64 Comments
User's avatar
weedom1's avatar

Breaking up any and all race based hiring cartels is a service to humanity.

aexeon's avatar

It's already illegal and they just do it anyway. It's too hard to prove and too risky for most people to challenge it. Even if this lawsuit is successful, the people responsible will likely not feel any effect. If you read it, it says this is actually the SECOND lawsuit against this department, first one was settled out of court which is basically a loss for SMU. Not only did nothing happen to the people responsible (not even a demotion), they kept on doing the same thing. A better solution would just eliminate the Civil Rights Act and make discrimination legal for whites as well.

weedom1's avatar

Eventually institutions respond to losses, and the legal landscape is changing a bit.

sr's avatar

In the private sector there is also very little transparency in any of the stack ranking that occurs so most of this slips under the radar. Things like hire-to-fire happen where they bring someone on as disposable in order to shield their ethnic favorites. Hire someone from the out-group, give them low visibility grunt work, then during layoffs say they are not meeting the bar.

Sage Alfields's avatar

No, the solution is to admit that the West is White and hire accordingly.

weedom1's avatar

How do you define White and how do you test for it?

Biggus Bangus's avatar

Consult the ancient texts(Nuremberg laws, 19th century physiognomy books)

weedom1's avatar

So it seems you can’t determine who is white.

Biggus Bangus's avatar

Yes you can. We’ve been doing it for hundreds of years.

weedom1's avatar

The basis of your ideas is worse than climate change “data”, because the racial mixing in Europe has gone on since prehistory.

DRB II's avatar

Perhaps the only comment in this thread worth consideration! Thank you BB!

Mitch's avatar

it's like pornography, you know it when you see it.

weedom1's avatar

Seems like you don’t regard it as OK.

Mitch's avatar

not at all, I was referring to the Jacobellis v. Ohio case regarding defining it legally, Justice Potter Stewart, in a concurrence, famously said, “I know it when I see it” to describe his threshold for “hard-core pornography”

weedom1's avatar

I know of your reference, but think it's an odd simile.

Racial characteristics are physical qualities that are not chosen. And there are innumerable racial mixtures. Most people are "mutts".

For example, the grandfather of the famous "white hispanic" George Zimmerman was Black.

Culture, morals and values are what matter the most.

Sage Alfields's avatar

I will decide it individually. Line 'em up and I'll work through em.

weedom1's avatar

What are the criteria for the decision and are you the single available tester?

Copernican's avatar

I disagree. The solution is for White people to start doing the same thing. We can't share egalitarianism with the world until after we've ensured our position at the top of the hierarchy.

weedom1's avatar

Wouldn’t egalitarianism undo the hierarchy?

Kathleen Lowrey's avatar

one of the things that is horrible but hugely entertaining about your work is the way that greediness is the fatal flaw. Be a nepotist, sure, but maybe DON'T give every department award to your son AND tank the tenure app of the handsome Chad East Asian who outperforms everybody in his faculty cohort

Be a crooked journal editor, sure, but don't pretend you are a co-author on dozens and dozens of papers published in your own journal and /or with authors who publish in your journal

I mean ideally don't be nepotistic or crooked. But if you must and you don't want to get caught, don't be so GREEDY when you do.

Copernican's avatar

Indians don't even give a shit about getting caught half the time it seems.

Mimzy Borogroves's avatar

This is a very interesting column because it illustrates on a small scale what is happening to our communities related to tribalism as practiced by other nations. I happen to be an SMU alumna from 50 years ago. I know in the past thirty years the push to diversify the faculty was strident and largely pushed by liberal factions within the Methodist church. In doing so, as typical of academia, SMU overreacted and the result was a new type of faculty bias. You see similar things happening in Richardson, where long time Chinese American groups that settled there in the 1970's are finding themselves displaced by newer residents from predominantly Muslim countries. The friction has been polite, so far, but there is still friction. SMU is going to have to tread lightly on this because right now UTD is attracting more of the Korean and Chinese American students. But the bottom line is Desai is a poor department head who is using tribalism as a means to maintaining control.

snakepilskin111's avatar

Hit the nail on the head Mimzy. Graduated a year ago. None of us ever really understood why SMU felt the need to chase it that hard. The result now is a very much bifurcated student body. The prevailing informal culture and external view is the 50% of students who are in greek life; the rest is what you see on official social media or media publication.

