Not too long ago, a large group of us published an article in Peter Singer’s Journal of Controversial Ideas, “In defense of merit in science“. The point was that both science and scientists should be judged by merit alone rather than by identity, equity, or other ideological considerations. To publicize the piece and defend it against the inevitable pushback, Anna Krylov and I also wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, “The ‘hurtful’ idea of scientific merit.” (I quite like that op-ed, by the way.)
Now our cudgels have been taken up by none other than respected journalist Fareed Zakaria, and at CNN, of all places! I’m flabbergasted! (Zakaria, by the way, identifies as a secular Muslim, violating my claim that the only religion that has a credible secular version is Judaism.)
Click below to read, or watch the six-minute video at the site:
After mentioning Professorgate in Congress and then giving statistics on the effects of wokeness—the continuing decline in respect for higher education and smaller proportion of high-school students going to classes—Zakaria decries the emphasis on “other agendas”, namely DEI ones, over emphasis on merit. In fact, as Zakaria recognizes, it is DEI itself that has led to the idea that Jews are at the top of the oppressor heap, leading to their unequal treatment in free-speech issues that became evident in the Congressional fracas. After all, it’s only when the Jews come under fire do many universities suddenly raise the flag of free speech. While it may be okay to call for gassing the Jews, it’s not okay to call for lynching African-Americans (I hasten to add that I consider both calls odious but still forms of allowable speech so long as they conform to the courts’ interpretation of the First Amendment).
Zakaria:
American universities have been neglecting excellence in order to pursue a variety of agendas — many of them clustered around diversity and inclusion. It started with the best of intentions. Colleges wanted to make sure young people of all backgrounds had access to higher education and felt comfortable on campus. But those good intentions have morphed into a dogmatic ideology and turned these universities into places where the pervasive goals are political and social engineering, not academic merit.
As the evidence produced for the recent Supreme Court case on affirmative action showed, universities have systematically downplayed the merit-based criteria for admissions in favor of racial quotas. Some universities’ response to this ruling seems to be that they will go further down this path, eliminating the requirement for any standardized test like the SAT. That move would allow them to take students with little reference to objective criteria. (Those who will suffer most will be bright students from poor backgrounds, who normally use tests like the SAT to demonstrate their qualifications.)
In the humanities, hiring for new academic positions now appears to center on the race and gender of the applicant, as well as the subject matter, which needs to be about marginalized groups. Based on conversations with dozens of academics, my impression is that today a White man studying the US presidency does not have a prayer of getting tenure at a major history department in America. Grade inflation in the humanities is rampant. At Yale College, the median grade is now an A. New subjects crop up that are really political agendas, not academic fields. You can now major in diversity, equity and inclusion at some colleges.
The ever-growing bureaucracy devoted to diversity, equity and inclusion naturally recommends that more time and energy be spent on these issues. The most obvious lack of diversity at universities, political diversity, which clearly affects their ability to analyze many issues, is not addressed, showing that these goals are not centrally related to achieving, building or sustaining excellence.
Out of this culture of diversity has grown the collection of ideas and practices that we have all now heard of — safe spaces, trigger warnings, and micro aggressions. As authors Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff have discussed, many of these colleges have instituted speech codes that make it a violation of university rules to say things that some groups might find offensive. Universities advise students not to speak, act, even dress in ways that might cause offense to minority groups.
I always considered CNN irredeemably woke, but this certainly is not that: it would be considered “hate speech” by many!
And this is the salient point, one that I hope people recognize:
With this culture of virtue signaling growing, the George Floyd protests erupted, and many universities latched on and issued statements, effectively aligning their institutions with these protests. By my memory, few took such steps even after 9/11 or during the Iraq War.
In this context, it is understandable that Jewish groups would wonder, why do safe spaces, micro aggressions, and hate speech not apply to us? If universities can take positions against free speech to make some groups feel safe, why not us? Having coddled so many student groups for so long, university administrators found themselves squirming, unable to explain why certain groups (Jews, Asians) don’t seem to count in these conversations.
Zakaria concludes, with Van Jones (watch the video), that “the point of college is to keep you physically safe but intellectually unsafe, to force you to confront ideas that you disagree with passionately.”
