Category: DEI matters

McWhorter and Loury on the departure of Claudine Gay

January 10, 2024 • 12:30 pm

The Claudine Gay affair, in which the President of Harvard was basically fired after only a few months on the job, with her cardinal sin being plagiarism, has got to be the most dramatic and portentous academic event of 2023/2024.  I say “portentous” because although Gay was fired for stealing other people’s prose, her exit also has led many to see this as the beginning of the decline of DEI in universities.  After all, Gay had made her name, in both her academic work and as an administrator, largely by pushing DEI, and her hiring was, without a doubt, a nod to the philosophy of DEI.  In his op-ed in the Boston Globe about what Harvard needs to do to repair itself, Steve Pinker proposed five propositions (his “Fivefold Way”) that included this as one suggestion:

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.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed that Harvard will do this, but I don’t think there’s a snowball’s chance in hell that it will.  DEI is too entrenched at Harvard, and where will they put all the bureaucrats who buttress it?

At any rate, John McWhorter and Glenn Loury, whose biweekly discussion on the Glenn Show I follow regularly (despite my disdain for podcasts), have a 25-minute discussion of Gay’s departure, and I’ve put it below. As you can see from the title and the picture, they’re not going easy on her. Here’s the intro, and I’ve put my own comments and summary (flush left) below it. I suspect that on Loury’s Substack site, where the video also resides, there’s a written transcript.

For the sake of argument, let’s assume all of that is correct, and Gay was ousted over matters of identity rather than academic integrity. That still does not explain why she plagiarized in the first place, nor does it excuse the offense. Whether or not one agrees with the motivations of Gay’s opponents, there is no excuse for a professional scholar to do what she did. None of the possible explanations—underhandedness, sloppiness, a belief that small acts of plagiarism don’t matter—could exonerate Gay, because they all betray a similarly cavalier attitude toward the integrity of the scholarly endeavor. Safeguarding that endeavor and ensuring Harvard’s continuing preeminence was a major part of Gay’s job, and she was not up to the task. Anyone who looked at her paper-thin CV could have guessed as much, and now the evidence is in.

It’s no small irony that a DEI ideologue who likely views “merit” as a suspect concept was brought down by her own demonstrable lack of same. Claudine Gay is the victim of her own debased principles. Harvard’s faculty and students deserve a leader who reflects the ideals of the institution, not a functionary with people skills. I don’t know who will be next in line for the job, but if they’re more of the same—another mediocre scholar with the “correct” politics—I’d advise them to rent a place in Cambridge rather than buying.

Brief summary: Both guys largely blame DEI for getting Gay into office in the first place, and both, like Pinker, see DEI as a villain that can destroy academia.

John McWhorter says he doesn’t think that one needs a good academic record to be a good college President, but his beef about Gay is that she lack both that and the business and fundraising skills necessary to run Harvard.  As he says about DEI, McWhorter says that Gay “was raised in that culture” and “was never asked to be excellent”, so she had no motivation to be that way.

He also makes no bones about why he thinks Gay was hired:  “The reason they chose her was because of the color of her skin”  As he notes, what she brought to the office of President was simply her “blackness . . . and her commitment to DEI.”  Both McWhorter and Loury emphasize that affirmative action was instrumental in her choice; as McWhorter says, “Her blackness was not just one factor, it was not just a thumb on the scale—it was decisive. She’s a token. . . ”

He adds “Affirmative action in universities is about lowering standards.” not just a thumb on the scale. I presume that what he means by a “thumb on the scale” is that when people are roughly equally qualified, it’s okay to choose a minority person, but the problem is that people are not equally qualified: the standards must be substantially lowered for black people like Gay.  This is a debatable issue, for if you don’t lower standards somewhat, you have no chance of getting anywhere near equity, for there’s a huge gap in academic qualifications between minorities, with Asians and top, followed by whites and then by Hispanics and African-Americans.

Glenn Loury is more exercised, and see’s the choisc of Gay as a “corruption of the meritocratic order underlying our most precious institutions of human achievement”. He also feels–and I agree with him–that yes, business executives can run a university, but they but can’t lead one. I prefer to have an academic who has had some administrative experience become president of a university. To appreciate and promote a good university’s mission, you have to be more than just a businessman or fundraiser.

