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Recently posted on the American Mathematical Society Blogs website:
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Not to alarm you, but I probably want you to quit your job, or at least take a demotion. Statistically speaking, you are probably taking up room that should go to someone else. If you are a white cis man (meaning you identify as male and you were assigned male at birth) you almost certainly should resign from your position of power. That’s right, please quit. Too difficult? Well, as a first step, at least get off your hiring committee, your curriculum committee, and make sure you’re replaced by a woman of color or trans person...
If you are on a hiring committee, and you are looking at applicants and you see a stellar white male applicant, think long and hard about whether your department needs another white man.
The writer recently received a PhD in mathematics from Princeton U. Her successful PhD thesis reads in part:
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Prologue:
Respected research math is dominated by men of a certain attitude. Even allowing for individual variation, there is still a tendency towards an oppressive atmosphere, which is carefully maintained and even championed by those who find it conducive to success. As any good grad student would do, I tried to fit in, mathematically. I absorbed the atmosphere and took attitudes to heart. I was miserable, and on the verge of failure. The problem was not individuals, but a system of self-preservation that, from the outside, feels like a long string of betrayals, some big, some small, perpetrated by your only support system. When I physically removed myself from the situation, I did not know where I was or what to do. First thought: FREEDOM!!!! Second thought: but what about the others like me, who don’t do math the “right way” but could still greatly contribute to the community? I combined those two thoughts and started from zero on my thesis. What resulted was a thesis written for those who do not feel that they are encouraged to be themselves.
This is a math professor who claims she doesn't like to talk about math.
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As a rule, I do not discuss math with mathematicians if I can at all avoid it. I would like to tell you why, but it’s complicated. You can never make assumptions about a marginalized person’s character based solely on behavior. Oppression creates behaviors that wouldn’t otherwise be there, and if you are not going through the same oppression, you can’t know how you would behave. People have made a lot of assumptions about me because of my actions with respect to math.
I must not like math. I must not like math enough. I don’t find math research interesting. Maybe I should be doing something else. It’s okay if it’s just too hard. It’s okay if academia is not for me...
I have this talk that I give and afterwards, I will often get concerned white men asking me what they can do to fight sexism. But they’re not really thinking about ending sexism. They’re thinking about progress. They want to know which benefits the cis male hoarders-of-power can offer to women so that we don’t feel so bad and complain so much and contribute to such dismal numbers. This is natural, reasonable even, but sexist all the same.
So, you're pretty much a filthy male pig dog no matter what you do.
This right here is the type of bountiful wisdom that only our finest colleges can turn out.
Reading your links, I had no idea mathematics had gone to the postmodernists... the world is heading toward a new dark age.
No! Once all the mathematicians have boobies, all the problems will be solved! Listen to the wise Princeton graduate. Our combined intellect is like that of insects compared to hers. The fault is clearly ours for lacking understanding of this complicated matter.
Looks like math is in the SJW crosshairs. Teach for America, which recruits Ivy Leaguers to spend a couple years after graduation teaching in poor neighborhoods, is developing a new math curriculum which includes this gem:
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“For centuries, mathematics has been used as a dehumanizing tool,” they write, citing the example of how IQ can be used against people who score in the lower half of the distribution.
There seems to be an effort to stigmatize higher level math because only people with high IQs can do it, and we all know IQ tests are racist. One of the commenters under Herron's essay calling for white men to quit math wrote:
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We need to decouple success in mathematics from IQ. IQ is a social construct that cishet white men devised that defines “intelligence” on the basis of culture. Sadly, there is a direct correlation between high IQ and “earning” a PhD in a STEM discipline, which is all too reflective of how white cishet men have designed disciplinary concepts to reinforce their own power structures. It is fundamentally unfair and marginalizing for IQ tests and mathematics curriculum to be designed around the same white supremacist, cisheteronormative standards, thus marginalizing women of color. What we need isn’t just “fair hiring;” we need a radical reconceptualization of mathematics in a decolonizing framework.
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