Category: Colleges acting badly

What’s the matter with American universities?

March 7, 2024 • 10:15 am

I was sent this article from The Economist (as usual, authors’ names aren’t given), and I’m not sure whether that site leans right or left.  Nor do I really care, except that people might tend to dismiss its argument and its data on political grounds. And, as usual, that would be a mistake.

The thesis here—and I’ll show data—is that American universities are going downhill in many ways: bigger bureaucracy, less respect from the public, grade inflation, lazier students, declining in world rankings, and so on. Some of these contentions are new to me, but the article does paint a picture of a system going downhill. I’ll show the data and the Economist‘s indictment below.

Click to read the headline, or find the article archived here.

Excerpts from the piece are indented.  First, their thesis:

But thoughtful insiders acknowledge that, for some years, elite universities, particularly those within the Ivy League, have grown detached from ordinary Americans, not to mention unmoored from their own academic and meritocratic values.

In theory, these difficulties could promote efforts to correct flaws that are holding back elite education in America. But they could also entrench them. “America’s great universities are losing the public’s trust,” warns Robert George, a legal scholar and philosopher at Princeton. “And it is not the public’s fault.”

This is accurate: other surveys show that public trust in American institutions of higher education is waning. And this despite the article’s claim that elite universities, at least, are getting richer and richer, both because tuition has risen so rapidly and because universities are now managing their endowments in a riskier manner. That new style of management has paid off since the stock market and real estate have boomed in recent years,

What this has done is created a two-tier system of universities: the “elite” ones, where everyone aspires to go, and the rest of the pack, which hasn’t changed that much:

All this has opened a chasm between America’s top-ranked colleges and the rest. A mere 20 universities own half of the $800bn in endowments that American institutions have accrued. The most selective ones can afford to splash a lot more money on students than the youngsters themselves are asked to cough up in tuition, which only makes admission to them more sought-after. Acceptance rates at the top dozen universities are one-third of what they were two decades ago (at most other institutions, rates are unchanged). Lately early-career salaries for people with in-demand degrees, such as computer science, have risen faster for graduates from the most prestigious universities than for everyone else. Higher education in America “is becoming a ladder in which the steps are farther apart”, reckons Craig Calhoun of Arizona State University.

Despite this, the reputation of elite universities has dropped, especially compared to Chinese ones, whose scholars are producing relatively highly-cited scientific papers. Two figures from the paper. These changes in research reputation are small, but they are all negative for the elite U.S. universities:

Same for highly-cited scientific papers; the Chinese are booming here while American papers are falling:

Now I don’t really care that much about whether other countries are doing okay or booming in scientific papers compared to the U.S., as science is a worldwide endeavor and, as I’ve said about this trend, “a rising tide lifts all boats.” But I care more about the reputation of elite universities, largely because I went to one for my Ph.D. and worked at one for 3 decades. I would care if the top American colleges stopped providing quality education, though maybe that’s just snobbery on my part. And of course the reduction in highly-cited papers is a side effect of a relative degeneration of quality education in the U.S.

But perhaps that’s just compared to China, and we’re doing as well as ever. But that doesn’t seem to be the case, either. Here are some of the factors that the article points out are dragging down our top universities.

Bloated bureacracy.  If you work at one of these schools, you’ll have noticed this:

As challenges from abroad multiply, America’s elite universities are squandering their support at home. Two trends in particular are widening rifts between town and gown. One is a decades-long expansion in the number of managers and other non-academic staff that universities employ. America’s best 50 colleges now have three times as many administrative and professional staff as faculty, according to a report by Paul Weinstein of the Progressive Policy Institute, a think-tank. Some of the increase responds to genuine need, such as extra work created by growing government regulation. A lot of it looks like bloat. These extra hands may be tying researchers in red tape and have doubtless inflated fees. The total published cost of attending Harvard (now nearly $80,000 annually for an undergraduate) has increased by 27% in real terms over two decades.

The next item explains much of the bloat:

The expansion of DEI initiatives. This is another thing you’ll have noticed if you work at an elite school.  But it’s happening pretty much everywhere. As you probably know, Florida just passed a law, largely in response to the Supreme Court’s banning race-based admission, getting rid of the DEI programs in state universities. In some places, like Michigan, the bloat—and salaries devoted to DEI—is stunning. DEI officials in Michigan colleges can earn more than $200,000 per year. From the article:

More often blamed are administrative teams dedicated to fostering “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” (dei). They have grown in size as the number of administrators of all kinds has increased. They have an interest in ensuring that everyone on campus is polite and friendly, but little to gain from defending vigorous debate. In theory they report to academic deans, says Steven Pinker, a psychologist at Harvard and a member of a faculty group committed to defending academic freedom; in practice they move laterally from university to university, bringing with them a culture that is entirely their own. Critics of dei departments insist these offices have helped soak campuses with unsophisticated “woke” ideologies that depict complex problems as simplistic battles.

Changing admission policies favoring equity over merit.  This itself may be changing, as in the last several weeks schools like Dartmouth and Brown have reinstated the use of standardized tests like the SAT as requirements for application. (In many places they became optional or were, as in California, not wanted at all.)  Reducing the importance of standardized tests was originally done to boost equity of minority groups, but that wasn’t often admitted by colleges; “holistic” admissions were simply said to be better judges of future success, and schools boasted that there was no tradeoff between merit and equity.. But this is not the case—SAT scores remain the best predictor of academic success as well as admission to good graduate schools. I’m hoping that the pendulum will swing back towards merit again, though I still favor a form of affirmative action: preferential admission of minorities when they are just as qualified as nonminority applicants. From the article:

In theory the Supreme Court’s decision to outlaw racial preferences last year should encourage posh universities to junk admissions practices that are even more irksome—such as favouring children of alumni. Instead many have made their admissions criteria even more opaque, potentially damaging universities’ meritocratic pretensions further. At the start of the pandemic, most stopped requiring applicants to supply scores from standardised tests. Now hard-to-evaluate measures such as the quality of personal statements are having to carry more weight. For some institutions that has proved unsatisfactory: in recent weeks Dartmouth and Yale announced that they will require standardised test scores from applicants once again. They are the first Ivies to do so.

