “I can see that point, but Thompson’s point wasn’t that at all. It was a false equivalency.”

Chang said she agrees with the intentions behind diversity statements and affirmative action, but cannot speak about whether the execution is perfect. 

As a student, Chang was secretary of the Davis Computer Science Club for two years and vice president during her senior year. With the club, she held a yearly Gender Diversity in Tech conference supported by the department. 

“It was almost as if the onus for diversity, equity and inclusion was left to our club,” she said. “If I didn’t hold the event, there wouldn’t have been anything else going on. They weren’t against diversity, but they weren’t proactive about it, though they did try to hire more female professors.” 

With regard to hiring, Casey said search committees have done a “fine job” at making sure no one or their application is overlooked. 

“They don’t underrepresent minority and women candidates, they overrepresent them by a factor of about two relative to the applicant pool,” said Casey. “The problem isn’t with the search committees.” 

Casey believes that Thompson’s notice is not about anyone’s specific opinion about how to eliminate the achievement gap or achieve diversity. 

“The question is whether they’re even allowed to have an opinion that has not passed a narrow ideological filter that was determined by University of California administrators,” he said. “It’s not about my opinion. It’s about my right to have an opinion.” 

Written by: Janelle Marie Salanga — campus@theaggie.org

Distinguished alumni announced as speakers

Among the many distinguished UC Davis alumni, three were announced as speakers for the campus’ undergraduate commencements in June. Nadine Burke Harris, California’s first surgeon general; Francisco Rodriguez, chancellor of the Los Angeles Community College District and Tracy Caldwell Dyson, a NASA astronaut, will speak to the thousands of graduates and guests at the UC Davis Health Stadium on June 12, 13 and 14 respectively. 

Traditionally, seven commencement ceremonies were held each year at UC Davis: three for the College of Letters and Science, two for the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, one each for the College of Biological Sciences and for the College of Engineering. The seven commencements have been condensed into three – with the distinguished speakers each speaking at one – and majors from each of the four colleges will be represented at each of the ceremonies. 

The selection and invitation of these prominent speakers are among the university’s changes to spring undergraduate commencement announced in April to celebrate UC Davis as a whole as a leading public university.

“A committee of students, faculty and staff made recommendations to the chancellor based on the suggestions that came from a variety of sources,” said Julia Ann Easley, a news and media relations specialist for UC Davis. “The chancellor then made a final decision based on the top recommendations.” 

The selected speakers have made strides in the fields of public health, education and engineering. 

Burke Harris earned her medical degree from UC Davis in 2001 and was appointed Surgeon General of California in Jan. 2019 by Governor Gavin Newsom. As a clinician, researcher and author, Burke Harris advocates for educating people on how Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACEs, negatively impact patients’ health. In 2018, she released her first book The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Adversity. 

She has helped to pioneer the treatment of toxic stress through projects such as the Center for Youth Wellness, which focuses on risk screening, care coordination and multidisciplinary treatment. As surgeon general, she has worked to implement a California law in partnership with the state Department of Health Care Services that offers reimbursement to MediCal providers for ACE screening, including abuse and neglect, to promote further research on toxic stress. 

While in medical school, Burke Harris also served as co-director for UC Davis’ student-run Imani Clinic. 

Rodriguez earned a bachelor’s degree in Chicano studies in 1985 and a master’s degree in community development in 1997 from UC Davis. He currently serves as a chancellor of the Los Angeles Community College District, the largest community college district in the nation. In his 30 years of experience as an educator, faculty member and administrator within the California public higher education system, Rodriguez has dedicated his career to championing diversity, outreach and equitable education policies for underserved groups such as undocumented students and student-veterans. He has also been involved with many boards and committees such as director of the Board of Higher Education; Workforce of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine and the California Association of Latino Community College Trustees and Administrators Association (CALCCTA), to name a few. 

Additionally, he served as a past president of the Cal Aggie Alumni Association and director of the UC Davis Foundation Board. Rodriguez said he was honored for the opportunity to return to UC Davis to share his words to graduating students on his experiences.

“I am deeply appreciative of Chancellor May and the university for extending this invitation [and] I am looking forward to returning to campus to connect with students,” Rodriguez said. 

As far as the content of the commencement speech, Rodriguez said he plans to incorporate general themes that are both practical and inspirational, drawing from his perspective as a first-generation college student from an immigrant family with no history of higher education. 

“I also initially struggled to find and embrace my calling, my profession – that is, how I could understand and use this powerful tool called higher education to do good work and to make an impact in this world,” Rodriguez said. “I believe that one of the most important leadership traits that one can achieve is resilience, so I will give some reflections on this purposeful act and necessary determination to overcome obstacles and to always move forward.”

The final commencement speaker is Dyson, who earned her doctorate in chemistry from UC Davis and recognized by the university as the outstanding doctoral student in chemistry in 1997. She was selected as an astronaut for NASA in 1998. She was part of two spaceflights – serving as a mission specialist in 2007 and flight engineer in 2010, with three spacewalks the latter expedition. Her work included designing, constructing and implementing electronics and hardware in the study of atmospheric gas phase chemistry and presenting papers on chemical ionization. She was awarded the NASA Go the Extra Mile (GEM) Award in 2001 and the Distinguished Service Medal in 2010. 

Easley expressed excitement on having these speakers to introduce the university’s new commencement structure. 

“They are very accomplished alumni who are making an impact in our world – and beyond!” Easley said. “They will help launch these new ceremonies in a wonderful way as new UC Davis traditions begin.”

Written by: Graschelle Fariñas Hipolito — campus@theaggie.org