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Great Debate at MIT, Part 3
Karith Foster
Heart, a little brain that thinks and feels and reasons independently, when we can connect those things, and of course what's in between our mouths, when we can put all those things in action. That's when we're on our way to success as a human race
Pamela Denise Long
So it's not lost on me that we're holding this event in Boston, Massachusetts, the grounds upon which our founders threw a massive Tea Party and, and they took a stand on fulfilling the Rights of Man and what I know from a survey of American history is that that language fulfilling the rights of men has been geared toward American freedmen, the descendants of slaves, ever since. Literally President Truman called forth a commission on civil rights to have that conversation about how to make it happen, as did President Johnson in 1966. And in that year 1966 When President Johnson made those statements, he noted that it was not enough to provide the Negro with opportunity to compete because of the accumulated burdens which do add up for performance and resources he needed to ensure achievement. So while we derived double standards, we have 400 years of double standards of treatment. And we can't just decide that now the playing field is level when we've been digging out of a ditch. So here's what I would like to say, if this proposition about Dei, at any point reminded you of the conversations or debates at Oxford between Malcolm X or James Baldwin and William Buckley, they should the tone tenor and messaging is very different. We're really sick of providing special accommodations to the people from whom we've essentially shackled, literally shackled, and disenfranchised for so very long. So here's what I would like to see to Heather's point. I would like to see competent hit hit dei a advocates actually create that multi generational talent pipeline in the negro community. We have such bright minds we can literally ship chips from China to the United States. Talk about supply chain, let's create a supply chain of talent so that when character I are in a medical situation, we have professionals that actually understand our experience and what it is like to live in our shoes so that we and our children might experience the health equity that is also an issue in the United States of America. Thank you.
Nadine Strossen
Thank 
you to all of the debaters now it's time for the audience q&a. So can you please line up at the microphones and I would like to lay out the ground rules. If you feel comfortable introducing yourself, please do so. You may address your question to a particular team or speaker, but both teams will have the chance to respond to all questions. The debaters agreed to give me some discretion about the timing here. But we also agreed we should try to confine each question answer to two minutes total. So Jr, Thanks for holding up the time cards. We want to accommodate as many audience questions as possible. So let me start on this side.
+2
you to all of the debaters now it's time for the audience q&a. So can you please line up at the microphones and I would like to lay out the ground rules. If you feel comfortable introducing yourself, please do so. You may address your question to a particular team or speaker, but both teams will have the chance to respond to all questions. The debaters agreed to give me some discretion about the timing here. But we also agreed we should try to confine each question answer to two minutes total. So Jr, Thanks for holding up the time cards. We want to accommodate as many audience questions as possible. So let me start on this side. Audience1
Thank you panelists and debaters for wonderful debate. And thanks to MIT for organizing this My question is very, very, very small and tiny, which is mainly to challengers. But you know you can answer. Why are diversity offices, the least diverse departments on campus?
Karith Foster
That's a great question. And I think it goes back to what I just said that people have creative as a misnomer that to be diverse. You have to be black or Hispanic or gay, you have to be part of a marginalized group. And it's unfortunate that that's how we've siphoned the positions within the diversity realm and the conversations around it and you're absolutely right. That's a very cute observation. What unfortunate
Pamela Denise Long
what I've also liked to offer to that in doing trainings around diversity, equity, inclusion and anti racism, there's a common refrain that I've heard I'm not sure if you've heard it as well, but I often get the idea from dei folk, that white people don't listen to non white people around this kind of thing. They don't feel comfortable sharing their vulnerabilities and therefore white person needs to lead the sort of work. I'm not sure if that's what your department looks like in your place, but where I come from in the Midwest, that is a common refrain that I see I come from Missouri, right, which is kind of the Michael Brown whole thing situation. So take that for what it's worth.
Nadine Strossen
I'd like to give one minute to the other team. We'd like if you'd like to comment No, otherwise
Pat Kambhampati
I can come if I may. Go ahead.
Heather Mac Donald
I would I would add to that issue. Do do historically black colleges and universities have a diversity problem. They are at least 75% Black and they are very small diversity offices should they be moving towards a 13% black population in their student body so that they can be diverse?
Pamela Denise Long
Is it okay for us to have to answer questions as the
Nadine Strossen
book one more but I really want to be respectful of the audience. Please
Heather Mac Donald
take that as a rhetorical question.
Pamela Denise Long
No, I'm happy to answer it. I just want to make sure that I'm you know not getting gaveled out here. I do believe that historically Negro because when those were established, we were talking about negros, not black immigrants. Institutions have a particular place in black society. I do not believe that they should be subjected to mandates. to dilute the population or to increase the diversity in the populations though I will tell you that when you look at the faculty at HBCUs, you'd be hard pressed to find an actual Negro in faculty position.
