Freaky shit, part two
I suspect the college sponsors worthless training programs in leadership, implicit bias, and other subjects. By worthless I mean these programs teach no valuable skills or information or ideas.
It’s unfair, I admit, to call these programs worthless based on mere suspicion. What do I really know about training programs? I was never trained. For the sake of fairness, the training programs should be given an opportunity to speak for themselves.
That is the purpose of today’s installment.
Date: Thursday, March 18, 2021 at 7:34 PM
To: Faculty-Announce
Subject: [Faculty-Announce] Cultivating the conditions to GROW at Pomona, An Invitation!Dear Colleagues,
We are returning to you with a renewed offer for deepening in building centered accountability with the Accountable History Network, which brought you the GROW series last month.
For those of you who expressed interest in attending the three-part series, but were unable, please join us for this six-session experience. We hope that this work can open up new questions and encourage the creation of new methods as we work to divest from structures that perpetuate violence. At the end of the last GROW session, we asked: How we can bring these emerging personal understandings into building collective accountability at Pomona? We’re excited to be able to offer a training for deepening into that work now!
Training to cultivate the conditions to grow:
What is it?
-This training will directly support the work of creating a community accountability plan at Pomona.
-We want you to leave this training with the skills to be able to recognize patterns that perpetuate violence and marginalization, and with the skills to identify where and how you can create change
-To do this, we will work deeply to understand core negative interaction patterns (CNIP), understand historical and relational context, and equip participants with the tools you will need when working through walls or barriers in the process of building collective accountability
-Together, we will guide group members through building an individual and collective set of tools for addressing barriers or walls to equity
Who is this for?
-Anyone at Pomona who has interest, time, and capacity to work on deepening your understanding and practice of how to build centered, collective, accountability.
-Anyone who wants to activate a critical understanding of history and patterns that perpetuate inequality and violence in the contexts in which you live and work.
Logistics
-Registration is limited! Please register at this link by Monday, March 22th, at 5 pm PST.
-Trainings will take place over 6 sessions, beginning the week of March 21st.
-Trainings will take place in a large group every two weeks.
-We will use a “buddy system” for you in the training to reflect and work during and in-between sessions (you’ll see a question on the registration form asking what spaces you feel most safe in which will help us pair you -- thank you so much to those who filled out the previous survey! The multiple choice option has been corrected in this survey)
-AHN will also support you in between meetings as you need
-Depending on interest, we will organize at least 1sessions with somatics practitioners to deepen the work of embodied practice.
Thank you for your time!
What is this?
“GROW” appears to be an acronym, but what do the letters stand for? Is the author inviting me to join a self-help program? A cult? A vampire army?
Who are the staff of the Accountable History Network? What are their credentials? Who trained them to administer this training? Can they show positive results from their training programs? What would count as a positive result?
(Maybe some of this information was communicated in an earlier email? No. If you look up the February email -- from the college’s diversity officer, announcing “a timely professional development opportunity” -- you will not find the names of any trainers, you will not learn what skills they think they can teach, and you will not learn the words that the letters in the acronym GROW stand for. If you search the internet, you might find the name Winter Rae Schneider, an Instagram page, and a Wordpress blog -- three nodes that appear to constitute the entire network. You might also observe that the name of the organization is uncertain: sometimes it is called “Accountability History Network.”)
In the announcement sent to the faculty list, you can sort of understand what the author is trying to say, but you might not be able to put your finger on a single intelligible line in the entire email.
“We are returning to you with a renewed offer for deepening in building centered accountability with the Accountable History Network.” Accountability -- is that a kind of thing that can be built and centered? Building -- is that a kind of activity that can be deepened, deepened in, or deepened into? What preposition goes with the verb “to deepen,” anyway?
Is the Accountable History Network a name for the guilty party that we are going to blame for some unidentified historical injury? Or is the Accountable History Network a name for an instrument of justice that presumes to hold me accountable? Is “collective accountability” a tool that assigns collective guilt for imputed historical wrongs on the basis of race or skin color? Also, I’m sorry, are we talking about human history or some other tradition (robots, vampires, or whatever) where historical wrongs are called “core negative interaction patterns (CNIP)”?
