The Quote of the Week comes from the Tablet article below, which is worth reading in its entirety (and is free). It’s about how DEI is ruining universities.
But one quote particularly struck me because of its truth and concision, and it’s this one:
As direct forms of discrimination are now virtually nonexistent in academia, discrimination has been redefined as an invisible, structural form of bigotry that is suddenly everywhere. Like witchcraft, this form of prejudice cannot be observed directly. Rather, it manifests instead through unequal outcomes. Once justice was reformulated in terms of equality of results, it became untenable to insist on merit and the pursuit of truth; these values had to be abandoned or redefined, whenever they came into conflict with the new orthodoxy.
Click headline below to read the whole piece:
h/t: Anna
Indeed – the figure from Hermeticism is the demiurge.
It is Gnostic-Hermeticism.
IMHO this makes sense of an enormous amount of confusing things in the “news”.
BTW I like the idea of a Quote of the Week, or even day.
A close second: “[E]ntire departments—especially in the humanities and social sciences—have become populated by people selected less according to academic credentials and achievement than the thinly disguised quotas required by DEI.”
Instead of “people” I would have said “disgruntled theatre kids who were always picked last and belong on Ark Fleet Ship B not on the faculty of elite research universities.” But whatever. Great article.
Maybe I’m being overly pedantic but:
Direct discimination against the traditional targets (blacks, women) is now virtually nonexistent. But direct discrimination against new targets (whites, Asians, especially when male) is rampant.
The SFFA vs Harvard lawsuit documented this. The article itself documents this (“Only 21% of the 2024 Stanford class, and 34% of the 2024 Harvard class, are “white” … they make up more than 70% of the country”).
Jews, of course, have the honour of being the targets of discrimination both in the past and today.
But Coel you missed that “direct discrimination against new targets (whites, Asians, especially when male)” is a feature and not a bug of the new system (the university with a changed telos).
As Klainerman (the author of the Tablet piece) writes:
Yes, but of course they’re talking about blacks and Hispanics here.
Yes, it’s a good article, but the author’s view is that the decline of religious belief has left a gap that has been filled by the various forms of irrational belief that are infecting society at all levels. That may well be the case; but his conclusion is that “the goal is to arrive at forms of faith that are compatible with reason”.
That horse has bolted. We need to re-establish the benefits and virtues of reason, concentrating on the track record of the methodology of science, broadly construed, as our host has emphasised over so many years. Easier said than done; but it has to be done.
THAT part I don’t agree with. There are NO forms of faith compatible with reason, including DEI!
As I said to some friends about this, I think Klainerman’s diagnosis is right. I’m not sure I share his prescription: “The goal is to arrive at forms of faith that are compatible with reason, in which human dignity and hope for improvements in human flourishing make sense again.” Much depends on what he means by “faith”. I would reject straight-up religion, but I could get behind faith as human solidarity in the face of death and the absurdity of existence a la Camus. At the very least I think we need a lot less two-eyed seeing and epistemicide.
That last anti-materialist, pro-religion paragraph seemed like a bolt out of the blue. I’m all for getting rid of DEI, and merit based hiring etc… But not on board for a war against materialism.
“invisible, structural” is really important. The main feature of this new theory of discrimination is that it is unfalsifiable.
+1
+1
Aligning oneself with witch hunters should raise a question about the validity of one’s concerns.
Last month, in the UK, the Open University was found by an employment tribunal to have directly discriminated against criminology professor Jo Phoenix because of her gender-critical beliefs. Her claims for wrongful dismissal, post-employment victimisation, and post-employment harassment were also judged to be well founded.
I was in complete agreement with this essay until the call for “faith”, its critique of materialism and its assertion that morality rests upon some non-materialist foundation. It is the Tablet, after all.
As I said above, yes, I agree with you: the “faith” stuff is nonsensical.
In The Critic, Jo Bartosch chose “Islamophobia” as her word of the week: https://thecritic.co.uk/why-we-should-question-the-charge-of-islamophobia/
“Islamophobia is a word created by fascists, and used by cowards, to manipulate morons.”
