Azhir Mahmood  🚀 🤖 🧬 🧠 🪐

Academics at the listed Universities rub their hands with glee - #Validation. This practice is yet another dumpster fire, and yet Academics & their Universities play into this game - sigh https://twitter.com/shaft/status/1355696154990628864 …

And this thread explores more details on how "elite hiring practices" sustains anti-Black racism in tech...https://twitter.com/RealAbril/status/1354922397653065728?s=19 …

For the UK - we know that many of the "world leading" programmes are inherently racist, as their is a lower than expected proportion of our demographic mix from current & historically underrepresented groups - especially participation of Black people, we also feed into this…

But you know - sorting equality, diversity and inclusion - that's not a strategic objective that we take seriously… (Some of us do, but as a system and as individual Universities & research groups, do we really‽)

Being working-class BME & having graduated from a “world-class programmes”. I can confirm it is racist and there is a real lack of representation. OTOH, oxbridge STEM is significantly harder.. There’s a lack of uniformity across universities and degree programmes.

Not sure where the evidence is for OTOH: What's the comparitor? Is it "being harder" just because it's worse taught? Ultimately - what are we looking for in recruitment? The "Oxbridge or bust" culture in the UK is damaging.

The primary difficulty is a result of how marks and grades are assigned. (The workload is higher as well). Oxbridge degrees are graded using a non-linear function on a normal distribution. I.e some programmes require you to be in the top 60% to get a 2(I).

You’re also right that in oxbridge teaching isn’t great, there’s no support, there’s a lot of racism and BME/working-class students disproportionately underperform.