Nadine Strossen
Can you keep it very brief?
Pat Kambhampati
I'll make a very brief comment to expand upon your question, which is a brilliant observation. I suspect you're an MIT scientist. Congratulations. Now. No, okay, fine.
Karith Foster
Wait a stereotype.
Pat Kambhampati
The majority of EDI workers what I've seen as a university professor are female and Caucasian 90% of my diversity Dean as a female, Caucasian and refers to me as a racialized minority. I told her, please don't do that. And she didn't listen to me. And then she said, I don't want to speak to you anymore. So that's I agree with you.
Nadine Strossen
Next question.
Audience2
Hi, thank you all. So much. So for some context for my question. In 2014. When Apple came out with their health app, they claimed that the app would be able to, quote, monitor all of your metrics that you're most interested in, except they failed to include the most commonly used health app and maybe there are men in the audience who know what I'm referring to, but I'm certain that the women do it was a period tracker. The development team is made up primarily of men failed to include a period tracker. Does that mean that they were sexist or ignorant, I doubt or that despite being excellent engineers with likely stellar grades from r1 universities, maybe they lacked all of the qualifications necessary some which cannot be quantified by test scores, but by lived experiences. So my question for the this team I forgot what the exact terminology is. Do you believe that there are traits that may be advantageous in academia and engineering that can only be accounted for accounted for by the AI efforts or can all qualities be measured by standardized testing?
Pat Kambhampati
Well, I'm happy to address that question. As a university professor and a scientist. I would say science is completely agnostic to your race, gender, religion, or any combination thereof. Other fields not necessarily so if I were a teacher, or a grade school teacher or a police officer, perhaps, you know, politician, then it might be useful to have people who are different races and genders and religions and all that sort of thing. Because the human experience is different, but science is not human experience. And if that's what we're discussing, especially in STEM and then MIT, that's one of the points. It might be different if you look at literature, because literature is more human enterprise, but I would say science doesn't require or doesn't care what you are. Having said that, what you've talked about how you choose to implement it, which is that the average man might not think about the period. And the average white person might not recognize that we brown people don't show up well on cameras, but for what it's worth, it's not because of programming. It's because of the detector. We're at MIT. So I'm talking about detectors for a bit is the detector
Pamela Denise Long
negative team comment all enterprises are human enterprises. Anything that engages people is a human enterprise and diversity, equity, inclusion and anti racism has applicability across disciplines.
Karith Foster
And I don't think it was because the scientists were racist or sexist. I think they didn't have girlfriends.
Nadine Strossen
Okay, next question, please.
Audience3
Thank you. This question is for the opposing side. You both share the visions for how do you think the AI efforts should look like laudable visions? Do you really see an realistic path from the way the eye offices exist now and what they focus on? And given what we know organizational tendencies, human tendencies, from that to your vision?
Karith Foster
I personally do and the reason I do is because when I take my programming, whether it's through college or university or a fortune 100 company, when I'm able to express the revised way of appreciating true diversity, I see the light bulbs go off I see the epiphanies I see people who were scared to even touch it realize that true diversity means consideration. It means having awareness. It means being conscious, it means being compassionate. And that is absolute possibility. And all of the arenas in which we're talking about and touching
Pamela Denise Long
and how I would address that is similar to what the young lady answered before and the folks who are talking about not having color based systems will not appreciate this. But you the people who are in the system have produced what we have, how do you understand a thing and how to fix it when you've never experienced it? So my belief is that the people who lead dei need to be the people who are primarily experiencing the inequity that necessitates diversity, equity, inclusion and anti racism, and I believe that multigenerational black Americans are do ideally suited with the knowledge and experience to nuance that to get to solutions. brief comment from the affirmative
Nadine Strossen
team?
Heather Mac Donald
Well, yeah, I think in an academic context, I just would like the examples of what the inequities are that are being experienced today. I just, I don't think that's a reality that is large enough, at the very least to justify these massive bureaucracies that are costing 10s and hundreds of millions of dollars money that could go into scholarships, or into faculty hiring.
Nadine Strossen
Next question.
Audience4
Thank you for your comments. I have a question. For both sides that I'd be really curious to hear really how you disagree or if you disagree to the answer to this question. You've both both sides have suggested that dei is in some ways gone off the rails from whatever it should be. Perhaps the affirmative would say it shouldn't exist in the first place. But I'm curious to hear why you think that it has gone the direction that it has gone insofar as you think it there was a positive direction it might have gone in and that it is diverged from there. And I guess sort of similar to the question or the previous question. Are asked, what is the solution to that?