Loury is really exercised about the corruption he sees in the choice of Gay. As he says, “What we’re seeing with Gay is the culmination of a process that is corrupt to its core”. His assessment of her academic qualifications, which he sees as important, is that they are very thin; he’s read her papers and finds “no really original ideas.” Like McWhorter, he blames DEI:  “DEI people put a mediocre person into the position of intellectual–of presiding over the precious jewel in the crown of American academia” By “corruption,” Loury apparently means that because of DEI, unqualified people get jobs and prevent qualified people from getting them, that politicians encourage identity politics and victimology, and that universities aren’t “developing black talent.”

Although a friend of mine judged the discussion as “a bit too harsh,” I think the guy are just being honest and speaking their minds. Claudine Gay wouldn’t like hearing it, but it’s not aimed at her. It’s aimed at us and at “progressive” Democrats.

Douglas Murray goes after Claudine Gay

January 5, 2024 • 9:30 am

Given that I wrote about Claudine Gay’s resignation as President of Harvard just yesterday, it may seem like piling on to add two more takes. But these are from people who are eloquent as well as straightforward:  British author and political commentator Douglas Murray, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, needs no introduction here. First I’ll show you Murray’s Torygraph piece on Gay’s resignation, followed by an eleven-minute video discussion between him and Ayaan about the same thing.

Click below to access the Torygraph, which is likely paywalled; you can find the article archived here for free:

As I said, the most striking thing about Gay’s letter of resignation, and especially about her op-ed in the New York Times giving her take on the situation, is her claim of victimhood. She was, she said, a victim not just of racism, but also of  unnamed “demagogues” (apparently the antiwoke + Republicans + conspiracy theorists), all sworn to destroy the values of Harvard.  Presumably the resignation of Liz Magill, the white president of Penn, was due to other factors. Were there demagogues set out to destroy the values of Penn?

Murray, however, notes not only Gay’s own claims, but others who have bought into Gay’s “victimhood” narrative, when in fact she had to resign because the accusations of her scholarly plagiarism had become overwhelming, rendering her ineffective.

Murray:

Claudine Gay might have weathered the storm because she had the protective cover of being Harvard’s first black female president, and in an age of identity politics that puts her very close to the top of the oppression Olympics that now dominate everything in American public life. You can be rich, privileged and the president of Harvard. But it transpires that you can still claim to be a victim if you are Claudine Gay.

That is what she tried to claim in her resignation statement on Tuesday. She said that there had been “racial animus” in the attacks on her. In fact, the attacks started because of her glaring inability to stand up to racism, followed by allegations that Gay’s distinctly meagre academic work, included a significant amount of plagiarism. The plagiarism story had been around for a while, but after her Congressional embarrassment, a larger number of people – including Leftist media – started to look into these serious allegations.

At first, Harvard tried to ignore them. Its board embarrassed itself by repeatedly expressing its full support for her. Ordinarily, basic academic failings like seeming to lift whole chunks of work – including acknowledgements – from the works of others would have seen a student censured. But not the Harvard president, apparently.

Finally it became too much. Gay’s resignation letter on Tuesday could have confessed to her failings and apologised. But it did no such thing. She went out the same way she had got in: on a blizzard of victimhood.

Others joined in her defence. Ibram X Kendi (author of the mistitled bestseller How To Be an Antiracist) claimed that “Racist mobs won’t stop until they topple all Black people from positions of power and influence who are not reinforcing the structure of racism.” Nikole Hannah-Jones (who initiated the New York Times’s lamentably ahistorical “1619 Project”) claimed something similar. She said in the wake of Gay’s resignation that “Academic freedom is under attack. Racial justice programs are under attack. Black women will be made to pay.”

In its coverage of Gay’s resignation, even the BBC claimed that the embattled former president had been a victim of America’s “campus culture wars”. The broadcaster also said that “For her Right-wing critics, Dr Gay – who is black – represents much of what they loathe about modern American higher education, which they view as being dominated by a Left-wing ideology that places a greater emphasis on ethnic and gender diversity than on academic rigour.”

Which is a typical BBC smear. Note the way in which the report implies that Gay being black was the problem here. And that the idea that identity politics trumps academic rigour is some kind of phantasm from the fevered imagination of the Right. The trouble is that identity politics does trump academic rigour in the modern American academy. Gay’s own appointment last year was testimony to this. Although in her bitter resignation statement she claimed that academic excellence and standards are central to who she is, they have never been obviously so. She herself is almost entirely without academic distinction.