Lowering of standards.  The article implies that students are getting lazier with time.  Over the three decades I taught here, I can’t really vouch for that, at least in undergraduate evolution class.  Because of my lack of experience in more than one class, I’ll just reproduce what the article says, though of course grade inflation everywhere is real and has been amply documented. Nowadays everyone gets As, which of course reduces the value of even calculating grade-point averages. (Putting the median grade in a course on students’ transcripts would help with this.)

Universities stand accused not just of tolerating small-mindedness among their students, but of perpetuating it. One theory holds that, if elite universities worked their students harder, they would have less time and energy to fight battles over campus speech. Between the 1960s and the early 2000s the number of hours a week that an average American student spent studying declined by around one third, notes Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank. Yet grades do not seem to have suffered. At Yale, the share of all grades marked “A” has risen from 67% in 2010 to around 80% in 2022; at Harvard it rose from 60% to 79%.

Boards of governance (trustees, etc.) have become too weak to enforce a climate of excellence. I know nothing personally about the University of Chicago’s Board of Trustees, but at least at Harvard the Board of Overseers’ spinelessness was a major factor in prolonging the kerfuffle about ex-President Claudine Gay. The Overseers first denied charges of plagiarism, threatened the New York Post for trying to publish those allegations, continued to deny them, and then, after the outcry—largely prompted by Bill Ackman—grew too loud, finally asked Gay to resign. Further, the Harvard Overseeers, who are nearly wholly responsible for putting in place policies like freedom of expression and institutional neutrality, have done almost nothing on this account. In the Boston Globe, Steve Pinker called for Harvard to reform itself in five areas, and there’s now a group of professors at Harvard to apply pressure on the administration to behave properly. Fingers crossed.

From the article:

University boards appear especially weak. They have not grown much more professional or effective, even as the wealth and fame of their institutions has soared. Many are oversized. Prestigious private colleges commonly have at least 30 trustees; a few have 50 or more. It is not easy to coax a board of that size into focused strategic discussions. It also limits how far each trustee feels personally responsible for an institution’s success.

Furthermore, trusteeships are often distributed as a reward for donations, rather than to people with the time and commitment required to provide proper oversight. Universities generally manage to snag people with useful experience outside academia. But many trustees prefer not to rock the boat; some are hoping that their service will grant children or grandchildren a powerful trump card when it comes to seeking admission. Too many see their job as merely “cheerleading, cheque-writing and attendance at football games”, says Michael Poliakoff of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, an organisation that lobbies for governance reform. And at many private universities the way in which new trustees are appointed involves cosying up to current ones or to university authorities. Outsiders can struggle to be picked at all.

There’s a lack of political balance on faculties. Everyone knows that university faculties are almost completely on the Left side of the political spectrum. Look at this plot:

And it’s even more skewed at elite universities:

A second trend is the gradual evaporation of conservatives from the academy. Surveys carried out by researchers at ucla suggest that the share of faculty who place themselves on the political left rose from 40% in 1990 to about 60% in 2017—a period during which party affiliation among the public barely changed (see chart 3). The ratios are vastly more skewed at many of America’s most elite colleges. A survey carried out last May by the Crimson, Harvard’s student newspaper, found that less than 3% of faculty there would describe themselves as conservative; 75% called themselves liberal.

One possible reason is that the definition of “liberal” has changed: that American politics in general have become more right wing, so that more centrist professors will now identify themselves as being far left or liberal. But I don’t think that’s true. Further, the article claims that conservatives have been forced out of academia or aren’t even being hired in the first place.  I don’t know the reason, but it is true that at least in elite universities, there is groupthink that demonizes conservatives. (Remember how Judge Duncan was treated at Stanford Law School?)

But I still think schools would benefit from increasing the diversity of political opinions, because sometimes conservatives have some good arguments, and at any rate without opposition from the other side, liberals have no way to test or hone their ideas. I would personally would benefit from more conservatives in my school, even though I identify as a classical liberal.

Given these problems, the solution is clear; do the opposite of what’s causing them. Pare down DEI, get better boards of trustees, put more emphasis on merit in admissions, require students to do more, somehow curb grade inflation (that seems nearly impossible to me!), hire more conservatives, and inculcate students with more information about free speech (we’re doing that here; see below). The return to an emphasis on merit seems to me the most important, but of course “progressives” define merit in ways that differ from how the term was used historically.

Here are a few suggestions in two paragraphs, with both Lukianoff and Ginsburg (head of the University of Chicago’s Forum to promulgate free expression) being liberals.

Better for universities to heal themselves. Smaller, more democratically selected boards would provide better oversight. More meritocratic admissions would improve universities’ standing. Greg Lukianoff of fire wants to see campuses stripped of bureaucrats “whose main job is to police speech”. Instead universities should invest in programmes teaching the importance of free and open debate, argues Tom Ginsburg of the University of Chicago, who runs a forum designed to do just that: “If your ideas aren’t subjected to rigorous scrutiny, they’re not going to be as good,” he explains.

Reformers would also like more people in the political centre, and on the right, to make careers in academia. No one thinks this will happen quickly. But college bosses could start by making it clear that they will defend the unorthodox thinkers they already have on their payrolls, reckons Jim Applegate, who runs a faculty group at Columbia University that aims to promote academic freedom. They could discourage departments from forcing job applicants to submit statements outlining their dei approach (one study a few years ago suggested this was a condition for a fifth of all university jobs, and more than 30% at elite colleges). Lately these have looked less like honest ways of spotting capable candidates and more like tests of ideology.

h/t: Jean

Quote of the Week

February 29, 2024 • 12:30 pm

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

Larry Summers on Harvard, AI, and other things

February 28, 2024 • 10:15 am

Here’s a longish discussion from Persuasion between Yascha Mounk and Larry Summers. Mounk is a political scientist and author whom you’ll encounter frequently in the liberal media, while Summer was, of course. . . . . well, let’s let Wikipedia summarize it:

[Summers is] an American economist who served as the 71st United States Secretary of the Treasury from 1999 to 2001 and as director of the National Economic Council from 2009 to 2010. He also served as president of Harvard University from 2001 to 2006, where he is the Charles W. Eliot University Professor and director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at Harvard Kennedy School.  In November 2023, Summers joined the board of directors of artificial general intelligence company OpenAI.

