Sunday: Hili dialogue

35 thoughts on “Sunday: Hili dialogue”

1. Re the Cornell hiring issue, I note that the case was from 2020, and there is a good possibility that the preference for a ‘minority’ candidate was perfectly legal at that time, and was consistent with institutional values. Rufo is naive if he thinks that the Cornell case was not standard practice even that recently. My own university made numerous DEI hires up to that time, and so did virtually every R1 I know of.

   1. Barbara, I strongly suspect that you are wrong in thinking that “the preference for a ‘minority’ candidate was perfectly legal at that time.” You seem to be mixing up “this practice is widespread” with “this is legal.” If the Republicans in Congress manage to significantly reduce the staff at the US Internal Revenu Service (as Jerry mentions in today’s news digest) and then tax fraud becomes more widespread, does this fraud then become legal?

      Here’s Berkeley Law School dean Erwin Chemerinsky explaining how his institution secretly practices racial discrimination in faculty hiring. And the key point here obviously is him saying that racial discrimination has to be done secretly – presumably because it is illegal:

      What I mean by unstated affirmative action is, what if the college or university doesn’t tell anybody, doesn’t make any public statements but still wants to [engage in affirmative action]?
      I’ll give you an example from our law school, but if ever I’m deposed, I’m going to deny I said this to you. When we do faculty hiring, we’re quite conscious that diversity is important to us. And we say diversity is important. It’s fine to say that. But I’m very careful when we have a faculty appointments committee meeting. Anytime somebody says “You know, we should really prefer this candidate or this candidate because this person would add diversity.” Don’t say that! You can think it. You can vote it. But our discussions are not privileged. So don’t ever articulate that that’s what you’re doing. Well, that works more easily with regard to faculty hiring. With regard to student admissions it becomes more difficult because there’s a statistical measure. [He’s probably referring to SAT or ACT scores.]

      1. Matt Burgess: It’s Time to Stop the Double Talk about Diversity Hiring. Chronicle of Higher Education, May 31, 2024
         First, let’s admit that it’s happening
         https://archive.ph/EPUce

         Excerpts:
         By “diversity hiring,” I mean using demographic factors (usually race and gender, occasionally sexual orientation and gender identity) as pivotal criteria in hiring faculty members.

         An honest conversation about diversity hiring must start by acknowledging the basic fact that, whether we like it or not, diversity hiring has been happening on a large scale for the past decade (the period in which colleges shifted sharply to the left by many measures), especially in the years since the summer of 2020.

         When discussing this topic in academe or online, I often encounter people who will argue one minute that diversity hiring is good and we should do more of it, but who will the next minute angrily deny that it is happening. Colleges breed this kind of cognitive dissonance.
         Why all this double talk? My best guess is it’s a combination of three things.

         A second reason for all the double talk is that diversity hiring in the United States is often on shaky legal ground, and college leaders want to avoid calling attention to it. Today, critics of DEI statements think of the practice as a means of enforcing political orthodoxies and compelling speech. But DEI statements actually originated in the University of California system as a way to launder diversity hiring and get around antidiscrimination laws, by defining contributions to diversity as merit-based and thereby exempt them from Proposition 209 …

      2. My old fried Dean Chemerinsky made that comment in 2023, in the context of the controversy over the charge of racial discrimination in college admissions and the extension of the Supreme Court decision to hiring. Prior to that, Affirmative Action was understood to allow race to be considered in hiring, and it was not illegal. Institutional policies all over academia promoted “diversity” and whole offices were dedicated to making sure that it was handled in ways that were within the law.

         My point, which you have ignored, is that Rufo imagines that he has unearthed some shocking scheme to hire a ‘minority’ candidate for a faculty position, when this was commonplace in 2020. Indeed, the memo he quotes seems to me to be walking a tightrope between the APPEARANCE of racial discrimination and the FACT that the candidate in question was, as the original memo notes, the top choice among the candidates they had considered — at that time, the suggestion that she be the only candidate interviewed allowed the university to make an offer as a diversity hire, which I believe was perfectly legal at the time. The diversity office at my university certainly thought so.

         It reminded me of a comment on an article in the WaPo this morning that referred to the 3 “liberal” Supreme Court justices as the DEI appointees. That kind of insulting comment highlights one of Rufo’s apparent biases: no ‘minority’ candidate (or woman) will ever be hired or appointed to a position without being considered some kind of DEI, poor quality, low merit choice. (Sorry to rant — summer is here, we just got back from the beach, and my relaxing week is disrupted by this kind of news….!)

         1. Well, Justice Jackson did say she has no idea what a woman is, as she is not a biologist……

   2. Hiring based on race has been illegal in the US since the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The fact that lots of institutions were doing that to boost “diversity” doesn’t change that.

      1. Affirmative Action was hiring based on race, in practical terms, and was widespread up until the 2023 Supreme Court decision on college admissions — which many employers took to be a caution about continuing affirmative action hires. If a ‘majority’ candidate for a job in 2020 sued over the possibility that s/he had been subject to racial discrimination, they were free to do so, and might have prevailed — but there were few such actions.