He then proffers gives a remedy, but it’s a bit weak on specifics:
What we saw in the House hearing this week was the inevitable result of decades of the politicization of universities. America’s top colleges are no longer seen as bastions of excellence but as partisan outfits, which means they will keep getting buffeted by these political storms as they emerge. They should abandon this long misadventure into politics, retrain their gaze on their core strengths and rebuild their reputations as centers of research and learning.
But what does that involve? Well, here are solutions I’ve given, and I add Zakaria’s call for more political and intellectual diversity (you don’t need DEI groups to produce that, and they couldn’t anyway):
a.) Colleges should adopt the two Chicago Principles of free expression and institutional neutrality—and enforce them.
b.) Colleges should spell out where First-Amendment freedom of speech ends (e.g., no violence, no obstruction of the University’s mission, and so on). That is, there should be clear “codes of conduct” that are compatible with the courts’ interpretation of free speech and with what universities are designed for: teaching, learning, and finding the truth. This may occasionally clip the wings of free speech very slightly, as when colleges enact bans on shouting down speakers. That’s legal in public but should be banned in colleges.
c.) And I add a new principle: dismantle all DEI bureaucracy at colleges. As far as I can see, it has done no good, sucked up a lot of time and money, and created a lot of bad stuff, setting student against student and group against group. Now that affirmative action is illegal, DEI no longer has a clear mission. Complaints of bias and harassment can be handled by the normal college procedures.
Great post! I agree with it completely.
Speaking of how DEI efforts at universities have sucked up a lot of time and money: Although I cannot pull out the specifics, I remember a Hili post here from a year or so ago that showed the budget for DEI administration at one of our major universities in Michigan (either Michigan State or University of Michigan). The annual budget was something like $70 million! Just for salaries. I expect their sports-ball budget would be more, but at least that gives a significant return on the area economy.
Mazel Tov!
Dismantle the DEI bureaucracy!
It’s an albatross around the necks of college administrators everywhere. No administrator really wants to have to genuflect to these authoritarians. No administrator wants to preside over lowering the quality of the education their universities provide. No administrator wants to provide reasons for its donors to stop giving. No administrator wants to have to deal with the lawsuits. No administrator wants to invest in a program that is bent on destroying one of civilizations greatest and most valuable institutions—our colleges and universities.
What is wrong with these administrators? The time is now to get rid of the entire DEI apparatus. Be a leader. Grow a backbone and everyone will thank you.
My hunch though is that it will be impossible to actually get rid of any of it any time soon, since once a bureaucracy is established, its bureaucrats will be effective at fighting their removal. For one, I doubt they can be fired for no good reason.
There would have to first be a very intense call for winding this system down. And it will only be wound down by slow retirements and maybe by reassignments.
I think this is right. But it is heartening to see that pushback on DEI is starting, even if only a tiny bit, to go more mainstream (and not just right wing). Maybe, I hope, it is the beginning of a societal course correction. But it’s going to be a long painful process.
From time to time I get a weird sensation of feeling shocked that we’ve gone so far down this bizarre road, and no, I haven’t been asleep for the past couple of decades. As an old school liberal (not a progressive), I am shaken by how the left once again has played into the hands of the right wing madness merchants. Between DEI and Palestine, the election is being gift wrapped for Trump.
Agree. Add in trans issues and schools overemphasizing the importance of racial identity and its as if the left is giftwrapping the election and handing it to the Republicans on a silver platter.
People can be fired for no good reason, Mark. Happens all the time in the real world. If the economic value you produce is less than your salary and opportunity cost of the space you take up, or if your employer thinks life would just be better without you, you’re gone. DEI is for brand enhancement of the university or the corporation. If DEI hurts the brand, poof! it vanishes like Dylan Mulvaney and whutzername from Penn.
School boards are a tougher nut to crack because they are totally controlled by activist Marxist unions who don’t care about brand and just want to queer the school system. DEI is their means to that end.