In my estimation, Summers was a very good President, though he did attract controversy. The most infamous incident during his tenure at Harvard was his claim, during a closed conference on diversity in science and engineering, that underrepresentation of women in STEM was due to a difference between men and women in the variance in ability in these fields. Although the means (average abilities) were about the same, the variance in ability means that there are more men than women at both tails of the distribution: the “low ability” tail and the “high ability” tail. Since academics and other scientists are drawn from the upper tail, Summers posited that this difference in variation (but not in means) explained the difference in sex representation in STEM.  (I would also suggest that there may be a sex difference in preferences.)

The evidence is, in fact, in favor of this theory for at least a partial cause of sex inequities, so Summers may have been right. But his mere suggestion that the inequities in sex representation may not have been due to bias was enough to ignite a conflagration among the Harvard faculty, and ultimately resulted in Summers being forced to resign. And this simply for noting that while on average men and women have about the same average ability in STEM, it is the difference in the variance of that distribution—a sex difference in variance seen in several other traits—that led to the outrage.  In my view, firing Summers for this was a mistake, and was a loss for Harvard.

At any rate, in this interview Summers talks about the problems with Harvard, with elite universities in general, and then goes on to discuss AI, finishing with a brief suggestion about how Biden could be reelected. I am not a big maven or student of AI, though I will of course use it when it’s useful, but I’ll skip that part and just quote the discussion about universities. Bits from the discussion are indented, and any comments of mine are flush left. As always, Summers doesn’t pull any punches.

The ruination of universities by “identity essentialism”.

Yascha Mounk: The last few months have been rather eventful at Harvard University. Tell us your view of what has happened and why it matters.

Larry Summers: It’s been a very difficult time. I think what universities do is as important as the work of any other institution in our society, in terms of training young people and preparing them for careers of leadership, and in terms of developing new ideas that set the tone for the cultural, the political, the policy debates that go forward.

Paul Samuelson famously said that if he would be allowed to write the economics textbooks, he didn’t care who would get to perform as the finance ministers going forward. So I think what happens in universities is immensely important. And I think there is a widespread sense—and it is, I think, unfortunately, with considerable validity—that many of our leading universities have lost their way; that values that one associated as central to universities—excellence, truth, integrity, opportunity—have come to seem like secondary values relative to the pursuit of certain concepts of social justice, the veneration of certain concepts of identity, the primacy of feeling over analysis, and the elevation of subjective perspective. And that has led to clashes within universities and, more importantly, an enormous estrangement between universities and the broader society.

This, of course, refers to the eternal struggle among academics involving identity (or “diversity”) versus merit.

It goes on:

Mounk: Tell us a little bit more about the nature of the conflict here. What is the conception of the university that has historically guided it, and how is it that those values have changed over the last ten years?

Summers: I think the values that animated me to spend my life in universities were values of excellence in thought, in pursuit of truth. We’re never going to find some ultimate perfect truth, but through argument, analysis, discussion, and study we can get closer to truth. And a world that is better understood is a world that is made better. And I think, increasingly, all you have to do is read the rhetoric of commencement speeches. It’s no longer what we talk about. We talk about how we should have analysis, we should have discussion, but the result of that is that we will each have more respect for each other’s point of view, as if all points of view are equally good and there’s a kind of arbitrariness to a conception of truth. That’s a kind of return to pre-Enlightenment values and I think very much a step backward. I thought of the goal of the way universities manage themselves as being the creation of an ever larger circle of opportunity in support of as much merit and as much excellence as possible.

I spoke in my inaugural address about how, a century before, Harvard had been a place where New England gentlemen taught other New England gentlemen. And today it was so much better because it reached to every corner of the nation, every subgroup within the population, every part of the world. It did that as a vehicle for providing opportunity and excellence for those who could make the greatest contribution. But again, we’ve moved away from that to an idea of identity essentialism, the supposition that somehow the conditions of your birth determine your views on intellectual questions, whether it’s interpretations of quantum theory or Shakespeare. And so that, instead, our purpose is not to bring together the greatest minds, but is back to some idea around multiplicity of perspective with perspective being identified with identity. We used to venerate and celebrate excellence. Now, at Harvard, and Harvard is not atypical of leading universities, 70 to 75% of the grades are in A-range. Why should the institutions that are most celebrating of excellence have only one grade for everyone in the top half of the class, but nine different grades that are applied to students in the lower half of the class? That is a step away from celebrating and venerating excellence.

Summers expatiates on the debacle of the Presidents of MIT, Harvard, and Penn testifying before a House committee, and notes, as I’ve emphasized, that what brought the Presidents down was not the hectoring of Elis Stefaniks or outrage about people being allowed to call for mass killing of Jews, but the arrant hypocrisy of these schools in their attitudes toward free speech (see below).  In the end, it looked as if demonizing Jews was the only form of free speech acceptable at Harvard, while other and more trivial issues were censored and censured.  Summers notes this below, and the commitment of elite schools to Social Justice and identity politics, led him to say that “. . . the fact that the ways in which great universities have acted have so enabled the Elise Stefaniks, the Bill Ackmans, and the Christopher Rufos, speaks to the danger with which they have been governed.”

Summers on free speech and Harvard’s double standard:

Summers: I think you and I are very much in agreement. I don’t think any reasonable person can fail to recognize a massive double standard between the response to other forms of prejudice and the response to anti-Semitism. And yes, you could have debates about when anti-Zionism or the demonization of Israel is and is not anti-Semitism. But on any reasonable conception of what’s going on, there has been a double standard. And I think those of us who are concerned about the double standard come to a view about how we want it remedied. And I think for the most part, the right way of remedying it is with a de-emphasis rather than a re-emphasis on identity.