   3. The hiring of Swanne Gordon at Cornell might be illegal but it wasn’t egregiously bad. She has a great publication record before and after 2020. The problematic part perhaps is that many of her papers are coauthored with her husband, who was also hired by Cornell at the same time presumably in the same search. So it can be hard to disentangle her contributions to that research from his contributions.

      The husband is a Latinx evolutionary ecologist. So it could be seen as a double diversity hire. Or maybe the husband counts as white, and thus the search eludes the criticism that it was conducted with racial animus. Hard to know. But whatever the criticisms of the process, one can’t really argue that Cornell was worse off for the outcome.

2. I don’t see how pulling our bases out of the Middle East is a good idea, on balance. It is at the very least a complex issue.
   Our presence lowers the threshold for taking timely action against more minor skirmishes such as the Houthi attacks against shipping in the area. Are we going to project force from across the world in response to one or two of those? I doubt it. Our presence also embodies a relationship with the host countries that would be eagerly replaced by Russia and China, to the extent that they can do so. When we do wish to project force, now flying over from a great distance, we can find ourselves having to negotiate around their effective airspace. That will definitely be an issue!

   1. From an operational standpoint, staging attacks out of the US is possible, but it a real war, it would dramatically limit the pace of attacks and increase the fatigue of aircrews (not to mention the fatigue of re-fueling plane crews). At the same time, although heavy bombers can do it, fighters and fighter-bombers cannot. Current US fighters have a range of only 800-900 miles (so 450 to the target and back). It would be impractical for many reasons to have air support for ground troops so far away. Not for nothing do we have large, expensive floating airbases that can travel around the world’s oceans. The reason that the Iran strike was so remarkable indicates why it is not a common practice in warfare.

      1. I think there are (or were) far more reasons to keep military bases in the area than there are reasons not to, but the balance of factors is indeed complex. I’m sure a big factor is to secure arrangements for oil imports, and I’d hope the host countries want us there in at least most cases. But I just looked it up and the US currently gets only 10-12% of its oil from Persian Gulf countries. We used to get 20%, not too long ago, and I suspect it was much higher farther back. That is why we have historically built so many bases there. Before the military build up, I doubt we would have such a heavy footprint in the area if we were getting only 10-12%.

         Besides entirely pulling out or staying in, we could consider if we can be just as effective in protecting our interests and those of our allies if we took out 20% of our presence, or 40% of our presence. But then again, what if our interests later increased? It would be much harder, politically and budget-wise, to build new bases than to maintain old ones. So I dunno.

         1. Sort of agree Mark, esp with the idea of even MORE bases.

            Can’t I disagree more with the whole “stop/quit the US overseas bases” argument.

            We’re paying those military people anyway and there is a differential between them being abroad vs at home for sure, but that differential is the price of FREE NAVIGATION and footprint of American power. (Verses other powers who COULD be running the world and the sea lanes). Well worth the cost in my view.

            A cop on the beat doesn’t prevent all crime but a lack of cops causes it.

            Re Qatar and Hamas. It is probably better they’re “represented” by Qataris we can deal with – and muscle – both ourselves and our GCC allies there (see the last decade) than have Hamas run about in Syria (where they were before Qatar), Iran or Turkey which we can’t seem to budge. (B/c Turkey is eff’d by a Islamist backwards Caliph/Sultan.)

            D.A.
            NYC

3. Add that Trump apparently hates all colleges and universities, not just Harvard. That’s what the Pell Grant cut is about.

   1. For sure. I presume it’s part of his goal of someday being thought the smartest guy in the roon.

4. As is well-known to every schoolboy, approximately half of all Americans pay no Federal taxes (pay none or have it all refunded). How on Earth could tax cuts not favor the wealthy? If we want to help the people who pay no taxes, we should eliminate withholding for people whose income history shows that they would wind up getting everything back.

   1. Do you mean income tax? There are a lot of other federal taxes.

      1. Yes, I meant income tax. Thanks.

5. A tax cut is not “showering largesse” on the cut-ees. The government isn’t “giving” them anything at all. It is just taking less from them than it did before. If someone is permitted by the grace and benevolence of the legislators merely to keep more of his own money, that’s not largesse at all.

   1. “A tax cut is not “showering largesse” on the cut-ees.”

      I beg to differ; it is, if the cut-ees are a select group(s).

   2. If my paycheck has less money withheld for any reason, it will sure look like a pay raise to me.

      1. If all your income is a paycheque you won’t see much effect from the tax cut. You aren’t meant to. Most of the income earned by taxpayers at the top is interest, dividends and, eventually, capital gains. The money comes to them directly and then every April 15 (or quarterly for instalments) they write a huge cheque to the IRS, bigger than most of us can even imagine. Under the tax cut, this cheque will be smaller. But there’s no money coming to them from the government. It just takes less.