Blurtings and Blatherings's avatar

I hope Wang wins, and I even dare to hope this story gets picked up by legacy media. Not holding my breath though.

Christopher Brunet's avatar

I sent it to a bunch of Texas newspapers. I am hoping they cover it tomorrow

LH Fry's avatar

American immigration policy - importing conflicts from around the world…

Monica's avatar

And so it begins

John Hines's avatar

Hard to take this seriously. Worked at three fortune 100 companies where the Chinese were very aggressive about hiring only Chinese. They had their own break rooms (the foods, the volume of noise, the angry-sounding speech drove others away). At one, in an advanced product group, many of the documents were in Chinese so of course that was all Chinese. Why is this prof surprised when other groups would act the same way?

Kathleen Lowrey's avatar

Undergrad from Duke suggests to me that this guy is Chinese-American not Chinese from China.

John Hines's avatar

Interesting point. But, how many of the Indians he's complaining about are Indian-American? If he's a second or a third generation US born, its a good point. But, the Chinese and Indians software people (both gendrs) I worked with at ATT were very worried that their children would act like Americans instead of Indians living in America. Immigrant or first generation Chinese and Indians are both very tribe oriented.

snakepilskin111's avatar

Down there at SMU where I graduated last year, the little first-gen or second-gen Chinese or Indian students there were assimilated pretty well, because they had no choice. They were a small population in the student body... as a matter of fact, I met quite a few Chinese whose ancestors immigrated here over a century ago. Might have something to do with this school being a magnet for sons of businessmen the south, and the Chinese as we know are a commercial people. I'm afraid it's a different story in the Bay Area though, where there are enough of them to form their own cliques.

Peace Seller's avatar

To go one step further, I would check the ethnic group of the people who got tenure in the department. I would bet my small savings that they all belong to the same ethnicity (not Indian): Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Gujarati, etc.

Indians don’t hire Indians. Tamils hire Tamils, Bengalis hire Bengalis.

Actually, the easiest way to check if a place has been completely taken over or they are doing cost savings and/or DEI hiring is to check for that ( the White liberal dummies think that all Indians look alike).

It’s very surprising that India is still a single country, considering how each ethnicity hates the other to a degree that the western mind cannot comprehend.

snakepilskin111's avatar

At SMU's accounting department you'd be incorrect.

According to Claude:

Gauri Bhat — most likely Karnataka or Kashmiri

Neil Bhattacharya — Bengali

Hemang Desai — Gujarati

Towne Acres Football Trust's avatar

I tried calling professor desei at 214-768-3185. He hung up when I asked him if the accusations are true.

Norm Al's avatar

sample size of 2 is quite small for acceptance rate for him to make a statistical argument. This probably is not public, but it would be better to see the nationality of those rejected on the other two search committees. If the research status claims are true then this is insane. I see this a lot at my university when it comes to awarding graduate research grants. It is very easy to get on a good grant if you know someone of the same nationality.

Louis's avatar

It's anecdotal, but that "rate my processor" comment is pretty damning. I never see comments like that in student evals. The whole body of evidence together is very convincing even though the statistical evidence is weak. Considering the endorsements of his research come from full professors within the school willing to stick their necks out for this says a lot...it's says it's egregious, and those professors are mad. Mad enough to make life more difficult for themselves.

Zoroastrian Vulture's avatar

That comment is most likely from him

Kathleen Lowrey's avatar

I doubt it. He sounds smart enough not to do a petty anonymous review that could tank his career.

snakepilskin111's avatar

I took the Alternative Assets course two years ago, Desai's son was a smart guy. The Don Jackson associate (they're just TAs for the ALTS course) selections were entirely meritocratic, and the program is under the finance department so accounting professors had no input. Your going after him I think was unneeded.

Other than that your article was spot-on, all of us undergraduates in the business school always had some suspicion this was what was happening but never had proof. The indian accounting professors were always the worst. Nobody could understand a goddamn thing they ever said, we especially the finance kids just sucked it up because the courses were required.

JasonT's avatar

Can they all lose?

JF's avatar

FYI the SMU response link seems to be broken. Couldn’t find immediately on google

Dr. Mathew Maavak's avatar

I had submitted an article on this very issue to a major publication. One of the editors liked it but it was flagged by the legal team. Indians are digging their own holes everywhere.

Nicoletta Perego's avatar

Congratulations for this! 👏