Murray then notes, as I did, Gay’s thin record of scholarship—only 11 published articles and one book that she edited—and the fact that, now demoted to her original job as a professor of sociology and black studies, she will continue to pull down her Presidential salary of $900,000 per year. That’s truly obscene, but I guess Gay, who had her own lawyer, cut some kind of deal with Harvard agreeing that, for all that dosh, she’d go gentle into that good professorship.  As Murray says at the end of his piece, “It was high time she went. But nobody should feel sorry for her. This already very privileged woman is going to remain on the teaching faculty of Harvard with a nice pay package of around $900,000 a year. Victimhood turns out to be nice work if you can get it.”

In the 11-minute video below, Murray discusses GayGate with Ayaan Hirsi Ali. He first adds Al Sharpton to the panoply of people attributing Gay’s resignation to racism.  Hirsi Ali responds that the case is “not all about race, it’s about the mediocrity and mafia that he represents so well, and that he has profited from for so many years. And I think it’s time that we ditch this diversity, equity, and inclusion movement that is really all about dismantling and degrading our institutions, about expunging our history, about indoctrinating kids at school. It started at universities and goes beyond that.”  She adds that DEI has spread “everywhere in America”, and we need to be aware of that.

Both Douglas and Hirsi Ali discuss Gay’s thin academic record and apparent plagiarism, with Hirsi Ali hurling the zinger,  “My grandmother would not trust Claudine Gay to herd her goats.” She then calls Ibram Kendi (see above) a “racist” who has used that term to benefit personally, though she thinks this form of “antiracism” is on the way out. (I’m not so sure, but Kendi is probably on the way out, but still has his millions.) The “mediocre mafia”, she says, “will disappear.”

The discussion goes into how Gay’s resignation may create a space in which merit rather than ethnicity can return as a criterion for advancement, with Ayaan arguing that the decline in merit has been promoted only by a loud vocal minority.

Hirsi Ali offers her own solution to America’s racial disparities that has left some people behind: “The way to lift up the people who are left behind is to make them a part of the values that make us come ahead: the values of hard work, the values of community, the values of commitment, responsibility, of getting up in the morning, of lifting yourself up by your bootstraps. That, I think, is for me what America is all about. And we can do that without degrading the standards of what has lifted up everyone out of poverty.”

But of course how does one do that? She offers no suggestions, but there was no time for them—if she had any.

Murray finally brings up the “young white men who nobody is speaking up for,” though that, to me, sounds a bit whiny.

In the end, Hirsi Ali expresses a hope that l’affaire Gay marks the ending of woke ideology but a beginning of a real way to address disparities without a victimhood narrative. Murray ends by saying, “Who would have thought that Harvard would be the place where DEI went to die?”

But I think DEI is far more entrenched in universities than either of them think. To get rid of it would entail either firing a ton of people or putting them in new jobs where they can’t work their mischief.  No, DEI is here to say—for a long time. It is not about diversity or inclusion, but aims solely at “equity”, or proportional representation regardless of merit.  DEI is indeed responsible fot hte decline of merit, which is the greatest mischief.  They might as well call the program just “E.”

The Atlantic: how DEI is ruining humanities in American universities

December 26, 2023 • 10:30 am

This article in the new Atlantic was given two titles; the original is the second one below, while the latest—and the one on the site—is the first. Presumably the older  title looked too provocative. You can go to the Atlantic‘s online piece by clicking on the first title, but in all likelihood it’s paywalled. But you can find it archived here (or click on second title).

The article is a good one, explaining why, to author Tyler Austin Harper, the humanities are being erased in American universities.  Many departments have been cut back in the face of declining enrollment (see below), while others have been eliminated entirely. (Neither I nor Harper are talking about “studies” departments, like Chicago’s new Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity; rather, we’re talking about the “classical” humanities like departments of English, classics, and art history.

The author is identified as “an assistant professor of environmental studies at Bates College”, and he’s black, which adds information (and credibility to his critique.  In this piece, Harper not only gives his take on why the humanities are moribund in America, why they’re valuable, and how one can combat their disappearance.  I happen to be a huge fan of the classical humanities (not so much of “studies” departments, which I see as vehicles not of learning but of propaganda), for I got a ton out my humanities studies at the liberal arts College of William and Mary, and their effects remain with me. So I, like Harper, defend the retention of classical humanities. Sadly, I don’t think the decline of the humanities can be stopped—not until wokeness abates in American universities.

The older one (identical in content); click to go to archived link. As usual, I’ve indented excerpts from the article.

