Category: DEI matters

Facing accusations of antisemitism, Harvard adds a “Jewish graduation” to its panoply of identity-group ceremonies

April 6, 2024 • 9:30 am

Yes, I know that Harvard University has one big graduation for all undergraduates and grad students (I went to it when I got my Ph.D. in 1978; Alexander Solzhenitsyn gave the commencement address in a famous speech that called out the West for its “spiritual degeneration”).  At that time, there was but one “identity” ceremony that included everyone. E pluribus unum!  (One small exception: people who got their Ph.D.’s in different fields had separate degree-granting ceremonies.)

I’m not sure when this changed, but now Harvard has many different graduation ceremonies for different identity groups. And, of course, they are organized by the DEI office. Here’s this year’s panoply of “identity ceremonies” listed by the conservative National Review:

Harvard University’s Office for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging will once again host “affinity celebrations” at its 2024 commencement, according to documents obtained by National Review.

Harvard plans to hold a “Disability Celebration,” a “Global Indigenous Celebration,” an “Asian American, Pacific Islander, Desi-American (APIDA) Celebration,” a “First Generation-Low Income Celebration,” a “Jewish Celebration,” a “Latinx Celebration,” a “Lavender Celebration” — which refers to LGBT students — a “Black Celebration,” a “Veterans Celebration,” and an “Arab Celebration.” The university will also hold a central commencement ceremony for students of all backgrounds.

. . . . The only publicly available mention of affinity celebrations on any Harvard website is published on the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences’ page. The note does not mention the specific events or groups recognized, simply describing them as “student-led, staff-supported events that recognize and celebrate the accomplishments of graduates from marginalized and underrepresented communities.”

“Desi-American” means people whose ancestry is Pacific Islander, Indian, Bangladeshi, Pakistani or other Asians, identity groups that may not be so fond of each other! Is there any oppressed group missing here? The “First Generation-Low Income Celebration” puzzles me, as the two features don’t necessarily go together, and of course immediately upon leaving the ceremony the graduates have abandoned that identity.

There was one notable group missing at Harvard last year, and you can guess which one it was. That’s right—the Jews!  But now, facing a federal Title VI civil rights investigation for a campus climate of antisemitism, and the fracas around the “Jewish genocide” hearing in Congress that in the end brought down Harvard and Penn’s Presidents, the school decided it had better do something to effect some climate change, though not in the way that the antisemitic Greta Thunberg would favor.

Frankly, I think these separate graduations are ludicrous and, in the end, purely performative. Do they move society forward? No.  Are they divisive? Probably, in that they continue the obsessive academic focus on identity.  “Identity politics” isn’t inherently bad—after all, it was the impetus behind the Civil Rights Movement of the Sixties. But these days, fostered and promoted by DEI offices, it has gone way too far, making someone’s identity, based on features they can’t control, the most important aspect of their persona. This is why Steve Pinker, who’s at Harvard and laid out in the Boston Globe a five-point plan for fixing Harvard that includes this recommendation:

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.

It is, as I said, Harvard’s DEI office that creates these identity-based graduations, reinforcing the malign atmosphere Steve describes in his first paragraph. Am I happy that Harvard, under the gun for antisemitism, now includes a Jewish ceremony? No, of course not: it’s disgusting—pandering to both Jews and DEI in general. It is, after all, DEI that, by fostering a climate that sees Jews as white oppressor colonialists, fosters antisemitism.

This conclusion isn’t rocket science. One Jewish student is quoted in the National Review about the issue:

For some, like Harvard Divinity School student Shabbos Kestenbaum — who spoke about the situation on the ground at his school during a House Education and Workforce Committee roundtable in late February — the addition of a separate celebration for Jewish students simply perpetuates the underlying dynamics driving antisemitism at Harvard.

“Rather than acknowledge the harmful ways in which Harvard DEI has contributed to campus antisemitism, the university further marginalizes individuals into groups of race, ethnicity, and religion,” Kestenbaum told National Review. “Harvard DEI is simply out of control.”

