Academic Intolerance at Duke

This isn’t new, but we could not pass up a good article on a Duke professor who dissented from the Divinity School’s “diversity” programs. For this he was called a racist and told he would have taken away many of the perqs of his position.

Duke University Divinity School professor Paul Griffiths is the latest faculty member to fall victim to the taboo against speaking out against “progressive” beliefs. His thoughtcrime: daring to say that a “racial equity” seminar would be a waste of time.

Back on February 6, Anathea Portier-Young, another professor in the Divinity School, sent around to the entire faculty an email. It encouraged one and all to attend a program she favored. “On behalf of the Faculty Diversity and Inclusion Standing Committee,” she wrote, “I strongly urge you to participate in the Racial Equity Institute Phase I Training planned for March 4 and 5.” Attending it, she continued, would prove to be “transformative, powerful, and life-changing.”

The Racial Equity Institute is one of those organizations that capitalizes on the “progressive” notion that the U.S. remains a very racist nation and cannot progress unless we “develop tools to challenge patterns of power and grow equity.” Its guiding idea is that “Racism is a fierce, ever-present, challenging force…and dismantling it requires an equally fierce, consistent, committed effort.”

Americans should be free to advance those ideas. But they should be equally free to challenge and reject them. Professor Griffiths has learned that professors on our college campuses exercise the latter freedom at their peril.

Shortly after receiving that email from Portier-Young, he wrote and fired off an email of his own. “I exhort you not to attend this training,” he wrote. “There’ll be bromides, clichés, and amen-corner rah-rahs in plenty,” but the substance of the program would reflect “illiberal roots and totalitarian tendencies.” And drawing a link to the Soviet Union, Griffiths observed that “(re)trainings of intellectuals by bureaucrats and apparatchiks have a long and ignoble history.”

You can read both of the dueling emails here.

One professor says, “This will be good and you ought to attend,” while another says, “This will be a waste of time and you shouldn’t.” What’s the problem?

The problem, of course, is that leftist pieties about race (and other things) now hold privileged status, much as Marxist theory used to in the communist bloc. To paraphrase Orwell, “All speech is free, but some speech is more free than others.”

Professor Portier-Young was so incensed that she filed “harassment” charges against Griffiths with the Duke Office for Institutional Equity. Has our academic world fallen to the point where a professor who finds her ideas challenged would rather file a complaint than make a counter-argument? Sadly, yes.

Liberal “Diversity” at the Huffington Post

Notice anything about this @HuffingtonPost editors meeting? 💃💃💪🏼💪🏼 pic.twitter.com/7sg4SyraPa

— Liz Heron (@lheron) May 20, 2016

Pope Center: Why So Much Intolerance of Speech on College Campuses?

George Leef, of the Pope Center, discusses the familiar list of The 10 Worst Colleges for Free Speech: 2016, and then offers his analysis of the causes of the upsurge of intolerance:

New attacks on free speech occur almost daily, so there is no question but that FIRE will have many colleges and universities to consider when it compiles its list of the worst schools of 2016.

Why do we see such hostility to free speech on college campuses, though? Why the haste to silence or punish people just for having said something? Colleges have always been contentious places—remember the Vietnam era?—but things have dramatically changed in recent years.

One reason why is that mid-level university administrators now hold so much power to control speech and behavior through speech codes and anti-harassment policies. As GMU law professor Todd Zywicki explained in this article, those people seldom have any strong attachment to unfettered discussion, but do have a strong preference for a campus with as little turmoil as possible.

Another reason for the increasing hostility to free speech is that far more faculty members than in the past think that free speech is actually bad. Those people, found overwhelmingly in the humanities, social sciences, and especially all the rather new identity studies programs, see their mission as changing society far more than enlightening young minds and encouraging them to search for truth. For them, free speech that might cause students to question their deep beliefs is unwanted.

Finally, many students arrive on campus already dedicated to various social causes and are so certain of their righteousness that they regard anyone who disagrees as an evil person who deserves to be silenced. Instead of advocating academic freedom, they insist on “academic justice,” which means controlling what may be said on campus—as one Harvard student wanted.

Free speech won’t return to its vital position until our schools again teach students that the only civilized way to deal with people who disagree with you is through rational discourse, not through silencing or punishing them.