First, Harper notes that the reason humanities are dying has to do with them becoming more political and ideological—even English departments. Our own English Department, for example, announced in 2021 that it would admit only those graduate students who planned to work in black studies. At Princeton, the well known classics professor Dan-el Padilla Peralta called for the elimination or radical restructing of his own field on the grounds that it promoted white supremacy. Princeton later eliminated its requirement that students know either Latin or Greek.   In this way humanities is morphing into studies. Indeed, that’s what college administrators want:

The idea that radical faculty members are destroying majors like English by teaching classes on the “queer subtexts” of Taylor Swift, rather than the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, makes for a provocative talking point. But narratives like this unwittingly turn the problem inside out. If the humanities have become more political over the past decade, it is largely in response to coercion from administrators and market forces that prompt disciplines to prove that they are “useful.” In this sense, the growing identitarian drift of the humanities is rightly understood as a survival strategy: an attempt to stay afloat in a university landscape where departments compete for scarce resources, student attention, and prestige.

And this, says Harper, comes back to the miscreant we see so often in the downfall of universities: DEI, which sticks its nose into every aspect of university life, rarely improving it.

Administrators, not professors, usually approve hiring decisions, and these administrators are under intense external and internal pressure to diversify the faculty and curricula. Diversifying the faculty is a noble goal—I’m a beneficiary of these initiatives—but universities have looked for clumsy shortcuts. The reigning assumption is that scholars of color are disproportionately represented in activism-oriented fields such as “decolonial theory,” which means that deans—always seeking more brown faces to put on university websites—are more likely to approve new tenure lines in ideologically supercharged, diversity-rich disciplines. It is often faculty who are trying to safeguard their fields from the progressive machinations of their bureaucratic overlords. But faced with a choice between watching their departments shrink or agreeing to hire in areas that help realize the personnel-engineering schemes of their bosses, departments tend to choose the latter.

And this has led to the erosion of humanities departments because they no longer attract scholars who really want to study humanities. rather. prospective students, from pecuniary motives, want to study humanities involved in “studies”:

At the same time, a generation of Ph.D. students is eyeing current hiring practices and concluding that the only research that has a prayer of landing them a tenure-track position relates to questions of identity and justice. I went on the job market in 2019—the last year before hiring and Ph.D.-admission trends toward activism dramatically accelerated as a response to George Floyd’s murder. The pressure, as a scholar of color, to bend my work to the study of race was already intense. Were I on the job market now, it would no doubt feel insurmountable. Open literature jobs this year are overwhelmingly skewed toward subfields related to identity, politics, and power. The message this sends to scholars of color, who are the intended audience for these job ads, is clear: The only expertise we want from you is the expertise that flows from your identity.

. . . As the historian Asheesh Kapur Siddique, a vocal champion of the history profession, told me: “We’re no different from the sciences and math. Just as there wouldn’t be any computer chips without quantum mechanics, there wouldn’t be any 1619 Project without scholarship on early-modern accounting practices. But it’s the curiosity-driven research in the humanities that’s being seriously undermined right now—this is what needs defending and advocacy.”

. . . A cynic could easily argue that the core purpose of the humanities has become to provide the illusion of progressivism to deeply unprogressive institutions, helping them appeal to wealthy liberal students.

It hasn’t worked. After a boom in the number of humanities students in the 1960s, the area is now experiencing a big bust. and enrollment has dropped further: 30% between 2005 and 2020.

Unfortunately, the response of humanities faculty has not been to emphasize the real value of humanities in enhancing one’s life (who cares about that now, anyway?), but to mistakenly point out that studying humanities is politically and socially useful. That notion is a recipe for disaster:

Instead of trying to prove that the humanities are more economically useful than other majors—a tricky proposition—humanists have taken to justifying their continued existence within the academy by insisting that they are uniquely socially and politically useful. The emergent sales pitch is not that the humanities produce and transmit important knowledge, but rather that studying the humanities promotes nebulous but nice-sounding values, such as empathy and critical thinking, that are allegedly vital to the cause of moral uplift in a multicultural democracy. If the arc of the universe bends toward justice, some would have you believe that it is humanities departments that do the bending.

This, too, turns humanities into “studies. But, as Harper points out, using an excellent quote from Kurt Vonnegut (read the piece to see it), there’s not the slightest evidence that studying the humanities transforms society in a positive way (by “positive”, I mean, “in the direction of Enlightenment values”).