Nadine Strossen
Let the affirmative go first since the negative
Pat Kambhampati
I would posit that EDI or di e was never a good idea. As I said it was a wolf in sheep's clothing. Now your question why have we accelerated so much in the last five to 10 years and it's been an astronomical acceleration. I would encourage the general reader or listener to look at the works of Jordan Peterson, and Gad sad who explained in great detail how we arrived at this point over the course of decades starting from what I call grievance studies in the 1970s, which gave rise to majors and grievance studies in the 1990s. And now we see students who are offspring of grievance studies. So that created a small group of people who have a very narrow way of thinking that's not consistent with reason, logic. And evidence as normally taking place in university environments. So that small subset created what we call canceled culture. And that created this idea of self censorship, where everyone's afraid to say what they think that's been like a runaway train in the last several years, for reasons that are probably 50 years old. Negative 10
Pamela Denise Long
Yeah, so I think part of it, like I said before, we're off the rails because the people who are leading it actually don't have an actual lived experience to guide it. I think that part of the reason dei started was because of the sense of urgency around well, reason that accelerated is because of the sense of urgency around very publicized very disgusting, very obviously racist murders of black Americans or black people in the United States of America and how that captured the imagination and condemnation rightfully so. From the entire world. How do we fix it is I think we MF EDI come together make it happen, and I think we change the people who are leading the conceptualization and the implementation plans overall.
Heather Mac Donald
Can I Can I just say quickly, diversity training began in the early 1990s incorporation. So you had our Roosevelt Thomas, other people going around telling corporations that they needed to be trained in managing and valuing diversity and that's when you got the ideas that expectation of punctuality was itself white supremacist, that expectations of accuracy were white supremacist. So this was in fact created for reasons that again, we had a an IT skills gap and an accomplishment gap and the DEI bureaucracy change it's a way to change the subject from the from the fact that there are skills gaps that need to be solved, but but attacking standards is not the way to do it. And that's how this whole racket began in the early 1990s.
Karith Foster
i If I can just have a few seconds. I think that most practitioners in the DI space, their hearts and minds are in the right place. The idea was to correct the horrific wrongs and civil rights infractions that so many people faced. It has gone off the rails because we've gone from trying to bring people together to being hypersensitive and I think that you know not to get all conspiracy theorists on you but it's a distraction. You know, I do agree with Heather in some respects. I think it's a distraction. It's like you know, they think more cats and look shiny light over there, while the bigger stuff is going on behind the scenes and it is taken a lot of money that could be going to some really positive helpful things. And we're not doing any better. We're not bringing people together. It's almost intentional in some ways and it's sick.
Pamela Denise Long
Thanks, question.
Audience5
evening, everyone. My name is David. For brief context I'm going to bring to you a personal anecdote and mainly I would like to hear from the team in affirmative, but I would like to hear from both. Now for context I am 24 and they have a GPA of one point 76 So I am surrounded by people in this room are far smarter than I am. Hi, Mama. Please don't beat me. That aside. The reason why I'm up here is because I feel like I have been a victim of this process, if you will. That being I come from New Jersey and I was initially offered enrollment to a college that was very prestigious. Now when I tried to apply for this college I barely made the cut and I'll be honest with you while I'm smart in high school, I am not very studious. I don't have the best of study habits. And when push came to shove I got over the finish line partly because of my background. Now when it came time for me to do the college,
Nadine Strossen
please get to the question.
Audience5
This question is primarily related to I go into I go into the college I am let in on a lower bar because of my background and then I am just absolutely shell shocked at the amount of work and the relative rate or quality of work that needs to be done. I now look at calculus textbooks with the same reference as someone with a clogged toilet
Nadine Strossen
and what's your question please?
Audience5
My primary point, what do you what do you think for students who have been through this process who have been let in on a lower bar? What can we do to go ahead and correctly address this issue? Because well, obviously it didn't work out that well for me.
Pat Kambhampati
I think this is exactly one of the dangerous points that that Heather had brought up, which is that if you let in people who cannot maintain this average standards, then they often end up not learning as much as they could. If for example, maybe instead of going to MIT, you went to another place and they don't expect you to drink from the firehose. So that's the point. Some of us are able to drink drink with a firehose and you should try to do that. But some of us cannot. As a case in points, I might be really interested in playing basketball, but I'm actually quite inept. So really, I shouldn't be going around playing basketball on the streets of New York City or whatever it might be. So by the same token, you should be able to do what you're reasonably good at and feel happy about that and run with it. That's all I would suggest. Don't try to be something you're not
Nadine Strossen
with the negative team like to comment.