One way to stop this, as Steve suggests, is simply to disempower DEI.  Perhaps colleges can keep on staff a few individuals to whom one can bring complaints of bigotry, but there should be none of the training, propaganda, and divisivenesss that DEI sows on campus.  Even at the “free speech” University of Chicago, our climate is permeated by DEI, which sends me announcements of events on a nearly daily basis.

Op-ed in Science: Expand DEI in STEMM fields

March 29, 2024 • 10:45 am

The battle continues between truth (or merit) and social justice, exemplified in John Haidt’s famous lecture at Duke on the two types of approaches to education, continues. This time it’s in an article in the new Science urging expansion of DEI initiatives in STEMM fields (science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine).

The article is by Shirley Malcolm, whose associated bio is this:

Shirley Malcolm is a senior advisor and director of the STEM Equity Achievement (SEA) Change initiative at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS, the publisher of Science), Washington, DC, USA.

Since the AAAS funds a whole unit on “STEM Equity Achievement Change,” it’s not surprising that they’re defending DEI at a time when the Supreme Court has banned race-based admissions and DEI is waning everywhere—not just in academic but in the corporate world. Malcolm says she’s explicitly fighting back against this tendency/

Click to read.

None of us want a country where there is bigotry against women or members of different ethnic groups, and all of us want a country where everyone has equal opportunity to rise as high as they can (the latter is far harder to achieve).  We want a country where the net for positions is cast as widely as possible, to get talent wherever it lies and to make sure that everybody’s in the net.

But this is not DEI.  To me, DEI stands for extreme forms of affirmative action, and I generally oppose it for the  reasons below. Malcolm’s quotes are indented.

1.)  It favors not equality of opportunity but equity: the proportional representation of all groups in a population in an endeavor—STEMM in this case. This is made explicit in Malcolm’s article:

STEMM should ideally benefit all of society. However, this will not happen until the country creates a STEMM community as diverse as the population it should serve.

This neglects the view that different groups may have different preferences; for example, it’s likely that in medicine women tend to go into “people oriented” fields, like pediatrics, family medicine, and OB-GYN, while most surgeons are men.  This appears to be due not to salary differentials but to preference, and is seen in countries, like those of northern Europe, which have the highest ratings for gender equality. (In fact, in more gender-equal countries, women are less likely to go into STEMM, for reasons probably connected with the freedom to exercise preference and make career choices.) Which leads us to the second problem.

2.) Differences in equity are imputed by DEI to systemic racism, not to differences preference or merit. Over and over again, we find that underrepresentation of groups are not due to people trying to keep others out of their fields, but to the fact that preference has controlled people’s movement into fields, or different groups are over- or under-represented because of differences in merit. Here we have Malcolm touting “inclusion and respect” as an important aspect of STEMM firled

The success of STEMM is measured not only by publications and head counts of underrepresented groups in STEMM fields but also by creating a culture of inclusion and respect.

3.) Systemic racism/sexism is said to have reduced equity in different STEMM fields, but there’s precious little evidence for that. In fact, STEMM fields and departments are desperate to hire minorities and women, which, because of affirmative action, actually now have an advantage in entering STEMM.

4.)  Because identity trumps merit (something not good for science), differences in merit are to be either effaced or reduced using with strong affirmative action. For example, standardized tests have been largely eliminated, DEI statements prevail in hiring and promotion (and, in covert forms, in college admissions essays), and “holistic” admissions are used to circumvent legal bans on sex-based or race-based hiring.

Instead of using these stopgap measures that result in more equity, but at the expense of the quality of science produced, we should be working (in society, not in science) on bestowing equality of opportunity from birth. That’s a hard problem, of course, but solving it ensures that the quality of scientists is the overweening criterion for evaluating them (of course there’s teaching and service, too). And everybody wants science to be the best it can, especially, of course, when it comes to medical science.

The emphasis on merit as opposed to identity has been embodied in the University of Chicago’s Shils Report, which states this:

 The Shils report dictates that faculty at the University of Chicago must display distinguished performance in each of the following criteria when being considered for promotion:
  • Research
  • Teaching and Training, including the supervision of graduate students
  • Contribution to intellectual community
  • Service

“Promotion” also includes hiring. We do not use DEI statements when hiring (though some departments try to do it on the sly), so that hiring as well as promotion is based on the criteria above, but mainly, because new professors don’t have a record of service or teaching, on research and contribution to the intellectual community.