Everyone needs to be enabled to feel safe. That doesn’t mean that they have a right to avoid being triggered by speech they don’t like, or to be spared exposure to ideas they find noxious. That doesn’t mean they have a right to bean-counting exercises where the share of members of their group is evaluated against a share of its population. It does mean that they’re entitled to the maintenance of an open and tolerant community where no one is allowed to shut down any set of ideas, that they have the right to be protected from discrimination, and that they have the right for there not to be indoctrination. I think in many ways what would be most problematic would be an indoctrination arms race in which a larger and larger fraction of an education is consumed by a recitation of the grievances of various groups.

In the second paragraph he’s touting equality over equity: equality of opportunity over “bean-counting exercises” (it’s this kind of metaphor that I would have avoided, as it equates university policy to “bean counting”, a phrase with bad optics (or “bad auditory”). But having equity as a goal, especially while maintaining that it’s perfectly consistent with keeping merit high, is a flawed exercise.

The stuff on AI will interest many readers, but I’ll let those folks read it themselves, and just finish with Summers’ response when asked what Biden and the Democrats could do to ensure that Trump doesn’t win in November.  His answer is somewhat lame, but of course he admits he’s not a political pundit but an economist:

I tend to find political experts’ opinions on economic questions to not be very sound and thoughtful. And I’m not sure why I should suppose that my opinions on political questions will be particularly sound and thoughtful. So I answer the question with humility. But my instinct is that political parties prevail and incumbent presidents prevail by returning to a broad American center. And I am hopeful that Joe Biden, whose roots are with an American middle class, will find a broad expressive American voice in the months ahead that will place less emphasis on responding to each particular identity element in the Democratic bouillabaisse and instead speak to the hopes, the obligations, the expectations of all Americans in a universalist kind of language. I think that he has styled himself over many years as “middle class Joe,” and that’s something that goes deep within him.

My hope and my best guess is that we will see that come out and that as it comes out and as the clamor of the various activist groups within the party comes to seem less dominant, he will emerge as a unifier and as a successful candidate. But again, I answer economics questions with confidence and political questions with trepidation.

I agree that Biden has become much more woke than I envisioned when he took office, and he’s been leaning more towards “progressive” Democrats than I hope.  Further, his wokeness will, I suspect, hurt him in the election, and I now think he’s got a better than even chance of losing. Given that many Americans (about 75%, I think) worry that he’s not physically or mentally fit to be President, while the same figure for Trump is about 46%, it seems that all Biden can do is get younger.

Harvard tries to make up for accusations of antisemitism

February 21, 2024 • 9:30 am

You’ll remember that Claudine Gay, the ex-President of Harvard, was grilled, along with the Presidents of MIT and Penn, in a House hearing on antisemitism. And all three Presidents were correct in saying that, if they applied the First Amendment on their campuses, calling for the genocide of Jews would often be considered free speech, but in some situations it wouldn’t. (One example of impermissible speech would be shouting “Gas the Jews” in front of a crowd of Jews if it would lead to predictable “imminent lawless action.)

Nevertheless, the professors were damned by the largely Republican panel—mainly because they spoke the truth, but there were two problems. First, the campuses didn’t explicitly have a speech code that comported with the First Amendment (they’re all private schools, too, so they aren’t required to). Further, they applied what speech codes they had unevenly, punishing much less serious offenses. In other words they were guilty of speech hypocrisy.

After the House debacle, Penn President Liz Magill resigned, while Gay, desperate to make amends, issued two statements plus a video explanation and apology.  That might have saved her job, but in the end she was brought down by numerous and credible examples of plagiarism in her scholarly work. An interim President, Alan Garber, was appointed to replace Gay, and the search is on for a long-term replacement.

Now, six Jewish students at Harvard have filed a federal Title VI lawsuit against the school, alleging that it was a “bastion of anti-Jewish hatred.” In other words, the school had by its behavior created a climate of antisemitism. The suit will take a while before it works its way through the courts. but Harvard is clearly on notice that it has to do something about its speech hypocrisy. In a Boston Globe op-ed, Steve Pinker suggested five actions that Harvard could take to “save itself,” including adopting institutional neutrality and disempowering DEI.

Unfortunately, Harvard can’t seem to stop disseminating antisemitic tropes, and incidents like this one (click the NY Post linke below to read) will only contribute to finding Harvard culpable in the lawsuit.

An excerpt:

The Harvard Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine reposted the cartoon Monday after it was shared by two student groups, the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee and the Africa and African American Resistance Organization, according to the student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson.

It shows a hand with a dollar sign inside a Star of David holding nooses around what appear to be Muhammad Ali and former Egyptian President Gamal Nasser — with “third world” printed around a black arm swinging a machete with the words “liberation movement” on it.

Note that faculty are participating here.

The groups said they shared the poster, which is originally from 1967, to show how “African people have a profound understanding of apartheid and occupation.”

Instead, it added to accusations that the Ivy League school fails to protect Jewish students from hate.

More:

“The cartoon is despicably, inarguably antisemitic,” Rabbi David Wolpe, a Harvard Divinity School scholar who resigned from the school’s antisemitism advisory committee in December, posted to X.

“Is there no limit?”

[Alexander] Shabbos Kestenbaum, a Divinity School student who is suing the university for discrimination, also shared outrage at the offensive poster being reshared.

“Harvard *faculty* just posted an explicitly antisemitic poster depicting a Jewish hand controlling the black mind,” he wrote.

“With professors like these, it’s easy to see why Jewish students don’t feel safe in class.”

So here’s the cartoon at issue, which undeniably uses antisemitic tropes. Look at the Jewish hand (with a $ sign inside the Star of David) being a puppeteer. The cartoon was ultimately withdrawn with apologies by the issuing groups, but it was too late.

 

Now if you ask me, this is free speech, although of course bigoted and hateful speech. Were this to happen at the University of Chicago, it’s likely that no official statement would have been issued. But, under the gun, Harvard’s interim President issued this statement yesterday; I got it as an alum. There was also a short Harvard Press release condemning the cartoon and its antisemitism.

Taking an official stand against this stuff would violate Chicago’s institutional neutrality mandated by the Kalven Report, but Harvard doesn’t adhere to that. Ergo, to save its reputation, the school could hardly have done other than issue such a long screed, though I think the short press release is sufficient.

