There is a whole paragraph answering this question:
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An uninitiated might be forgiven for not realizing that caste-based discrimination is rampant in India (yes, even among faculty members at IITs), and perhaps worse among Non-Resident Indians (NRIs). Therefore, there was always fear of what would a potential letter writer or someone on tenure evaluation committee think of me if they knew I belonged to OBC. It was the same fear that stopped me from mentioning anything about my caste in any of DEI statements that I prepared for the job search or tenure: I had to pretend not to know what it feels to be under-represented.
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>> There are at most five tenure-track faculty who belong to OBC category among all the faculty members in North America's "top" 50 CS departments
The full quote is:
>I think I can summarize the lack of representation with the help of a claim that I believe is true: There are at most five tenure-track faculty who belong to OBC category among all the faculty members in North America's "top" 50 CS departments. Any reasonable process to pick 50 CS departments should suffice. I will, of course, be overjoyed to be corrected.
So, this is a claim they believe is true and would be happy to be corrected. Please go ahead and correct them if you disagree.
>And then continues to show castes of faculty at IIT.
This is literally preceded by
>You might ask: What evidence do I have to support my claim?
So, to lay it out for you:
1) Hypothesis: There is discrimination against OBC in academia
2) Evidence: The near absence of OBC professors in IITs
3) Prediction: This probably affects OBCs outside India as well
I am Indian, from an IIT, and I have seen this kind of knee-jerk dismissal from higher-caste Indians against any claims of discrimination more times than I can count. I do not believe you are making a good-faith argument here.
If you're from IIT, you must be aware there is clear difference in the performance of those who come on quota(like oBC, SC, ST etc) and those without quota. If you extrapolate the same academic performance throughout the students career, and assuming for the incoming class of 1000 have to select 10 professor on the academic performance, who it's gonna be? The dude who came on quota or the dudes who were off the chart in the tests? Do you suggest we should also appoint professors and give grants based on the caste?
Are the Indians in NA somehow fundamentally different? It isn't like we've left the rest of our social/cultural practices and ills behind upon moving to the West. Thus it makes sense that if there's evidence of caste based discrimination at the highest levels of education in India, there is likely such discrimination in Indian communities in the West too.
One important difference is that Indo-Canadians make up about 5% of the Canadian population. It would be surprising if the higher caste subset of that 5% was capable of suppressing access to tenure-track positions across the board. Moreso if it's extended to NA, as the number is ~1.5% in the US. Less if I'm supposed to assume that people from India prefer to work for other Indians, or if Indians are overrepresented in CS academia positions.
I also tend to imagine that those in academia are considerably more likely than the general population to reject racism.
Knowing how those in positions of power can gate keep, yes, those higher caste Indians could easily block tenure. Especially since non-Indians propably cannot really spot the caste based component of those actions.
I'd like real numbers, but I've come across, a disproportionate number of people in interreligious, inter-ethnicity marriages, and presumably inter-caste marriages, except that I can't really tell one's caste unless they have a caste based lastname, and I know that name is associated with a caste.
I've heard of numerous cases where Indian-Americans didn't know their caste until they were asked about it by people not of Indian origin, who seemed to have the 4 caste + outcastes model in their heads, which barely maps to how caste is understood in modern India.
Yes. They are fundamentally different because they are a super minority and hence any kind of discrimination is unlikely to have any measurable impact.
For example imagine people who have tattoo on right hand discriminating against people who have tattoo on their left hand or people who are members of Libertarian party discriminating against members of green party.
1) Hypothesis: There is discrimination against OBC in academia
2) Evidence: The near absence of OBC professors in IITs
3) Prediction: This probably affects OBCs outside India as well
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I hope the author is not a STEM prof, because with that poor grasp of scientific method and statistics he wont be able to do justice to any subject that involves science. But of course I recognize that this is paraphrasing of the author and not author's precise argument.
When you take tiny slices of society where the people need to be in top 0.05% of their field, chances are there wont be uniform distribution of other social aspects in it such as race, caste, language, gender etc. I am not a statistician but this phenomenon is called non-ergodicity. I like to call it `Jew` effect.
> According to a May 1945 roster, Jews made up about two-thirds of the leadership in the Manhattan Project’s Theoretical Division (T-Division) — the group tasked with calculating critical mass and modeling implosions — which is still operating today as the only division with an uninterrupted history since Project Y.
Does this imply that the government was somehow discriminatory because there were not enough black people on the project leadership ? Perhaps project Manhattan needed a DEI department too ?
> 3) Prediction: This probably affects OBCs outside India as well
This is even more nonsensical. Outside India is mostly white and probably cant even spell Caste properly is obsessed with author's
dubious OBC identity ? How ? In my experience white people see all of us as brown people. They do no discriminate in their discrimination if at all they do it.
It is even easier to bust this sort of propaganda by finding counter examples. Look at areas where discrimination might cause major harm to the one discriminating.
Good example is politics:
Kamala Harris - who has some Indian blood is actually coming from "high caste" Tamil Brahmin.
Vivek Ramaswamy - again belongs to high caste Tamil Brahmin
Rep. Ro Khanna - Khatri caste (typically high caste)
Rep. Pramila Jaypal (maiden name Menon) belongs to higher caste Nair from Kerala.
Rep. Raja Krishnamooorthi - Tamil Brahmin.
Nikki Haley (real name Namrata Randhawa) - Jat (Royal/Warrior caste).
Let us look at Trump's appointments of federal judge appointments:
- Amul Thapar - Higher caste/Royal caste.
- Jagan Ranjan - Maithili Brahmin - high caste
- Raag Singhal - Warrior caste higher caste.
- Diane Gujrati - Trader caste - Medium caste (not OBC)
Lets look at other prominent judges in USA
- Moxilla Upadhyay the judge who warned trump - Higher caste Brahmin.
- Arun Subramanian - high caste.
- Sri Srinivasan - appointed by Obama. is an high caste Iyenger.
Unless both Trump and Obama administrations and their advisors such as Cato, Heritage, Soros etc. are all casteist engaging in a conspiracy to keep OBCs out of courts, it might be the case that Brahmins and Kshatriyas often tend to dominate the top academic fields.
PS Note: I have closely looked at IIT Bombay faculty recruitment for CSE department. The process is extremely rigorous and has far too many people involved. The person need to have impeccable academic record to begin with. We are pretty much talking about people who have consistently been top 0.05% of every damn exam in their life.
Yes, I think so. The evidence he's showing demonstrates the claim he made (within a reasonable level of accuracy given the data). The point is that the number of OBC professors is much smaller than you'd expect, ceteris paribus, and one likely explanation is caste discrimination in top-rated North American CS departments.
Risk of what ? Seems a bit exaggerating.
> There are at most five tenure-track faculty who belong to OBC category among all the faculty members in North America's "top" 50 CS departments
> What evidence do I have to support my claim?
And then continues to show castes of faculty at IIT.
Am I missing something here ?