I won’t bore you by quoting Malcolm at length, because it’s simply a boilerplate defense of DEI neglecting all the points above. The only remotely cogent point she makes is this:

For example, one study reports that women researchers in the United States are more likely to make innovations that benefit women as a whole but are less likely to participate in commercial patenting. Their relative absence is a loss for women and for the world economy. Critics imply that DEI promotes mediocrity, whereas research shows the exact opposite.

The link indeed shows what Malcolm says, except she doesn’t mention that the innovations are “patents for biomedical innovations”, but of course those reflect a sex-ratio bias inherited from the old days. and, more important, there is no bias in hiring, promotion or funding grants of women these days. As I said, departments are competing fiercely for good female talent, and the proportion of women in biomedical research is increasing. It will increase up to the point where representation reflects female merit and preference—I suspect this may be more than 50%.   And this will happen naturally, so long as there’s no systemic misogyny, something that no biologist I know has seen. Here’s a table of recent Ph.D.s conferred in various fields: look at biology and at “health and medical sciences; the latter is 71.4% female!

In the end, the invidious effects of DEI, with its misguided emphasis on equity and systemic racism, and its devaluing of merit in favor of social justice, is not good for science.  And yet the AAAS itself, and the journal Science, has been ideologically captured, as have nearly all scientific organizations. As Luana Maroja and I predicted, the nature of science has already changed in the past five years, and may be almost unrecognizable in another ten:

And because it’s “progressive,” and because most scientists are liberals, few of us dare oppose these restrictions on our freedom. Unless there is a change in the Zeitgeist, and unless scientists finally find the courage to speak up against the toxic effects of ideology on their field, in a few decades science will be very different from what it is now. Indeed, it’s doubtful that we’d recognize it as science at all.

We were accused of hyperbole for saying that. And yet it’s happening, as scientific journals have science articles increasingly replaced by statements like the above, by “invited” papers on progressive issues and bias, and by ideologically-based papers accepted to reinforce a preferred ideology.

And the new science, needless to say, will not produce as much understanding of the world as science that leaves ideology at the door of the lab.

The National Institutes of Health adopt possibly illegal tactic of using “diversity statements” when funding new positions

March 15, 2024 • 11:30 am

Yes, this is an op-ed from the Wall Street Journal, but if you neglect all of their op-eds, which of course lean right, it will still be your loss.  Click to read (it’s archived here). It shows that the NIH—and not for the first time—is requiring diversity statements to hire researchers, a requirement that may well be illegal.

Click to read:

Here are a few paragraphs on what’s happening at the NIH:

Thanks to a grant from the National Institutes of Health, Cornell University is able to support several professors in fields including genetics, computational biology and neurobiology. In its funding proposal, the university emphasizes a strange metric for evaluating hard scientists: Each applicant’s “statement on contribution to diversity” was to “receive significant weight in the evaluation.” [JAC: note that every applicant has to submit a DEI statement.]

It might seem counterintuitive to prioritize “diversity statements” while hiring neurobiologists—but not at the NIH. The agency for several years has pushed this practice across the country through its Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation program—First for short—which funds diversity-focused faculty hiring in the biomedical sciences.

Through dozens of public-records requests, I have acquired thousands of pages of documents related to the program—grant proposals, emails, hiring rubrics and more. The information reveals how the NIH enforces an ideological agenda, prompting universities and medical schools to vet potential biomedical scientists for wrongthink regarding diversity.

The First program requires all grant recipients to use “diversity statements” for their newly funded hires. Northwestern University suggests it will adapt a diversity-statement rubric created by the University of California, Berkeley. It isn’t alone. A year ago I acquired the rubrics used by the NIH First programs at the University of South Carolina and the University of New Mexico, which I discussed in these pages. Both used Berkeley’s rubric almost verbatim.