Attributed, possibly incorrectly, to Christopher Hitchens.
Good article. “Islamophobia” used by muslims to avoid and condemn any criticism or discussion of the worlds most current violent, intolerant, misogynistic religion.
You could add, “destabilizing.”
True, I forgot that plus a few not suitable for print.
Good article. Thanks to Anna and Jerry for bringing it to our attention.
I disagree with the last part, that we have to find some religious faith that is compatible with reason. I don’t think this is feasible.
The trend is for universities to become divorced from the philosophy of liberalism (broadly speaking) of their host societies. At the same time universities are financially dependent on their host societies. Most of their expenses are paid by student tuition, taxpayer money, and donations from the rich, with the remainder being paid by investment income from university endowments (which themselves were built up by donations + the power of compound interest).
The only way to reverse the baleful trend is for the outside forces that supply most of the funding (taxpayers/politicians, students, donors) to excert strong countervailing influence. Universities by themselves will not reverse the trend.
One thing that is eye-catching in the Tablet piece:
This seems to even contradict the woke ideology. Help me out here! Should the compositions of the Stanford class and the Harvard class, by white/non-white, not parallel that of the host society (the USA)? Did the author get his numbers garbled (no hyperlinks are provided for these facts)?
Ultimately, and unfortunately not without doing a lot of damage, I think the DEI revolution will fail for reasons that are spelled out by philosopher Joseph Heath (University of Toronto):
The futility of arguing against identity politics. Nov 25, 2023, 2000 words [access is free]
https://josephheath.substack.com/p/the-futility-of-arguing-against-identity
His basic argument is that any group can play identity politics, any group can claim that things it doesn’t want to hear should not be allowed to be said because it endangers the group’s safety (words are violence), etc. Any group includes non-woke whites which far outnumber the wokes of all ethnic identities.
To quote from Heath’s piece:
In order to be effective in restoring values such as truth and merit, the author of this piece calls for a drastic, full-on attack against the intellectual foundation which makes DEI possible — which is (drum roll please) — ATHEISTIC MATERIALISM!
Oh. Alas, we’ve been here before …
I fail to understand how people who decry the religious mindset of “woke” thinking manage to believe that they can dispel the blind rigor and tendency to demonize others by substituting supernatural religion. The problem is NOT believing the mind comes from the brain. And a natural world is not one without meaning. This is old stuff, and shallow.
I admire the way the problem is explained, but the solution is a let down.
Ha, I should always scroll down to look for your comments before posting my own. Spot on as usual.
While individual merit should be “the only admissible criteria of selection for hiring and promotion,” measuring merit needs to change. To increase racial diversity, use merit indicators acknowledging the greater challenges minorities must overcome to achieve the merit levels of whites.
For instance, elite colleges are once again using standardized test scores. Lower scores in the context of a challenging socioeconomic high school means the student overcame greater challenges. Thus, this measure of merit has changed, resulting in increased minority admittance. Similarly, Black scientists face discrimination in published papers*, so meritorious citations for promotion should be lower. Other minorities (e.g., females) should receive the same attention to changed measures of merit.
All organizations, not just academia, are plagued with these outdated measures of merit. Changing the indicators of merit in the manners just illustrated will mean that bureaucratic DEI institutions can be eliminated.
(* Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01457-4)
I think you’re conflating merit with effort here. If you want to combine the two, that’s fine, but merit means only one thing: the ability to perform a job. Would you prefer to have a pilot or a surgeon who had lower merit than another but who had lower scores in med school or pilot testing? I wouldn’t. I would go on merit alone, regardless of where the person came from or who he is.
What you seem to be touting here is a new conception of merit whereby a student who had high ability would have less “merit” than a student who had lower ability but worked harder to get there. I don’t know about you, but I’d prefer a surgeon who scored high on med-school tests over one who scored lower but came from a difficult background.