Although all these trends are mostly promoted by the Left, Harper doesn’t let the Right off the hook, either. They not only have defunded or eliminated humanities because of declining enrollment, but use the very politicization of humanities as an excuse to do so. Who wants those Lefty-taught propaganda courses?  And, of course, everyone knows the difficulty of getting a job, much less a six-figure income, with a degree in, say, English or art history. So another reason for the decline of humanities relative to STEM studies is the increasing commodification of universities: even liberal-arts students demand to know how studying Caravaggio will help them get a job. (Some of my own evolution students, primarily pre-meds, used to beef that studying evolution was useless for their goal of becoming doctors.)

So how do we defend the humanities? Clearly, it’s because they enrich your life independently of your income—at least that’s my view.  My personal example is studying philosophy and art history.  Had I not taken those classes in college (fortunately with charismatic professors, numerous at a teaching school like William and Mary), I don’t think I’d be reading philosophy now, or going to art galleries and reading books on art. Humanities education, at least for some, ignites a fire to engage in lifelong learning, and surely that makes your life better. I wouldn’t give a hoot for a scientist who dismisses the value of literature or art (sadly, I am mostly tone-deaf to the allure of classical music, but I don’t dismiss it!) And this seems to be Harper’s view as well:

If Newfield is right that we must reestablish the humanities as a serious research discipline, then we must begin by defending the idea that the humanities have value that is independent of their political or economic use-value. We can make the case that we are not the stewards of some rigid and exclusionary Western cultural heritage or literary canon but of a millennia-old tradition of human inquiry that is still capable of producing knowledge vital to understanding our present. And above all, we can start by being honest—publicly honest—about the forces that form, and deform, the humanities today.

. . . When I fell in love with English on a college campus many years ago, it was precisely because studying John Milton and James Joyce and Octavia Butler was so intoxicatingly useless in market terms. It rejected the assumption that value and utility are synonyms. The humanities captivated me—and foiled the best-laid plans of mice and pre-med—because literature and philosophy seemed to begin from a quietly revolutionary premise: There is thinking that does not exist merely to become work, and knowledge that does not exist merely to become capital. As a blue-collar undergraduate, that was a radical proposition. And it’s the only kind of politics we should expect—or require—from the humanities.

Sadly, mounting a defense like this seems doomed. Too many students want palpable usefulness from their studies. And that is the fault of whoever made liberal-arts education into a commodity.  My own limp defense would be to ask students to read Joyce’s story “The Dead”—in my view, the greatest thing written in English. If they’re not moved by the story and its ending, then there’s no hope for the humanities.

Bari Weiss on why DEI must be dismantled

December 19, 2023 • 9:15 am

In this 20-minute video, Bari Weiss makes two points. First, the testimony of the MIT, Harvard, and Penn Presidents before a House committee was antisemitic and reprehensible, and reflects a widespread lack of “moral leadership” in universities. Second, this moral leadership requires the elimination of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives in higher education.

Weiss points out what was really reprehensible in the Presidents’ testimony, which was their arrant hypocrisy in having a history of enforcing lesser violations of speech codes, not the fact that their speech codes apparently called for First Amendment-style freedom of speech (I’m not sure that they do). Insofar as such codes should reflect the First Amendment, then, yes, calling for the genocide of Jews is allowed in most cases, though the courts’ interpretation of the Amendment deems such speech impermissible on some occasions, like promoting predictable and imminent violence. (And of course real violence violates all university behavior codes. But you can’t start enforcing freedom of speech right at the moment that it’s calling for genocide of Jews.

In that sense, then, the Presidents were right in answering “it depends” when asked whether their speech codes permitted calls for genocide of the Jews. It’s unfortunate that their answers were given in such a  wooden and stiff way—probably the result of coaching by lawyers—and that adherence to institutional neutrality may have prevented them from expressing their own personal opinions, though in such a forum I think that giving their personal take would be okay. And, of course, they all have to fix their speech codes so that permitted speech not only comports with how the courts construe the First Amendment, but that speech regulations are enforced uniformly.

Where Weiss goes amiss, I think, is when she pronounces that Liz Magill and the other Presidents really did “do something wrong.”  What was that? Magill, says Weiss (and presumably the other Presidents, though they’re not mentioned here), failed in this way (7:53):

“failed the very basic duties that [Magill’s] role and responsibilities required of her, because the job of a university president is not merely to point out the basic Constitutional rights of student to scream for a violent uprising against Jews or anyone else—and of course the students have those legal rights—but is pointing out obvious legal rights why we have university presidents? Is their job simply to remind us that people are allowed to shout terrible things,  and that the First Amendment protects them from doing so?. . .