The only difficulty comes if you try to fire someone for a good, stated reason. Then you will have a lawsuit alleging:
1) the dismissal “for cause” wasn’t sufficiently grounded. “For cause” dismissals get you out of having to pay severance to truly execrable employees, or;
2) the reason for dismissal was a prohibited “human-rights” reason, like race, creed, sex, etc. etc. So just make sure you don’t fire people for those reasons. Even if you hired them for those reasons with great fanfare in the first place, the firing has to be plausibly deniable. So if all your DEI hires were angry black women, you have to fire them because they are angry.
Re this astonishing sentence: “School boards are a tougher nut to crack because they are totally controlled by activist Marxist unions who don’t care about brand and just want to queer the school system.”
That sweeping statement reads like self-parody, or a crude SNL-level parody of a right-wing position.. Maybe you have clear examples examples of “activist Marxist unions…” — you may have some at hand and perhaps you live in some strange place — but this is the good ol’ USA where school boards are & more likely to be under siege by right-wing cranks.
I interpret what you wrote as expressing real contempt for America’s overworked, underpaid, unappreciated teachers. Maybe I’m reactive on account of knowing teachers trying to maneuver, as a small example, a biology curriculum where evolution may be in the text, but it’s a no-no to teach. Even “change over time” is suspect.
Way off topic and it would be distasteful, I suppose, to consider such issues as active shooter drills and the full implications thereof.
”totally controlled by activist Marxist unions…” Bah! A joke! But again, maybe I’m wrong, wrong again. Are all unions by definition Marxist? Let me know — that’d set me in my place.
+1
GCM
Well, the cult of trans definitely smacks of cultural Marxism. There was the notorious case of a boy in Virginia who raped two girls at school, and the schools tried to cover the rapes up because he was wearing a skirt. The father of one of the victims erupted in anger at a school board meeting, was arrested and charged. The governor pardoned him.
There are elements of a corporate world in public universities now, but I don’t think whole divisions can be just pink-slipped because they are not profitable or whatever. There are existing unions and bye-law agreements that constrain what the different level can and cannot do, all the way to the top. I work at one.
Over 240,000 tech workers got laid off in the first 11 months of 2023 for profitability reasons.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/11/tech-layoffs-2023-list/
That doesn’t include all the 2022 layoffs.
What you describe is true for union shops, and that why unions exist.
Right, GordonC. In union shops, the company just goes bankrupt and/or gets nationalized because they can’t fire anyone.
Of course I’m being hyperbolic and so are you. Layoffs absolutely do occur in unionized workplaces (other than in the civil service) in order for the company to remain profitable and retain the right to exist. The only difference is that people are laid off according to seniority or other provisions laid out in the collective agreement, instead by how useful they are to the employer. Big companies like railways and manufacturers often lay off management folks first because they aren’t unionized and are less essential to production. The deadwood can be more easily targeted. But if no one is buying electric vehicles, the unionized workers on the factory floor are gone, too.
Whoa there. I don’t mean to speak for Leslie, he may indeed have “real contempt for America’s overworked, underpaid, unappreciated teachers” (though I doubt it). But Leslie does live in some strange place called “Canada” where it’s true that the people who run the school districts are members of or captured by unions that are devoted to critical social justice. We have fewer RWNJs besieging our schools, so the Marxists have had more or less free rein. This teacher ran a very successful false flag operation last year in which he trolled the pro-trans-rights school district he worked for by wearing hentai gear in the classroom. But otherwise there is little public pushback against woke extremists in our K-12 schools (or elsewhere, really).
https://www.reddit.com/r/canada/comments/xk3p08/ontario_transgender_teacher_sparks_controversy_by/
As a secular Muslim, Fareed Zacharia has been taking religious extremists of various religions to task for the almost 15 years I have watched him. He has had other secular Muslims on his program, so he is clearly not the only one.
I think the term “secular muslim” is adopted simply because it has a lower mortality rate than “apostate”!
Universities are not about education, they are about making money. Insurance companies are not about health or caring, they are about making money.
Yet people supposedly go to universities to get education rather than pay 4- or 5-digit tuition only to be ensnared in a reenactment of Soviet ideology and practice. And I suppose there is a government licensing body that can remove the university status of an institution that no longer provides education.