Note two things about the statement. First, it looks as if Harvard’s going to sniff out the perps with an eye to punishing them. Punishment for free speech! Notice further that besides condemning antisemitism, Harvard also has to condemn bigotry against Muslims, Palestinians, and Arabs. This “both sideism” is somewhat offensive to me: if you’re going to condemn an incident of antisemitism, you don’t have to throw in stuff about the other “side” as well. After all, Harvard isn’t being sued for creating an “Islamophobic atmosphere”.  And I, for one, find it difficult to approach loud and aggressive pro-Palestinian demonstrators with “compassion and mutual respect”, so that part of the letter seems patronizing.  As for “discourse grounded in facts,” fuggedaboutit!

In my view, Harvard should adopt Pinker’s “Fivefold Way” immediately, or it will be issuing statements like the one above every time there’s an incident involving people’s politics and identities. And you can see that it’s still violating the First Amendment, threatening punishment for flyers like the one above.

The Harvard Crimson also has a story about the image and Harvard’s reaction, but it largely mirrors the Post‘s story.

Jon Haidt goes after DEI

February 10, 2024 • 11:00 am

UPDATE AND CORRECTION:  Jon Haidt has commented below (comment #19) and notes that the UnHerd characterization of his talk is incorrect; in particular he doesn’t oppose students chanting “Intifada” and  “From the River to the Sea,”  but (like me) deplores the hypocrisy of punishing some speech and not other speech. He also recommends that readers watch his video (here), and notes two time stamps for when he talks about telos and identitarianism.  I should have listened to his talk, but I couldn’t find it and I assumed that the UnHerd talk was correct. My apologies to Jon.

I should add that while discussing this correction, Jon noted that he does feel that a university should have policies against calling directly for violence, even if it those calls are protected by the First Amendment.  Here we differ, as I think calls for violence should be permissible except under the stipulations of the courts: they become impermissible if they are likely to incite imminent lawless violence. If they aren’t likely to do this, I’d say to allow them; Jon would apparently disagree.

_____________________

A lot of academics who haven’t previously gone after DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) initiatives are coming out of the woodwork to criticize the philosophy and actions of DEI.  New critics include Steve Pinker, who, in his Boston Globe article on how to fix the problems of Harvard, included “Disempowering DEI” as one of the five things that needed attention. To wit:

Disempowering DEI. Many of the assaults on academic freedom (not to mention common sense) come from a burgeoning bureaucracy that calls itself diversity, equity, and inclusion while enforcing a uniformity of opinion, a hierarchy of victim groups, and the exclusion of freethinkers. Often hastily appointed by deans as expiation for some gaffe or outrage, these officers stealthily implement policies that were never approved in faculty deliberations or by university leaders willing to take responsibility for them.

An infamous example is the freshman training sessions that terrify students with warnings of all the ways they can be racist (such as asking, “Where are you from?”). Another is the mandatory diversity statements for job applicants, which purge the next generation of scholars of anyone who isn’t a woke ideologue or a skilled liar. And since overt bigotry is in fact rare in elite universities, bureaucrats whose job depends on rooting out instances of it are incentivized to hone their Rorschach skills to discern ever-more-subtle forms of “systemic” or “implicit” bias.

Universities should stanch the flood of DEI officials, expose their policies to the light of day, and repeal the ones that cannot be publicly justified.

I’ve always opposed DEI because, though its proponents may be well meaning, the acronym has now become synonymous with compelled speech, attacks on freedom of speech (via “hate speech”), authoritarianism, policing of speech, censorship, and racism. By the latter I don’t just mean racism against “majority” groups, but, recently, the anti-Semitism growing on college campuses. I’m convinced that hatred of Jews is somewhat egged on by DEIers, who, with their view that Jews are “privileged” and “white adjacent”, while their opponents are oppressed people of color, have promoted antisemitism on campus.  And schools like my own are reluctant to punish those who demonstrate against Israel even when those protestors violate college regulations. It doesn’t looks good to sanction people who demonstrate on behalf of “the oppressed.”

Now social psychologist Jon Haidt, who cofounded Heterodox Academy, has come out against DEI as well. Previously he kept pretty quiet on the issue, though he often spoke out favoring the pursuit of truth over the pursuit of social justice as the mission of a university (see his famous talk at Duke here). But now he’s at bat against DEI in the UnHerd article below (click to read). Note the strong title: abolishing DEI will “save academia.” It’s a short piece, based on a talk at UNC, which I haven’t found.

Here are two excerpts, which are, in effect, most of the piece:

Abolishing DEI may be the only way out of the Leftist ideological capture of American campuses, Jonathan Haidt told an audience at the University of North Carolina (UNC), Chapel Hill, on Wednesday.

Those words mark a dramatic departure for Haidt, who has been known as a restrained, moderate voice on the subject of cancel culture, identity politics and what he calls the obsession with “safetyism” that has gripped Gen Z in the past decade. Haidt, a professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business, is the author of “The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure,” and founder of the Heterodox Academy, an academic organisation committed to the ideals of viewpoint diversity and academic freedom.

On Wednesday the professor said that he no longer has confidence that universities can reform themselves. The reason for his volte-face: the unwillingness of university administrators who diligently police speech codes and pronoun usage to stop students and professors from chanting genocidal slogans against Jews. Indeed, the antisemitic eruptions on campus, and subsequent Congressional testimony of three elite university presidents who waffled on genocide, was “probably the most important turning point in the history of American higher education,” Haidt stated.

. . . He said he used to think that some parts of DEI might make sense, but now it’s clear that DEI does not work, and often makes things worse by exacerbating racial hostilities. He continued:

Privileged people have power. Power is evil. They use their power to oppress the good people. What a sick thing to teach 18-year-olds coming into college in a multi-ethnic democracy. But that’s what we’ve been doing, especially at elite college campuses since 2014-2015, since the DEI revolution… The inevitable outcome in terms of antisemitism is Jews are white, Jews are oppressors, it’s okay to kill Jews because that’s just resistance.

