![]() Unlike “the ideologically infested humanities, the road to mathematics was wide open to all, except to those who had ‘Jew’ written in their passports,” he explained. ![]() His story made me realize how important it is for professors to speak up when they disagree with campus orthodoxies.īarvinok began his academic career in 1980, enrolling in the math department of a university then named for the Stalin-era propagandist Andrei Zhdanov in the city then named Leningrad. What follows is his account of the life experiences that informed his opposition to DEI statements and helped motivate him to take a stand against their spread. No one knows more about what it feels like when the noble goal of social justice is invoked in ways that coerce and corrupt rather than improve, and I was curious how Barvinok would compare and contrast the different academic cultures he has experienced. “Even if one is required to say ‘I passionately believe that water would certainly wet us, as fire would certainly burn,’” he wrote in his resignation letter, “the routine affirmation of one’s beliefs as a precondition of making a living constitutes compelled speech and corrupts everyone who participates in the performance.”Īnytime an immigrant who experienced the Soviet Union frets about growing ideological coercion in the United States, I pay attention. Any coerced statement, he says, would trouble him as much. Do we really want our math departments to be populated by conformists?”Ĭonor Friedersdorf: The hypocrisy of mandatory diversity statementsīarvinok insists that it isn’t diversity to which he objects. This lived experience and also common sense convince me that only true conformists excel in this game. “As years went by, I observed the remarkable ease with which passionate communists turned first into passionate pro-Western liberals and then into passionate nationalists. “I grew up in the Soviet Union, where people had to affirm their fealty to ideals, and the leaders embodying those ideals, on a daily basis,” he told me. Painful experiences long ago convinced Barvinok that requirements to affirm any ideal are corrosive in academia. He regards these statements as a gravely concerning trend for his discipline, and he wanted to register some sort of protest against them. Earlier this year, he resigned his three-decade membership in the American Mathematical Society in a letter citing the group’s failure to oppose the growing number of job openings for mathematics faculty that require applicants to draft and submit a statement on diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI. Before immigrating to America from Russia as a young academic, Alexander Barvinok lived under a repressive regime that he experienced as “systemic absurdity.” He is now a tenured mathematics professor at the University of Michigan.
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