We have long pointed out that “diversity” initiatives, which often involve restricting speech, are a dandy way for administrators to expand their bureaucratic empires with more and more “diversity” bureaucrats. These bureaucrats, of course, have no commitment to robust debate and discussion, but are committed to making the campus comfortable for politically correct identity groups.

Add these bureaucrats to intolerant members of the faculty, and you have a really toxic brew.

The Racial Bean Counters

From Jeff Jacoby:

THE CENSUS BUREAU has begun rolling out state-by-state demographic data distilled from the 2010 Census. They include statistics on race and Hispanic origin that can be broken down with meticulous geographic precision. If you want to know how many African Americans live in Arkansas’s Benton School District (1,302), or whether Maryland’s white population has gone up or down since 2000 (down 0.9 percent), or which Vermont county has the most Hispanics (Chittenden, with 2,586), the Census Bureau can tell you. Spend a while with the census search engine, and you could be forgiven for thinking that the nation’s racial composition has never been defined with such pinpoint accuracy.

In fact, the nation’s racial composition has never been defined with less accuracy, and the margin of error is widening. Why? Because of the growing number of Americans like Michelle López-Mullins, who render the government’s racial categories meaningless or obsolete. The University of Maryland student was introduced last week in a New York Times story that illustrates the difficulties faced by the bean-counters in an increasingly post-racial society:

“The federal Department of Education would categorize Michelle López-Mullins -- a university student who is of Peruvian, Chinese, Irish, Shawnee, and Cherokee descent -- as ‘Hispanic,’” Susan Saulny’s story began. “But the National Center for Health Statistics, the government agency that tracks data on births and deaths, would pronounce her ‘Asian’ and ‘Hispanic.’ And what does Ms. López-Mullins’s birth certificate from the State of Maryland say? It doesn’t mention her race.

“Ms. López-Mullins, 20, usually marks ‘other’ on surveys these days. But when she filled out a census form last year, she chose Asian, Hispanic, Native American, and white.”

Though most Americans may still think of themselves as belonging to a single race, the multiracial population is surging. Racial boundaries are more permeable and easier to ignore than they have ever been before.

Today, one in seven new marriages -- 14.6 percent -- unites spouses of different races, according to the Pew Research Center. The interracial marriage rate has doubled since 1980, and is six times what it was in 1960. For some combinations, the rate of increase has been even more rapid. When Barack Obama was born in 1961, less than one new marriage in 1,000 was, like his parents’, that of a black person and a white person. “By 1980, that share had risen to about one in 150 new marriages,” Pew notes. “By 2008, it had risen to one in 60.”

Yet instead of shutting down the racial bean-counters, the government is giving them new powers. The Times reports that new Department of Education rules require any student who acknowledges any Hispanic ethnicity at all to be reported solely as “Hispanic” in federal filings. That doesn’t sit well with López-Mullins, whose Peruvian-Chinese-Irish-Shawnee-Cherokee family tree is considerably more diverse and interesting than the word “Hispanic” alone can possibly convey.

To be sure, some lobbies and grievance groups profit handsomely from aggravating racial distinctions. But most Americans have moved beyond the color-consciousness of generations past, and it’s time federal agencies did too.

The problem, and it’s a huge one, is that as American society is becoming more tolerant, more multi-racial and more diverse, a very large infrastructure exists to divide people and put them into categories. And people put into some politically correct victim category are supposed to nurse grievances against American society.

Thus, the bureaucrats and activists who talk most about “diversity” and “inclusion” have a vested interest in promoting social division.

And there are plenty of them at Marquette.

Academic Affirmative Action for Conservatives?

A former student or ours, a conservative, got the following e-mail:

You are invited to the

Harvard Kennedy School

GOP Recruiting Reception

Hosted by

Judy Kugel, Acting Dean of Students

The University Club

1135 Sixteenth Street, NW

Washington, DC

October 7, 2009

6:00 pm - 8:00 pm

Acting Dean of Students Judy Kugel will discuss Harvard Kennedy School’s degree programs, admissions procedures & updates from campus.

Please RSVP to dana_garfunkel@harvard.edu by September 30.