Haidt argued that things have gotten so bad they are beyond repair and need to be jettisoned. Since many universities are not likely to take those steps on their own, they may have to be pressured to do so. Haidt even suggested that Republican legislatures should intervene in running public US universities as a means of “counter-pressure” against universities.

“I think we’ve dug ourselves in a hole, especially with the studies departments, where there is no way to reform them [but] from the outside,” Haidt said.

There’s no doubt DEI is divisive, and I’ve often thought that the “D” really stood for “divisiveness” and the “E” for “exclusion”, for DEI encourages racial and gender animosity. It does not bring people together, but rather encourages people to not only see their gender or race as the most important part of their character but, importantly, sets up a hierarchy of oppression, which is inherently divisive.

It’s intriguing that Haidt’s mind seem to have been changed largely by “the unwillingness of university administrators who diligently police speech codes and pronoun usage to stop students and professors from chanting genocidal slogans against Jews.” In saying that, he’s also saying that universities shouldn’t have complete free speech—at least the kind that allows genocidal slogans against the Jews. (These would be chants like “Globalize the intifada” or “From the river to the sea, yadda, yadda.”) If he’s really saying that some kinds of speech are intolerable on campus, I wish he’d be clearer about what kind of speech he means, and who would police it.  After all, if Haidt really favors “Truth University” over “Social Justice University,” he must then feel that some kinds of speech are incompatible with seeking truth. My own view is that speech should be free, but the university has a right to set the times, places of speech, and to regulate rules of when speech violations university regulations by acting to actually harm the dissemination of knowledge. Finally universities must stipulate that permitted speakers can’t be deplatformed or shouted down.

But there remain good reasons to abolish DEI beyond the fact that it may encourage hatred of Jews (and the use of specified pronouns, which isn’t comparable at all).  Pinker gives some of them above.  If we want to get rid of illegal prejudice and bullying on campus, there can be an apparatus for doing that. But that’s not the same thing as DEI.

Given how deeply DEI has sunk its hooks into American universities, though, having huge budgets and armies of bureaucrats, fulfilling Pinker and Haidt’s call won’t be easy.

As for Republican legislatures helping run American universities, I know where Haidt’s coming from, but I’m not on board with that, either.

Columbia University rejects just one student group out of nine: the one opposing antisemitism

February 9, 2024 • 10:15 am

Andrew Sullivan’s statement, “We are all on campus now” has become pretty famous, and it’s proven true for wokeness, DEI, and other stuff that first shows up at universities and then spreads to other institutions and people.  The latest on-campus phenomenon, though it’s already appearing other places, is antisemitism. And antisemitism is how I interpret this latest bit of college news published by Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe (and reprinted on his website.  Jacoby’s take on the latest happening (at Columbia University, of course) is mirrored in a piece by free-expression lawyer Popehat (Ken White).

Click below to read Jacoby’s piece:

Jacoby’s piece begins with Marie-Alice Legrand, a Columbia law student “of French Caribbean descent.”  I don’t think she’s Jewish, as the piece doesn’t mention that.  But she grew up with Jews and with  knowledge about pogroms and the Holocaust, and so when she got to Columbia she decided, in the face of campus antisemitism, to found a group to counter Jew hatred. The rest is is the story:

Legrand was shocked when the Columbia campus erupted in “blatant antisemitism and hate,” as she wrote on LinkedIn. Anti-Israel throngs publicly cheered the Hamas atrocities and marched behind banners bearing Palestinian flags and the words “By Any Means Necessary.” A tenured Columbia professor waxed ecstatic over the murders, rapes, and abductions of Israelis, which he called “astounding,” “awesome,” and “victories of the resistance.” More than 140 other faculty members signed a letter defending the barbaric assault as a legitimate “military action” against the Jewish state.

The callousness of what she was seeing scandalized Legrand. She knew students at Columbia who had lost friends or relatives in the Oct. 7 pogrom, she told me, but “there was not one ounce of sympathy or compassion extended to my Jewish and Israeli friends.” She reached out on social media. “You are not alone,” she posted. “I unequivocally support and stand with you.”

She decided to offer more than comfort. Over the next few months, Legrand assembled a group of students, Jews and non-Jews alike, to create a new campus club, Law Students Against Antisemitism. They drafted a charter laying out their objectives: to raise awareness of historical and contemporary antisemitism, to foster dialogue, and to provide support for students targeted by antisemitism.

Student groups are ubiquitous at Columbia — the university boasts that there are more than 500 clubs and organizations, at least 85 in the law school alone. Given the surge of venomous anti-Jewish and anti-Israel bigotry, especially among young Americans and in academia, the need for groups like Law Students Against Antisemitism is self-evident.

On Jan. 23, Legrand and the group’s other officers appeared before the law school student senate to request official recognition for their club. Such recognition, which is needed to reserve space on campus and be assigned a Columbia email address, is normally a routine formality. Eight other clubs requested approval last month; all eight were rubber-stamped in a few minutes.

But not Law Students Against Antisemitism.

Before the vote was held, a delegation of progressive students showed up to demand that Legrand’s group be rejected on the grounds that it would “silence pro-Palestine activists on campus and brand their political speech as antisemitic.” It would do so, they claimed, by adopting the standard definition of antisemitism drafted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance [IHRA]. The accusation was ridiculous on multiple grounds. First and most obviously, no voluntary student group has the power to silence anyone, on campus or off. Second, as recent months have made plain, there has been no shortage of pro-Palestine expression on Columbia’s campus.

What is that definition? Here it is from the IHRA, which also gives some examples:

“Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”  

The Globe story continues:

Above all, it is beyond surreal to denounce an organization opposed to antisemitism for adopting the most widely used definition of the term. The IHRA formulation has been accepted by 42 countries — including the United States — and by well over 1,000 states, provinces, cities, nongovernmental organizations, and corporations. In fact, it is the definition relied on by the federal government in its enforcement of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.

Read the definition again. Wouldn’t you write something similar if you were trying to define hatred of blacks?  And is using that definition of antisemitism likely to “silence pro-Palestinian activists”?  You’d have to be insane to think that; the activists are already out there, very loud and aggressive.  No, the vote of the Law School’s student senate reflects only one thing: an attempt to make Jews and their allies shut up, while approving of groups, like pro-Palestinian ones, giving them all the benefits that come with official approval.  The senate vote was also anonymous, as Popehat reports.