That rubric penalizes job candidates for espousing colorblind equality and gives low scores to those who say they intend to “treat everyone the same.” It likewise docks candidates who express skepticism about the practice of dividing students and faculty into racially segregated “affinity groups.”

Berkeley’s rubric is dire, and I’ve described it before (see also this statement by FIRE). It requires you first to give  your understanding of what diversity is and your philosophy of,it then your background in promoting diversity (Ceiling Cat help you if you don’t have one), and then finally tell your you will promote diversity in your positions. You’re scored separately in each area, and the three scores added up to give a total.  Remember, diversity is construed as racial or gender diversity, with race being most important, and if you start talking about “viewpoint diversity,” you might as well forget about the job.  Likewise, you fail if you espouse Martin Luther King’s philosophy of “colorblindness.”  King became passé a long time ago.

Here’s how Sailer described a similar rubric for USC and UNM in an earlier piece:

The South Carolina and New Mexico rubrics call for punishing candidates who espouse race neutrality, dictating a low score for anyone who states an “intention to ignore the varying backgrounds of their students and ‘treat everyone the same.’ ” Applicants who are skeptical of DEI programming might choose to describe their commitment to viewpoint diversity. This too runs afoul of the rubrics, which mandate a low score for any candidate who defines diversity “only in terms of different areas of study or different nationalities but doesn’t mention gender or ethnicity/race.”

The rubrics likewise punish candidates for failing to embrace controversial diversity practices. They recommend low scores for candidates who “state that it’s better not to have outreach or affinity groups aimed at underrepresented individuals because it keeps them separate from everyone else, or will make them feel less valued.” These affinity groups exemplify a new kind of segregation, but expressing that view could imperil an applicant’s career.

Because of a lower funding rate of black than of white or Asian scientists applying for grants, the NIH tried in 2021 to remedy this by boosting grant ratings of minorities by asking them to tick a box specifying their race. The plan was that even if a minority applicant’s grant score fell below the funding range, the ticked box would give them a boost, allowing program officers to leapfrog the minority grants back into the range where they might be funded. (This would be, of course, at the expense of researchers who had higher grant scores.)

But as Science reported just a month later, this plan failed and the NIH was forced to eliminate the magical box:

The National Institutes of Health has yanked a notice from three NIH institutes that aimed to encourage grant proposals from minority scientists. Researchers who saw the notice as a way to help bridge a funding success gap between Black and white scientists are dismayed by the move.

. . .Some observers hoped that if the notice were expanded across NIH, it could help raise success rates for Black scientists. But earlier this year, NIH’s Office of Extramural Research (OER) barred more institutes from joining the notice because it was “confusing” and institutes already had leeway to fund “outside the payline” to “bring in diverse scientific perspectives,” the agency said.

NIH rescinded the notice “for clarity in communications,” an OER spokesperson says. “We decided that issuing a general notice that encompassed all NIH better communicated our intent.” That new notice, issued 25 October, encourages applications from underrepresented groups, but won’t enable researchers to tag their applications.

It wasn’t rescinded solely for “clarity in communications,” as you see, but likely because it was unfair and probably illegal. Yes, it’s great to encourage members of underrepresented groups to apply for grants, but handing out money preferentially to such groups prioritizes identity over merit—and in the crucial area of biomedical sciences. (Actually, two papers published in 2019 and 2020 in Science showed that there appeared to be no gender or racial bias in reviewers’ scores of NIH grants, and also that funding rates for minorities were lower largely because they applied in areas having lower funding rates (see also this 2020 paper).

At any rate, DEI statements, which may be a way to hire based on race, could be illegal for that reason alone (Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibits race-based hiring). They could also be illegal on First Amendment grounds, since the way they’re judged involves a form of compelled speech, which is also illegal. Finally, the Supreme Court’s recent ruling against affirmative action in college admissions could and likely will also be applied to race-based hiring of faculty and race-based awarding of grants.  There’s a note to this effect at the top of an NIH program statement from last July:

Note: Summarized here is the most recent NIH Advisory Committee to the Director (ACD) discussion of UNITE. However, it is recognized that the recent Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) decision regarding affirmative action may be at the front of consciousness. NIH adheres to federal law and does not make funding decisions based on race. NIH awaits further evaluation and interpretation of the SCOTUS decision to determine whether there is the need to modify any current policies or practices.