In other words, you’re confecting a form of affirmative action designed to elevate those with less “merit” (lower scores) but came from a racial minority. What i see here is affirmative action, pure and simple
You’ve misunderstood. The ability to perform a job (merit) must be measured. Therefore, the measurement is the indicator of ability to perform a job.
If something other than a person’s ability to perform a job lowers that measurement (e.g., educational headwinds in a low SES school; overt discrimination in accepting papers for publication), then a lower measurement could still mean a high degree of certainty that the individual can perform the job as well or better than someone with a higher measurement.
I’m sorry but you seem badly confused. You say that if one person is less meritorious than another (“lowers that measurement”) then they should be ranked higher than someone with more merit b ecause they worked harder. Where does your “high degree of certainty” that someone who doesn’t do as good a job as another could actually do better “with a high degree of certainty”? How do you know that? How do you measure that? I’m sorry, but I see no reason other than to increase racial diversity to perform the kinds of evaluation that you do. And yes, it will do that. But I’ll still take a surgeon who performs better on the job to a surgeon who does worse on the job (“lowers that measurement”) but comes from a backgrounds with “headwinds.” ; You are suggesting affirmative action, which is okay if you admit it, but are achieving that by redefining “merit” to include “effort”. What matters is how well they do the job, not the greater effort they put in to do a worse job.
No need to reply; I’ve had my say in this discussion and you’ve had yours.
That student who might be very bright, but didn’t do so well on the entrance exam due to a lack or resources/hardships in their early life is going to struggle compared to students who did well on the exam. It is very difficult to catch up on what you missed due to hardships in your life, and also do a difficult current work load in a new and challenging environment. Might be better to offer the bright student a year or two of remedial studies before throwing them in the deep end.
The article you link to provides little evidence that black scientists actually face discrimination. As the woke usually do, it leaps straight from “there is an inequality” to “therefore there is discrimination”.
If, for example, papers from some country tend to be less well cited, well maybe that’s because the research from that country is (on average) less good. (Which can be for all sorts of reasons including lack of resources.)
To pick an example, in my field of science, papers from Russia tend to be less cited. That’s because they tend to be not very good.
It is just the latest instantiation of the “doctrine” of original sin (and further evidence that wokism is a religion). The point is not to list or demonstrate your opponents’ supposed sins, but to tar them with a brush wide enough (though, strangely, invisible) to encompass any sins with which you might wish to encumber them.
Inversion of organizations, where captured organizations switch to the opposite of their original function. It seems more common now, but perhaps I am just noticing it.
The border patrol now primarily works to facilitate the mass movement of unvetted foreigners into the country.
School counselors try to instill beliefs in happy, well adjusted kids that will inevitably lead to depression and premature sexual activity.
Legal systems that punish law abiding citizens and allow criminals to act with impunity.
Why wouldn’t educators follow suit and try to turn smart, mature and motivated kids into tantrum-throwing revolutionaries with no useful skills?
Outwardly, it looks like a bunch of people working tirelessly to destroy western civilization so that they can experience medieval life. I don’t think that is really the case, but instead they are hyper focused on one aspect of reality that they wish to change. And they are oblivious to larger connotations or the inevitable results of their actions.
My youngest is in a university where much of this garbage is going on. Not only are there regular mobs on campus hinting for Jews, social justice classes are required for everyone.
We are not Christians, but I still feel it is terribly wrong to force Christians to deny Christ or desecrate religious symbols to prove fealty to Caesar or whatever.
My kid has to write papers and make statements in class that demonstrate what is essentially faith in Marxism, even though he finds it repugnant.
Not only has he heard firsthand from his grandfather what it was like to be in a Chinese camp for political prisoners, he has read Marx, Mao, and much of the other source literature in the original languages.
And he understands it, unlike his professors, who have only a superficial knowledge of the subject, which they have never experienced yet adhere to religiously.
Logically if you accept that there is systemic discrimination there must be systemic victims of that discrimination.
Rewarding such systemic victims with a prepared excuse for bad behaviour, or other advantages over others, flows ‘naturally’ from such flawed reasoning.