Popehat begins his article with a criticism of those who themselves go after students for generally being censorious and “politically correct”.  Popehat thinks that there is far more danger from government leaders who think “that dissent is illegitimate and un-American” (he uses the GOP and Florida in particular as examples).  And he’s probably right. But you fight fires where you can. So although Popehat’s not one of those who take a dim view of “woke” students, he nevertheless decries what the Columbia law-student senate did.  Click to read his site.

An excerpt:

Now, Columbia Law’s students are perfectly right to be vigilant about attempts to suppress criticism of Israel. Plenty of people of bad faith have been trying to disguise suppression of anti-Zionist or pro-Palestinian thought as concern about antisemitism. Colleges have been complicit and sometimes students are the ones advocating suppression.

But Columbia Law’s Student Senate is being fuzzy-headed at best, and acting at bad faith at worst, to say that a student group shouldn’t be approved if its values and viewpoints could lead to censorship if widely accepted, or that its definition of racism is wrong. A newly formed Law Students Against Antisemitism would only be able to add one additional voice — a student voice — into the incendiary debate about Israel. Their definition of antisemitism is subject to critique, like everybody else’s. They would have no official power to enforce it, only the power to associate with each other and speak their views. Their power to argue that some criticism of Israel is antisemitic is no more powerful — and no less a legitimate part of the debate — than Students for Justice In Palestine saying that it isn’t.

I also question whether the supposed logic is sincere. Would the Columbia Law Student Senate deny recognition to, say, the Black Law Students Association, on the basis that students from that group have sometimes called for the punishment of speech they perceive as bigoted? Somehow I think not; nor should they.

So does the Columbia Law Student Senate think that it’s necessary to stop speech to save it? Possibly. It’s the sort of philosophical fatuity that students have always eructed. Realistically, though, it’s more likely that these particular students think that when they don’t agree with speech, it’s legitimate to suppress that speech by any means at their disposal, including official and quasi-official means. It’s more likely that they think they have some kind of right not to be exposed to speech they hate. They see no value in the utterance of things unless they agree with those things, and don’t share the value that they should respond to speech rather than preventing it. I feel no obligation whatsoever to respect that sentiment or the students who hold it, as I’ve made clear before. And I am perfectly capable of regarding them as censorial dipshits while recognizing that they are also mostly insignificant censorial dipshits, compared to our nation’s leaders.

The fact that Columbia Law is private, and not bound by the First Amendment, does not change this analysis. Columbia advertises itself as a haven for free expression. If Columbia law wants to be free for expression that its Student Senate agrees with, maybe it should say that on the package. The belief “there is only one correct way to view the conflict in Gaza and we will not recognize student organizations who disagree” is loathsome and un-American whether or not it violates the First Amendment.

I think the students could do better. In fact I expect it of them. I expect students at one of America’s best law schools to say “I think your definition of antisemitism is overbroad and wrong, but you get to advocate it just like other groups do.” I hope that age and experience will rub the censorial dipshittery off of them. But all of this may mark me as naive. Has the America of this century provided a good example of the value of liberty? Have these students’ local and national leaders modeled a mature and civically responsible approach to encountering speech they don’t like? Likely no.

It’s not only ridiculous to assume that Legrand’s group would silence students in pro-Palestinian groups, but even more ridiculous to reject her group because it espouses a definition of antisemitism that is accepted by the U.S. government and used as a standard to enforce Title VI violations (see page 13 of the Biden-Harris initiative to counter antisemitism). Read the definition again.  Do you think a group formed to fight antisemitism should be rejected because it uses the IHRA’s definition of antisemitism? And does the precise definition even matter so long as it captures the sense of Jew hatred?

Fortunately, Ms. Legrand has guts (from the Globe):

Legrand knows only too well how tenacious antisemitism can be. She said she was “heartbroken” by the student senate vote and by the moral perversity of those who would mobilize to kill an organization like hers. But she is not giving up. She hasn’t forgotten the view from her childhood bedroom window. And she knows that in the fight against antisemitism, surrender can be fatal.

We’re all on campus now, and the antisemitism spreading among colleges will simply infect the wider population—or hearten hidden antisemites to come into the open. For now there appears to be little penalty for hating Jews.

Confusion at Barnard about free speech, institutional neutrality, and academic freedom

January 25, 2024 • 11:15 am

According to the New York Times, Barnard College is in a big kerfuffle involving free speech, institutional neutrality, and academic freedom. The problem is that they’re conflating them all, so the campus is full of stress and argument that, with some good will, could be avoided. Here I proffer a simple solution to the College’s woes.

First, some terms. These are my takes, so others might disagree. Free speech is the ability to express yourself without censorship. The First Amendment protects your speech from being censored by the government, but not necessarily by anybody else, including your boss on the job. Public colleges and universities, however, must adhere to the courts’ construal of the First Amendment (they’re considered arms of the government), while private colleges need not. In my view, however, they should, for free speech is seen by many academics as the best way to get to the truth, with everybody able to discuss issues without being quashed. The University of Chicago, a private school, adheres to the First Amendment in our Principles of Free Expression, also known as the “Chicago Principles,” and these have been adopted by more than 100 colleges.

In contrast, institutional neutrality in academia means that colleges and universities remain neutral on political, moral, or ideological issues, and make no “official” statements about them. (Faculty and students, of course, are welcomed to express their personal views.) Thus, at Chicago, which adheres to institutional neutrality, you will (or rather “should”) find no department or unit of the university making any kind of statement about politics or ideology on its websites. This is an adherence to our Kalven Principles (also see here), which allow exceptions to neutrality only when the issues at hand are intimately connected with the mission of the University. Sadly, only a few schools in the country, including Vanderbilt and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have officially adopted institutional neutrality, though I think all of them should. That’s because the purpose of Kalven is to not “chill” speech by avoiding intimidating people who want to speak up against positions that might be construed as “official”. Kalven and the Principles of Free Expression are designed to buttress each other.