“May be at the front of consciousness”? What does that mean? “We have to find ways around it?”

The only question is whether these DEI statements are used as a proxy for race, as they well could be. But even ifr they aren’t, they’re probably still illegal. To see why, read my colleague Brian Leiter’s article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “The legal problem with diversity statements,” which has the subtitle “Public universities can’t make hiring decisions based on political viewpoints,”

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

Princeton’s President makes bogus arguments that diversity and academic excellence are compatible

February 14, 2024 • 11:30 am

The article below, by the President of Princeton, just appeared in the Atlantic.  (Christopher Eisgruber has been Princeton’s President for 11 years.)  The title clearly implies that college diversity (and the implication is “racial diversity”) is not at all in conflict with excellence.

This is a message that, of course, the Progressive Left wants to hear, but when I read the article, I found it deeply misleading. It turns out that excellence at Princeton has not been maintained by admitting more racial minorities, but by allowing certain barred classes, like Asians, Jews, and the impecunious, into the school.  As far as the evidence goes for racial groups, yes, there is a tradeoff between excellence and diversity, and we know that for several reasons that I’ll mention below. One that we know well that colleges are omitting indices of merit, like SAT and ACT scores, as ways to increase equity, for racial minorities (save Asians) don’t do as well as whites (including Jews, which are seen as “white adjacent”).

This does not mean that colleges shouldn’t strive for more racial diversity, but I think they shouldn’t do it by substantially lowering the merit bar of admissions. There are other ways, like casting a wider net among prospective students, or, for equally qualified students, give the edge to minorities. But to imply that there’s no tradeoff between academic excellence and ethnic diversity (not including, of course, Jews and Asians, known to be overachievers) is to purvey a lie. But it is of course a lie in the service of “progressivism”.

It’s hard to imagine how the Atlantic could accept an article whose arguments are explained by the conflation of causation with correlation, as well as with cherry-picked examples or recent trends in grade inflation and selectivity. But let’s look at the argument.

You can click on the headline below, or find it archived here.

First, many American colleges either implicitly or explicitly have eliminated standardized tests (or made them optional) as criteria for admission, and yet, as I’ve written several times (e.g., here and here), SAT scores correlate better than anything else, including high school grade-point averages) with academic success in college. The reason they have done away with the tests, or made them optional, is to increase racial diversity, concentrating on blacks and Hispanics, who do worse on these tests.  Increasingly, medical schools are also ditching the once-required MCAT admissions tests for the same reasons, and Graduate Record Examinations, or GREs for graduate schools, are being deep-sixed for the same reasons.

But of course this isn’t mentioned by Eisgruber, nor the fact that Princeton itself did away with required SAT and ACT tests; apparently they’re now optional in the school’s “holistic admissions” process. And, as I’ve posted before, making them optional, or omitting them, actually hurts diversity! But misguided colleges don’t seem to realize that.

But here are the four main arguments Eisgruber giv; I’ve characterized them and put them in bold. First, though, his thesis:

A noxious and surprisingly commonplace myth has taken hold in recent years, alleging that elite universities have pursued diversity at the expense of scholarly excellence. Much the reverse is true: Efforts to grow and embrace diversity at America’s great research universities have made them better than ever. If you want excellence, you need to find, attract, and support talent from every sector of society, not just from privileged groups and social classes.

He’s right about how to achieve excellence—finding talent where you can—but this is not the same thing as saying that there’s no tradeoff between excellence and (ethnic) diversity and that you must reduce merit-based admissions if you want to increase diveristy. What the above says is that the more widely you look around, the more likely you are to find talented people. But again, that’s not people will read this article. Now, on to Eisgruber’s arguments:

He points to a few examples of ethnic minorities at Princeton who have been successful.

Not surprisingly, the first example is a Chinese-American, Fei-Fei Li.  But Asians, like Jews, are overachievers for what I think are largely cultural reasons, and that’s why Ivy League schools used to have Jewish quotas and why Harvard, until recently, had “Asian-American” quotas.