Mid-Career Master in Public Administration

The one-year Mid-Career Master in Public Administration (MC/MPA) is an intensive eight credit program, preceded by a one-month summer program exclusively for Mid-Career professionals. The MC/MPA is designed to increase the knowledge and skills of well established, high-performing professionals, who seek to enhance their public service careers or to move from the private sector to a leadership position in either the public or non-profit sectors.

These experienced professionals, in consultation with their advisers, plan individual academic programs designed to develop new skills or to pursue emerging professional and intellectual interests. In doing so, MC/MPA students are constrained only by the requirement to take at least one course in each of the Harvard Kennedy School foundational methodological areas of analytics, management and leadership. Not surprisingly, the MC/MPA program includes some of the school’s most accomplished students. They represent many professional backgrounds and come from across the United States and around the world. They typically range in age from thirty to the early sixties, but HKS has also graduated a septuagenarian. Mid-Career students make valuable contributions to the school’s intellectual community during their year at Harvard.

People who really believe in diversity, as opposed to those politically correct people who are always talking about “diversity,” will see some logic here. Academia is often stiflingly left/liberal and politically correct, and if there really is benefit in having different viewpoints represented, it’s conservatives who are in short supply.

Politically correct academic “diversity” hustlers, in contrast, want more blacks, Hispanics, and women in traditionally male fields, but they want them to think pretty the way they do, with the proviso that articulating racial grievances or gender grievances can be useful in intimidating people who might be inclined to argue with white male leftist professors.

Of course, affirmative action for conservatives has some of the same dangers as affirmative action for (say) blacks. Will people come to assume that conservatives in academic settings are not as well-qualified as liberals and leftists, just as they now assume that blacks in academic settings are not as qualified as whites? That’s a real danger, but of course it’s a danger that liberals and leftists blow off then applied to their favorite beneficiaries.

Perhaps this is simply a rather benign form of affirmative action, an attempt to let quite well-qualified conservatives know that they are welcome to apply. There are indeed plenty of well-qualified conservative policy wonks -- on congressional staffs, in conservative think tanks and interest groups, and even a few in academia (especially in economics departments). If they are welcome at the JFK school, that’s good. There is a clear tendency (which we have seen in our own students) for conservatives to self-select out of academia, which they view (rightly) as hostile territory. If the JFK school wants to appear less hostile, good for them.

More Diversity Follies in Chicago

Thomas Evoy has become, virtually, our regular correspondent on the absurdity that is Chicago city government, and he sends this along:

Here’s a fun story-one of the Cook County commissioners wants to ensure that the public prosocuter’s office is racially balanced:

Beavers slams hiring in prosecutor’s office

Never mind the competition from PC law firms, get out there and hire! And hire for a job that’s probably pretty unpopular with minority “victims,” being the man and putting it to the downtrodden!

I have to wonder what’s next. We’d like to hire the most qualified doctor, but were already over budget on whites, hispanics and asians so everyone who needs brain surgery will have to wait until we find a black brain surgeon who wants to work for low wages at County Hospital. Will we need racially balanced garbage crews, tree trimmers, sewer workers and road crews?

The Cook County commissioner who’s making that absurd demand is the same one who tried to get his daughter elected as a Chicago alderman to follow him-she lost to Mrs. Jesse Jackson Jr.

Apart from that, in the “bad timing” department one of the Illinois courts handed down a soverign immunity decsion yesterday in a case about a porch collapse two or three years ago. Not too unusual except for the timing with the bridge collapse: and also the disclosures (after the porch came down) that Chicago had hired the 19 year-old son of a politically connected carpenter as a building inspector (with the excuse that he knew about buildings as the son & grandson of carpenters) and that some porch inspections were taking something like 10 minutes for a three-story structure serving six apartments.

Here’s a little bit from the Sun-Times GOSSIP columnist that I didn’t see before: the term “Superblack” as well as the idea that his own kid is already pulling down $70k/year.

“The hitch: Beavers may have a point! Turns out his own son, David, landed a plum job in that office as a $70,000-a-year investigator and is among the highest-paid employees in the state’s attorney’s capital litigation program!”

Racial Discrimination in the Marquette Law School?

We just came across something that we should have noticed over a year ago. But we’re going to post it now, since it raises a recurring issue -- the claim that the Marquette Law School is “too white.”