There is, of course, a difference between free speech and institutional neutrality.  You can have free speech without institutional neutrality, so that individuals can speak their minds but departments and universities can also take “official” positions.  (I can’t imagine, however, having institutional neutrality without free speech, as the former makes sense only if you have the latter.) The problem with Barnard College, as outlined in the NYT article below (click to read), is that it has adopted free speech but isn’t trying that hard to be institutionally neutral. And this is causing problems.

As for academic freedom, that’s usually construed as the freedom of academics to teach and do research on what they want without interference. In other words, it is a freedom of inquiry. This is somewhat connected with freedom of speech (can a professor say whatever she wants to in a classroom? Nope.), but it’s not the issue at hand today, though both Barnard and the ACLU are conflating freedom of speech with academic freedom and with institutional neutrality. If they adopted the Chicago Principles and Kalven, they wouldn’t be in trouble. But there are lots of faculty who think that departmental websites, official emails, and other official venues should be able to express political opinions, and that’s where they get in trouble.

Click to read, though you may be paywalled:

First, Barnard College (in New York City, affiliated with Columbia University) has adopted the Chicago Principles, and so has free speech (NYT text is indented).

The Barnard faculty also held a vote in December affirming the “Chicago Principles,” a commitment to free expression, several professors said.

It’s in the institutional neutrality issue where they get balled up, because the professors cannot refrain from making political statements on official websites:

Three weeks after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College in New York posted a statement on its departmental website in support of the Palestinian people.

Below the statement, the professors posted links to academic work supporting their view that the struggle of Palestinians against “settler colonial war, occupation and apartheid” was also a feminist issue. Two days later, they found that section of the webpage had been removed, without warning, by Barnard administrators.

What happened next has sparked a crisis over academic freedom and free expression at Barnard at a time when the Israel-Hamas conflict has led to tense protests on American college campuses and heated discussions about what constitutes acceptable speech.

“Acceptable”, however, means “speech that can appear on departmental websites”.  The departmental statement was removed because, at least for this issue, Barnard was enforcing institutional neutrality, which is good. (The claim that the Hamas/Israel war is a feminist issue is the way department always try to get around these restrictions.  In fact, I’d argue that if you’re a feminist, you’d want to support Israel, which doesn’t oppress women or gays. But I digress.)

Asked to explain why the page was removed, college administrators told the department that the statement and links were “impermissible political speech,” a statement from the department said.

And if that applied to all “official” political, ideological, and moral issues, that would be great. Barnard would then be like the University of Chicago. The problem is that Barnard College seems to have taken it upon itself to judge whether some “official” political/ideological speech is okay, and other speech isn’t.  And that puts them in the position of being, as W. said, “The Decider.”  What speech is acceptable, and what is not.

The Barnard administration then, in late October and November, rewrote its policies on political activity, website governance and campus events, giving itself wide latitude to decide what was and was not permissible political speech on campus, as well as final say over everything posted on Barnard’s website.

And so we get stuff like this:

At both Columbia and Barnard, an all-women’s college that is formally part of Columbia University but has its own leadership and policies, administrators have asked the community to refrain from slogans and words that others may find hurtful. Both institutions have also issued reworded administrative rules that officially apply to everyone. But critics say that in reality, they are being used to curtail views the college does not want aired.

Under new rules Barnard emailed to faculty on Nov. 6, for example, all academic departments must submit changes to the content of their websites to the Office of the Provost for review and approval. All content on the college’s website may be amended or removed without notice, a related policy states.

Arthur Eisenberg, executive counsel with the N.Y.C.L.U., said that the policy gives the administration discretion to determine what is permissible academic discourse on the website. “And that’s the problem,” he said.

While the pro-Palestinian statement was taken down, for example, a statement by the Africana Studies Department decrying anti-Black racism and state-sanctioned violence in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in 2020 was permitted to stay up.

No “hurtful” speech? Trying to maintain a position like that is asking for trouble.

At Chicago, statements about George Floyd, structural racism, state-sanctioned violence, and Black Lives matter on departmental websites was taken down, simply because these were political statements that had nothing to do with the mission of the departments who issued them or our University.

And now the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) is warning Barnard that institutional neutrality amounts to “censorship”, not realizing that it is intended to prevent chilling of ideas. The problem is when you are trying to draw lines between “hate speech” and “other speech”. It’s best to just adopt Kalven and not permit any official speech on politics or ideology.

Apparently, the NYCLU doesn’t understand that, nor does it understand academic freedom:

The moves caught the attention of the New York Civil Liberties Union, which wrote a letter to Barnard’s new president, Laura Rosenbury, in December, warning that the website and political speech policies violated fundamental free speech principles and were “incompatible with a sound understanding of academic freedom.”

“Such a regime will inevitably serve as a license for censorship,” the letter said.

In a statement, the Barnard administration said that it had barred college resources from being used for political activity for at least a decade. Another policy barring political signs from being posted on campus was not directed at any ideology, it contended.

But the statement about George Floyd and “state-sanctioned violence” above is certainly a political statement. It would be barred here and, if Barnard adheres to its principles, it should be barred there. As for the ACLU defending “academic freedom”, that’s simply not what’s at issue.

The upshot seems to be that Barnard will approve of some political speech on department websites, but not all such speech. Sure, it’s fine to have the administration decide in advance what additions to department websites should be made, but they should simply ban all additions that make political, ideological or moral statements.

This kerfuffle is easily resolved:

Dear Barnard College,

The solution to your problems is this: adopt both the Chicago Principles of Free Expression, which you’ve already approved, but also the Kalven Principles of institutional neutrality.

Cordially,
Jerry Coyne
(University of Chicago

The big impediment is that some professors are so bursting with political bombast and feeling of virtue that they INSIST that their political views must be broadcast on their departmental websites. One example:

The Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies has now created its own website that is not administered by the college, and posted its pro-Palestinian statement and resources there. It has for the past two months been in discussions with Barnard’s provost office about permitting a link from its official website to this website, Dr. Jakobsen said.

Fine, have your unofficial website. But the answer to whether this should link to the departmental website is “NOPE!” If Barnard says it’s okay, then they’re opening Pandora’s box.