He then names one black person, one poor person, and one white but economically deprived person (Mark Milley) who became successes after attending Princeton.  Again, this proves nothing, for Eisgruber is making a general statement, and picking out one example from each of three minority groups proves nothing.

Princeton is academically better than it was in the middle of the last century because it began admitting public-school students and women.

But again, this proves nothing other than widening the pool of applicants that might contain meritorious students will allow more of those students to enrich Princeton. Once you begin at least considering public-school students and women, you suddenly have a whole large group of people from which to pluck the talented. But again, this says nothing about Eisgruber’s implied thesis: that admitting more minority students in general will not reduce “excellence” (presumably construed, though not defined, as graduation rates, grades in college, and success after college).

. . . Princeton’s history is illustrative, not because it is special but because—in this respect, at least—it isn’t. At the beginning of the 20th century, Princeton had a reputation as “the finest country club in America”—a place where privileged young men loafed rather than studied. When asked early in his Princeton presidency about the number of students there, Woodrow Wilson reportedly quipped, “about 10 percent.”
Half a century later, when the university began admitting public-high-school graduates in significant numbers, it sought to reassure alumni that the newcomers would not displace more privileged but marginally qualified children. The Alumni Council published a booklet declaring that Princeton would admit any alumni child likely to graduate. As evidence, it boasted that the sons of Princetonians were overrepresented not only in the bottom quartile of the class but among those who flunked out.
The Alumni Council’s brochure spoke about Princeton’s sons because, of course, the university did not admit women to the undergraduate program until 1969, thereby turning away roughly half the world’s excellence. That was only one of many unfair and discriminatory distinctions that American universities embraced at the expense of excellence.

Eisgruber also maintains that concerted efforts to obtain black students didn’t occur until the 1960s, but of course he doesn’t tell us how they fare at Princeton relative to Asian, white, or Jewish students (I guess the latter are counted as “white”). He also notes that Princeton had Jewish quoteas untyil the 1950s:

People who accuse universities of “social engineering” today seem to forget the social engineering that they did in the past—social engineering that was designed to protect class privilege rather than disrupt it. At Princeton and other Ivy League universities, anti-Semitic quotas persisted into the 1950s. Asian and Asian American students, who now form such an impressive part of the student body at Princeton and its peers, were virtually absent.

So now that there’s more “diversity” of Jewish and Asian-American students at Princeton, and the classes are doing better, does that prove that diversity is compatible with excellence? I don’t think that’s what Eisgruber means in his title. As New York Magazine says, and Harvard admitted, accepting Asians only by merit would result in “too many Asians”:

Harvard itself found in a 2013 internal study that, if it admitted applicants solely on the basis of academic merit, its share of Asian American students would explode from 19 percent to 43 percent.

No, no, we mustn’t have that! This is why, of course, Harvard discriminated against Asians by lowering their “personality scores,” and this is what the Supreme Court found when it banned race-based admissions. And, of course, blacks and Hispanics with the same indices of merit as Asians or whites are admitted much more often via affirmative action.  Again, this shows the conflict between merit and ethnic diversity.

Opening up admissions to poorer students increased excellence. 

With help from charitable endowments funded by grateful alumni and friends, Princeton and other leading research universities have also dismantled financial barriers that in the past discouraged brilliant students from attending. Contrary to what readers might infer from the endless stream of articles about debt-ridden college grads who become baristas, America’s elite research universities now offer financial-aid packages that make them among the country’s most affordable colleges. At Princeton, the percentage of students on aid has risen from about 40 percent in 2000 to 67 percent in the most recent entering class, covering low-, middle-, and even some upper-middle-income students. The average scholarship exceeds the tuition price.

The elimination of barriers to entry coincided with two other changes: students’ increased willingness to travel for an outstanding education and improved informational tools that colleges could use to assess the quality of students (and vice versa). The result, as documented by the Stanford University economist Caroline Hoxby in 2009, is that student bodies at America’s best colleges and universities are significantly stronger academically in the 21st century than they were in the 1980s or ’90s. By 2007, she reports, America’s leading colleges were “up against the ceiling of selectivity” defined in terms of academic credentials, not acceptance rate: Further improvements to the quality of the student body would be so refined as to be invisible.