In the wake of a directive from the American Bar Association -- which has become increasingly activist and politically correct -- that American law school enroll more blacks and other minorities and break state law if necessary to do it -- Marquette Law Professor Christine Hurt posted the following on the blog Concurring Opinions.

This week’s events (the promulgation of new rules by the ABA on diversity admissions, publication of David Bernstein’s op-ed, Affirmative Blackmail, and the ensuing blogospheric discussions) have prompted me to post on a topic that I have been ruminating about for some time: admissions. At the Glom last year, I blogged a series of advice posts (here, here, here and here) from information gleaned after my first year on admissions committee. This is my second year on that committee, and I have to admit that the shiny has worn off a bit for me. I wanted to be on the admissions committee because I wanted to find out why we had classes with low percentages of minority students. Surely there must be some subconscious, yet insidious discrimination creating this result. I was going to ferret out this bias and squash it like a bug.

Presumably, Professor Hurt is saying this for rhetorical effect. She could not possibly have believed her Law School colleagues are a bunch of racists, could she?

What I found was a problem that I couldn’t fix. The problem is math. Prof. Bernstein and Thom Lambert point out that the ABA’s new rules show that the ABA has a conscious disregard for the rule of law. I would add that the rules also show a conscious disregard for math. For schools like Marquette, in the middle of the rankings, with a small faculty, administration and budget, cold, hard numbers are our problem when it comes to increasing diversity. Putting aside debates as to whether affirmative action is good, bad, constitutional, unconstitutional or whatever, the most affirmative action-minded admissions committee has to make very difficult choices in an environment of scarcity. Scarcity of applicants; scarcity of dollars.

Marquette’s problem is not that we don’t admit minority candidates. The percentage of minority candidates in our “admit” pool is larger than the percentage of minority candidates in our “applicant” pool. In fact, the percentage of minority applicants who become admits is larger than the percentage of nonminority applicants who become admits. However, the yield on minority candidates in our “admit” pool is quite low. These candidates have a lot of other opportunities. We do what we can: phone calls, scholarships, letters, emails, dinners, etc. I soon found out that to say that we discriminate against minority candidates is to say that we discriminate against candidates with 170 LSATs. We don’t end up with a lot because we don’t start out with a lot. And, no matter how many 170 LSATs we admit, our yield on 170 LSATs is very low, similar to our yield on minority candidates. These people have other opportunities, and our recruiting activities don’t change that much. If we were ranked higher, our yield would be greater. If our yield were greater, we would be ranked higher. See how that works, ABA?

However, the ABA now says that we are required to do more than just work with what we have. We need to commit resources to increase the number of minority applicants in our applicant pool. For instance, we could have a dedicated diversity admissions person, we could recruit in person at historically black colleges, we could hold minority applicant fairs, and we could have more minority scholarships. At present, our admissions office has one assistant dean and one office administrator. To comply, we would need to basically double our admissions budget. And our scholarship pool.

I teach corporate law, so I follow the recent white-collar prosecutions. Bernard Ebbers was criticized, and eventually punished, for blithely telling subordinates to “hit the numbers” without regard to the consequences. The ABA is also blithely telling law schools to do something without regard to the realities of numbers. I understand that in some situations, schools may have money, time and resources that they don’t want to commit to a laudable goal and will not until forced to do so. However, my impression is that many schools like Marquette will be caught in the middle because they actually do not have unlimited money, time and resources.

Being willing to “commit the resources” is a euphemism for giving black (and perhaps Hispanic) students more generous scholarship offers to induce them to come to your school.

Of course, in academia, prestige is also an important currency.

Marquette’s Law School, which is hanging by its fingernails at the bottom of the second tier of the nation’s law schools, can’t compete terribly well here either.

When Harvard Law School admits minority students who aren’t as academically capable as the white students they admit, they are still going to have pretty good minority students.

But when minority students who should be at Madison go to Harvard, and minority students who should be at Marquette go to Madison, Marquette has to accept minority students who belong at schools low in the third tier or in the fourth tier.

Or else fail to meet some quota.

Ultimately, shuffling minority student populations around does little good, although it serves the career interests of university bureaucrats and makes politically correct faculty feel all warm and fuzzy.

Until minority students graduate from high school with the same qualifications as white students, “diversity” is never going to be anything but a cynical con game. And of course, the problems begin long before high school.