Pamela Denise Long
Yeah, so feel for you in that situation. I was a high school student who really just had a lot of time thinking about how to get out of Mississippi. I had a great time in Chicago when I went up there, my GPA showed it and I didn't test that well and I still don't, I'm a pretty smart chick. I would have to agree with what Pat was saying about the idea that some of our students who perform lower on standardized testing and the like do have the actual capacity to succeed. How does one assess that is anyone in Dei, for example, looking at what happens with students and what is their personality profile other markers of success that better predict that? What I will also say is even though I kind of sucked in high school, and I really wasn't interested, I graduated with honors from my occupational therapy. program. There are a lot of things that I accomplished now that I'm pretty sure that people who saw me in high school are kind of surprised about or they're really championing my solid in you and I'm glad you finally saw it yourself. So I think the universities that choose to let students in because they saw something in them that they invited into the institution need to really have the capacity to support those students success and all the ways that matter.
Heather Mac Donald
I would just say racial preferences are pernicious. They are evil. They are putting blacks at a disadvantage and they are reaffirming stereotypes. Here's the data. Every single selective Law School has massive racial preferences, at least a standard deviation of difference. What happens after first year here's the data. This is nationwide. This is 10s of 1000s of data very brief, please how they're 51% of Black Law Students after the first year of law school end up at the bottom 10th of their class, compared to 5% of whites. Two thirds of Black Law Students ended up at the bottom fifth of their class. That is a way to reaffirm racial stereotypes not to break them up. And all this is is a an endless up up employment card for the DEI bureaucracy that comes in and says oh, the problem is racism, rather than racial preferences. It is a pernicious machine.
Nadine Strossen
Next question, please.
Audience6
Hi, my name is Soham. I have a question for Heather McDonald. I have a question about at some point you mentioned that the interventions should not be done in college for equity or for equality. It should be done earlier on, I believe, like interventions for making sure that there's diversity. Right educationally early intervention should happen early on, I believe, what What should these interventions be? Could you offer some specifics, please? And also specifics about where the funding for these interventions would come from?
Heather Mac Donald
Are you asking what are the early interventions that should be undertaken to close the skills gaps? Yes, I think the family can do more. I think there can be if everybody acted like Asians, we'd all be in Harvard, you know, there's the obsessive attention to academic achievement to parents monitoring that their kids are going to school that are they're taking their textbooks home. They're studying for exams, that would make a massive difference. Also, we should have schools that are high expectations, no excuses. We used to have those. This whole group of charter schools called No, no excuses schools that would be just obsessively in routinized regularized about teaching students the basic habits of accomplishment of deferred gratification. You walk quietly down a corridor, you do not beat up on your classmates you do not object to your teacher. Those parents have to sign contracts. One of the early proponents of this no excuses. philosophy was a charter school chain called KIPP and they had a motto that said, Work Hard, Be nice. A perfectly non offensive motto right? Wrong. They they retracted that after the George Floyd race riots because they said it was racist. So they feel that they can no longer expect conscientiousness from their students because that would be have disparate impact and be and be systemically racist. So I would say get rid of the KIPP mentality return to keep one and say we need to work on socialization that begins in the family but should continue in the schools, make no excuses do not have an idea that discipline has a disparate impact and therefore we got to get rid of student discipline. So you're leaving kids that are extremely disruptive in this classroom, because if you if you if you discipline them, you're gonna have a disparate impact on minority students, that those sorts of ideas, a whole disparate impact can see it has to go negative team
Nadine Strossen
would you like to comment?
Pamela Denise Long
Okay, I mean, you want yet no, no, I just, you want to go many
Karith Foster
things. I don't I know so many Asian students who are teetering on the verge of suicide and stress because of what their parents are doing to them and putting them through. It's It's horrific, and it's sad, and I get it's a cultural thing. I also, you know, I think of the disruptive children and I think of red dye 40 Which is something that most people don't know about, but it's an ingredient and a lot of foods that most parents have no clue, no idea. It changes my daughter, my beautiful, wonderful, hyper intelligent, super incredible daughter, from like Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde. There's so many elements that we just aren't considering when we're talking about why students are the way they are, why their behavior is the way they are. You know, they are allergies. There are so many things that we think, Oh, just solve it with Ritalin. They're disruptive because you know of their family life. There's so many things that we just do not know and don't take into consideration and to make a blanket assumption like that. I think that's I think it's incredibly unfortunate. That's the nicest thing I could say.
Nadine Strossen
Next question. Okay.