Again, all that’s happening here is the advent of “need-blind admissions,” which we practice at the University of Chicago. If you don’t prevent impecunious students from attending Princeton—I was one of those, by the way; I couldn’t apply to Princeton, my first-choice school, because my family couldn’t afford it—then of course you increase the chances of finding students with good grades and high SAT scores.

Finally, over time, the degree of “excellence” of Princeton students has increased. This correlates, says Eisgruber, with an increase in diversity. 

Princeton’s internal data show striking changes consistent with Hoxby’s more general findings.  Princeton’s undergraduate-admission office has long assigned academic ratings to all applicants based on their scholarly accomplishments in high school, with 1 being the strongest and 5 being the weakest. In the late 1980s, Academic 1s made up less than 10 percent of the university’s applicant pool and less than 20 percent of our matriculated class. Indeed, if you plucked a student at random from the Princeton University student body in 1990, the student was as likely to be an Academic 4 as an Academic 1 (but unlikely to be either: Academic 2s and 3s made up half the class).

 

In recent years, by contrast, Academic 1s have constituted roughly 30 percent of the applicant pool and about 50 percent of the matriculated class. Princeton’s academic excellence has increased substantially across every segment of its undergraduate population.

Here we have the classic example of confusing correlation with causation. And there’s a double causation: standards for admissions have increased overall, which has raised the “rank” of admitted students, and the grade-point averages of students in college (presumably one index of “academic excellence” of Princeton students) has ballooned due to grade inflation.  At the same time, Princeton increased its ethnic diversity.  This is no evidence that the latter caused the former.

So there we have it, a pastiche of misguided or erroneous arguments, made by a guy who is a President of an academic powerhouse, to “prove” that you needn’t sacrifice academic merit for diversity. It’s all wrong, and it’s embarrassing—embarrassing for both the Atlantic and the hapless Eisgruber.

So how do we test whether diversity really is compatible with excellence?  There are two ways, and I’ve already mentioned them both:

  1. See if lowering the bar for merit of admissions (i.e., eliminating SAT scores) affects academic excellence and achievement. We already know it does because of the correlation of SAT scores and other standardized tests with academic achievement.  If Eisgruber were right, why are schools like Princeton getting rid of mandatory test scores, or making them optional? There’s only one reason, and it shows that Eisgruber’s thesis is wrong.
  2. Follow students of black or Hispanic ethnicity through college and see if their achievement (or post-college success) is negatively correlated with their minority status. I believe this is also the case, though I don’t have the data at hand. (I believe this is true for medical schools as well.) But if it is the case, it shows that there is a tradeoff between merit and diversity.  That is surely the case, and it’s one of the Great Lies of Wokism.

All the evidence I know of goes against Eisgruber’s contention. Why didn’t the Atlantic editors point out these simple problems? Because, of course, Eisgruber’s flawed conclusion happens to comport with the dominant narrative of “progressive” liberalism.

Two final points. I’m saying nothing about genetics or inherent abilities here, for I think that differences in achievement between racial/ethnic groups is cultural. (The genetic data simply aren’t in.) All I’m saying is that, given differences in qualifications and achievement among groups, Eisgruber’s thesis is wrong.

Second, I’m not saying that colleges should give merit 100% priority over diversity. That is a judgment call about whether, as Jon Haidt puts it, you want “Social Justice University” or “Truth-Finding University.”  But Haidt also notes that you can’t have both, and in this abysmal piece of analysis, Eisgruber takes issue with that. I have always said that I prefer some form of affirmative action, and I stick by that, but I’m not pretending that substantial increases in equity can be achieved without lowering overall “excellence.” There are other ways, though they’re slower. One of them is giving children from different groups equal opportunity at the outset. American doesn’t seem to have the dosh or the will to do that, but that’s what it will ultimately take to comport merit with diversity.

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.