Years ago, when I first encountered this kind of language, my response was: this weak rhetoric could not possibly influence anyone, and no one could take this nonsense seriously. Now I see that I was wrong on both counts.
My second example is a symposium about training.
Institute for Inclusive Excellence Symposium, 2024
Ratcheting Equity
“We can only move forward”
More than half of all the students entering college intending to study STEM do not graduate with a STEM degree. The STEM completion gap is highly racialized. Compared to whites and Asians, persons who identify as Black, Indigenous, or Latine (“PEERs”) are only half as likely to complete the STEM bachelor’s degree (Asai, 2020). In studies that compare students with similar pre-college preparation -- e.g., high school math and science, families that value higher education, family income, and standardized test scores -- PEERs complete the STEM degree at a significantly lower rate than non-PEERs (e.g., Riegle-Crumb et al., 2019; Hatfield et al., 2022). Most alarming, the racialized STEM completion gap has not changed in three decades. It is time to shift our mindset from “fixing the students” to a focus on creating a more inclusive learning environment centered on equity (NASEM, 2023). Equity begets Inclusion begets lasting Diversity. We need to build ratchets for equity in science education (Baldomero Olivera) -- creating systems in which we can only move forward and not slide backwards. Ratchets for equity include learning the skills of equity and re-imagining the introductory science experience.
· Asai, D.J., 2020. Cell 181: 754-757. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2020.03.044
· Riegle-Crumb, C., B. King, and Y. Irizarry, 2019. Educational Researcher, 48(3): 133-144. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X19831006
· Hatfield, N., N. Brown, and C.M. Topaz, 2022, PNAS Nexus. https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgac167
· National Academies, 2023. Advancing Antiracism, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in STEMM Organizations: Beyond Broadening Participation. https://www.nationalacademies.org/our-work/advancing-anti-racism-diversity-equity-and-inclusion-in-stem-organizations-a-consensus-study
The author, David Asai of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, writes clearly enough when discussing a problem in science education: college students of different races complete degrees in the sciences at different rates. His language becomes vague, even redundant, when he discusses explanations and solutions. Now the data and citations vanish. Instead: “Equity begets Inclusion begets lasting Diversity.” Begets?
What is a “ratchet for equity”? Asai’s first example of a ratchet is “learning skills for equity,” in other words, equity training. It is unclear whether “skills” is supposed to refine the meaning of “ratchets.” His second example is “re-imagining the introductory science experience,” but he does not say what the new image of introductory science ought to be.
Asai proposes no criteria for judging success. The procedure of ratcheting equity will not end when college students of all races complete their science degrees at the same rates. It will not end even when all college students get perfect scores on their tests. Instead, “we can only move forward,” which is a formula for radicalization in organizations. (Michael Clune has written about this kind of radicalization in places like Pomona College, using a model borrowed from the WW2 historian Ian Kershaw: “working toward the Führer.”) No one knows the precise meaning of equity, but everyone can easily pick out the most equitable extreme, the step that goes furthest forward, in a given menu of options. No specific plan of action, no criteria for success, only continuous agitation in the service of the personified abstraction of Equity. And out of the stem of Equity, lasting Diversity in STEM.
Asai’s lecture was sponsored by the Institute for Inclusive Excellence at Pomona. The name of the institute is puzzling. Excellence isn’t supposed to be a meaningful category by itself; one can be excellent at cooking, piano, surgery, but one can’t be excellent at excellence. To make excellence itself a job description is exactly like the joke in The Simpsons where Homer receives an award for “outstanding achievement in the field of excellence” to trick him out of receiving compensation for a workplace injury.
The modifier “inclusive” is similarly puzzling, because excellence is supposed to be competitive. Not everyone can be the best at piano. One can improve with practice, and one can learn the difference between excellent piano and one’s own piano. And if no one is able to hear what is special about excellent piano playing, then the value of piano is severely diminished for all performers and listeners.
My suspicion that the college sponsors worthless training programs is based on the foregoing email announcements, and many others of a similar nature.