         But if you insist on seeing a tax cut as a raise, see it from the view of your employer, who had to meet payroll and write your paycheque. To him, you’re not getting a raise, because the gross amount of the paycheque that he has to have money in the bank to cover the full amount (remittance to the IRS and net to you) is the same. Since he didn’t have to find money to “give” you a raise you didn’t do anything to deserve anyway, perhaps at next salary negotiation time you might accept a smaller gross salary that, with the tax cut, might still give you more money in your pocket than before. Or he might say, “Sorry, times are tight. All non-union salaries are being reduced by $1000 a year to reflect the $1000 windfall you all got from the tax cut.” There goes your “raise.”

         1. “…every April 15 (or quarterly for instalments) they write a huge cheque to the IRS, bigger than most of us can even imagine.”

            Unless they are Donald Trump, who bragged about paying no income tax, arguing that this is a sign of his being smart.

            https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trove-of-never-before-seen-records-reveal-how-the-wealthiest-avoid-income-tax

            1. Well, he and the other smart people won’t benefit from a tax cut, then, will they? A truly altruistic gesture to those rich people of pedestrian intellects who pay most of the taxes in all countries with progressive income tax systems.
               Q.E.D.

            2. Oh yes, the stolen IRS files that ProPublic then used to redefine the American tax code so as to foment rebellion against the oligarchs. The following is from The Tax Foundation but perhaps others have more reliable numbers or alternative perspectives.

               “The top 1% of income-tax filers provided 40.4% of the revenue in 2022, according to recently released IRS data. The top 10% of filers carried 72% of the tax burden. Self-styled progressives will never admit it, but U.S. income taxes are already highly progressive.

               … The top 1%: This group includes 1.5 million tax returns with adjusted gross incomes (AGI) above $663,000. These people made up 22.4% of the country’s total reported earnings, yet their share of income taxes paid was nearly double that at 40.4%. Their average federal tax rate was 26.1%. …. Add all this up, and the top quarter of earners reported 69.9% of all income in 2022 but paid 87.2% of all income taxes. 

               … First, these figures overstate the actual income-tax burden shouldered by the bottom 50%, because “refundable” credits paid to those with no tax liability are treated as spending and aren’t reflected in the IRS numbers. This means tens of millions of Americans have income-tax rates that are effectively negative—that is, they get what amounts to a welfare check from the government.

            3. I don’t disagree with anything that Leslie or Jackie writes here — my point was simply that the image of many wealthy people writing large checks to the IRS — bigger than most of us can even imagine — is not accurate for some wealthy people, and might not be accurate for most. But I will note that the argument that the wealthy pay a large percentage of the total tax revenues collected by the IRS, and therefore….. what?? — is not exactly a logical argument, but is simply one of several competing moral arguments. For much of the 20th century the wealthy paid an even greater percentage of their income in taxes, when a different moral calculus was used.

      2. The flip side of an apparent raise from lowered taxes is that services previously funded by tax revenue (a) need to be paid by affected individuals out of their pocket (their goes your raise!), or (b) fall out of reach for said individuals, or (c) are being dropped entirely.

         One might say (a) is “the American Way”, but consideration of e.g. European countries suggests that “socializing” the costs for government infrastructure and services leads to better outcomes societally in fields like health, crime, and education.

   3. Tangent thought:

      There’s a “meme” that goes:

      “I’m ready to know the truth”
      “Your house isn’t worth more – your money is worth less.”
      “[crying]”

6. I had a conversation last week with a man whose niece is about to finish her philosophy dissertation, with a focus on ethics. The niece hopes to stay in academia, and I’m told is not overly concerned because, as a female, she is given extra consideration in her field.

   This seems a ripe topic for an ethics philosopher.

7. Maybe they have a point on removing US bases from the Middle East. But that would create a power vacuum that would most likely be filled by Russia and China, which is not a good prospect.

8. Vinegaroon creepy crawly arachnid! I want one – or a tank full of them. I get all my exotic pet ideas at WEIT. Like that crazy anteater (the broom like one) a few months ago.
   WEIT is a wild and wooly place!

   D.A.
   NYC

9. There’s a guy on X (I think Anthony Bonato) who either coined or relayed this :

   “Everything in mathematics is trivial when you understand it.”

   I give that a 🎯

10. The cliche diversity (DEI) hire was Claudine Gay at Harvard. Her resume was rather thin (to say the least). She has a total of 6 publications and 215 citations. By contrast, the same source (ResearchGate) lists Larry Summers as having 174 publications and 38,114 citations. Her only qualifications were her sex and race.

11. Where could Trump’s face go on Mt. Rushmore?
    Well, I’m sure that there’s plenty of room on the other side of the peak. And he’d have it all to himself.

    1. I’d recommend putting a toilet at the base of the monument
       with Trump’s head sticking out.

    2. America can give him his Mt Rushmore moment now. Project his face to an on-site weather proof canvas. That way, he can change/tweek his image each month. For, as we are reminded, no portrait has ever done proper justice to Himself. Hell, even add one to his trading card superhero collection.

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