Diversity in Science: Where are the Data?

Thanks for this data, Persistence, on the limitations of diversity in science.

Along these lines?

This review of Stephen Marche’s book on The Literature of the Second Gilded Age makes several points about the role a college education plays in reifying hierarchies—and so brings Monica Mercado’s argument about the historical role of the east coast colleges up to the present. Some excerpts:

“The principal subject of mainstream literary fiction today is the way…the upper middle class lives now….The natural terrain of this struggle is college and life just after college…from leaving the bosom of an institution to finding a place in the world of markets and neighbors. This journey is often shared by the members of a clique, a group somewhere in between friends and an economic tribe….

Upper-middle-class cliques emerge from expensive places…. universities are natural subjects for the bourgeois novel of the moment because they have become expensive ways of replicating privilege, of falling in with the right sort of people, of learning the prerequisite social codes…College has essentially replaced the debutante ball and the presentation at court. The difference is that college is less honest about its motives. Hypocrisy and self-critique are reflex conditions, ways to outflank the brute materialism of the new economic reality….

[and/yet/but!] The novel has historically been the great enemy of snobbery. Openness to various forms, to various voices, to the cacophonic influx of impressions provided by industrial life, has been its triumph. The novel’s great advantage as an art form is its portability and cheapness. The novel goes everywhere; it belongs everywhere….The novel is, and always has been, a reflection of social upheaval.”

So stay tuned for more on the possibilities of genre!