Audience7
Burma is like the demographic here excuse a lot older than the people living and working here overall. And so my question is, what do you see as some obstacles and some possible solutions for bringing more students and other young people into these conversations?
Nadine Strossen
Let's start with the negative thing this time.
Pamela Denise Long
I think from a very practical implementation perspective, I think the institutions who are sponsoring this who are pro pro free speech, reaching out in developing relationships and setting up clubs in high schools and middle schools, right, so children learn political orientation orientation, especially in today's climate pretty early on. So I think from a practical perspective, that's one of the things I think, as well. Adults are kind of afraid of being canceled and saying the wrong thing, children probably even more so being in middle school was tough enough than me having to decide like how I feel about merit versus equity, right. And so creating a space where we're having even conversations with our own children, about these very difficult topics, so they can develop their language, their own values around these types of things as well. And I'll stop
Karith Foster
there. It's just going to add to enroll younger people. We need to shift from the safe spaces, which I think are a horrible idea. I'll be very honest. You can feel that, you know, there's a space where you can be protected from ideas and thoughts. Like that's just as tragic. That's not what school is about, right? Let's have brave spaces, right where you can show up as your authentic self. But you can also be brave enough to hear ideas that are contradictory to your own and maybe get something out of it. And this idea that, you know, people aren't allowed to say something or it's going to be over your head forever. It's going to be put on social media, and you're not gonna get a job. I mean, we have terrified these poor children. And I just say children because they're not 25 yet their prefrontal cortex is not fully developed. Right? We've terrified them into silence. And guess what, we're gonna get adults who do the same exact thing.
Pat Kambhampati
I can very much agree with Garth on this point that may I call Paul, if I pronounced your name incorrectly. I'm sensitive to that as well. Now I think what is happening is we've created this culture of safe spaces and trigger warnings that we all have now discussed quite a bit, and that's harm children from the ability to speak freely and be brave, as Kurth has said, I think we should be able to do that. And the irony of it is, we all folks are the ones who don't get along with each other and can't talk to each other. Young folks are the ones who are supposed to be open minded in university and college talking you having all night bowl sessions. That doesn't happen anymore. I see it and undergraduates and PhD students that are afraid to say what they think you when you're young should be the most unafraid. So I don't know why you're watching. I know why you're so I'm afraid. I know why you're so afraid. It's this modern culture of safe spaces and trigger warnings and not offending someone. We shouldn't do that. Be brave.
Nadine Strossen
Next question.
Audience8
I wanted to ask so based on my understanding, as opposed to equality, which means equal outcomes, equity means more equal sorry, quality, that means more equal opportunities. Equity means more equal outcomes. On the other hand, inclusion means more people, and diversity means a greater variance of people, which I would assume would lead to more varying outcomes for people. So in your mind, one, is there a contradiction between equity and the diversity, diversity inclusion? If not, why not? And if there is a contradiction in your mind, how do you address that?
Pamela Denise Long
Yeah, so I definitely don't define equity as what you described. I find that hard to even wrap my mind around what I I'm not criticizing you quite as much as by the way but that's a common refrain in this conversation. I define equity more in the in keeping with the sort of dictionary. Sense of it the two ways one return on investment, accrued, return on benefit accrued from investment in a thing and being fair about that. Now, we can certainly parse fail, right? We could have a whole nother debate literally about what that means, but to me. equality means receipt of the going treatment, whatever that is, right. And I think in the United States, not just to reiterate it, I think that you can't get to a quality in the United States without delivering equity. To American Negroes. And so, and I know that sounds like I'm saying, other people are set apart from that. And that's exactly what I'm saying. And because of all the history that I outlined here, that doesn't change just because we don't like it because we're here, whether we're new here or we've been here we don't appreciate the history. It's just the reality that there's that stuff that I talked about accumulates. My child for example, her school district, was found in 2012, in the midst of a Kenyan American president to have discriminated against her on the basis of race her and other students. So don't talk to me about how racism is done in America. There are things that I can speak about that I have experienced across my professional life after I graduated college in particular, that would break me down to this very day and piss people off in this room and be ready 
to go get some folk. So don't talk to me about how racism is done. Because it is not and as an American Negro who comes from that lineage of people who were in chains, that is not something that I ever want to see continue to happen. Nor should you no matter what you think fair is or isn't that is grossly unfair for a move to Well,
+1
to go get some folk. So don't talk to me about how racism is done. Because it is not and as an American Negro who comes from that lineage of people who were in chains, that is not something that I ever want to see continue to happen. Nor should you no matter what you think fair is or isn't that is grossly unfair for a move to Well,