“The job of a university president is not merely to point out what is and isn’t legally permissible.  The job of a university president is to offer leadership—intellectual leadership, of course, but also moral leadership.

“. . . Can anyone look at these three people and say that they offer the kind of inspiring leadership and moral clarity that the country so desperately need at this moment. I think that those questions answer themselves?”

Weiss offers as her remedies “committing to  intellectual freedom, not ideology. . hiring based on merit. . .doing away with double standards based on speech”, and not sending your kids or checks to schools that betray truly liberal values.

This is all good stuff, except that if one expects college presidents to exert moral clarity leadership by condemning speech that they find reprehensible, or making political pronouncements—something that Weiss implies but doesn’t state directly—then that violates an important principle for promoting free discourse: intellectual neutrality. That is, schools should not make any official pronouncements on moral, ideological or political issues.

That principle, which is the opposite of universities providing “moral clarity,” is embodied in the Kalven Principle of the University of Chicago, a principle embraced by only two other of the several thousand American colleges.  We should not expect college Presidents to condemn Hamas or offer similar “moral leadership” as part of their regular jobs, for that violates institutional neutrality, chilling the speech of those who disagree.

You can’t fix a free-speech problem by placing more limits on speech. (Those limits, of course, will change over time, and are largely subjective.) The administration of the University of Chicago has made no public pronouncement on the morality involved in the Middle East war (see here for our statement), and we’ve come to no harm because of that.

Real moral leadership should be exercised by getting university to adopt those principles that promote the functions of a university: teaching, learning, and the free discourse that promotes these things. The other day I described Steve Pinker’s Fivefold Way: five principles that, if adopted by a school, can create the kind of climate that Weiss wants. These five are free speech, institutional neutrality, the prohibition of violence (already in place and already illegal), viewpoint diversity, and disempowering DEI.

These last two principles have not been enacted, but are necessary for The Good University.  Weiss doesn’t mention viewpoint diversity, but at 11:58 she does begin her clarion call for dismantling DEI, for she argues it imposes an injurious ideology on universities.  Pinker shares her views, as do I: DEI is divisive, sucks up lots of money without producing results, reduces viewpoint diversity, is racist in some ways, values ethnicity above merit, and quashes dissent.  Those are not liberal principles.

Here’s what Pinker said about DEI in his Boston Globe op-ed, as of the five parts of his Fix the Universities plan (I’ve given a screenshot since it’s impossible to cut and paste):

With the exception Weiss’s call for university presidents to exercise “moral clarity and leadership”, then, her discussion is eloquent and correct. I hasten to add that she doesn’t really specify how “moral leadership” is to be exercised.  The best way is to put in place and then adhere to the five principles outlined by Pinker.

Will that happen? I’m not confident that universities will launch policies of institutional neutrality, start dismantling DEI, and begin enforcing viewpoint diversity.  Very few are moving in even one of these three directions. But they’ll never do so unless people like us press for these changes.

 

h/t: Rosemary

Conor Friedersdorf (and Alexander Barvinok) on ideological coercion in American colleges

December 15, 2023 • 11:00 am

The Atlantic‘s Conor Fridersdorf is a breath of fresh air among liberal woke media.  He is in fact a liberal, but not a “progressive”, and in the new article below he reports one mathematician’s observations of how DEI has insinuated itself into academics, creating not only viewpoint homogeneity, but authoritarianism.

Like my colleague Anna Krylov, Alexander Barvinok began his studies in Russia (math for him, chemistry for Anna), and then moved to the U.S., where, at the university of Michigan, he initially enjoyed the academic freedom he lacked overseas. But then, as time crept towards the present, Barvinok found that math began changing in the direction of a Soviet-style academia, with required conformity and fealty to non-scienctific but ideological ideals. Granted, we don’t kill American academics for bucking conventional ideology, but the parallels between Russia and the U.S. about how the authoritarianism started and advanced are striking. Anna’s story is very similar.  Right now we’re at the “DEI stage” of authoritarianism, but will it stop here? I doubt it.

Click to read, though it’s paywalled. I didn’t find it archived, so a judicious inquiry might yield the piece.

I’ll quote from Friedersdorf’s nice piece, in which Barvinok’s words are given in quotation marks.

“I grew up in the Soviet Union, where people had to affirm their fealty to ideals, and the leaders embodying those ideals, on a daily basis,” he told me. “As years went by, I observed the remarkable ease with which passionate communists turned first into passionate pro-Western liberals and then into passionate nationalists. This lived experience and also common sense convince me that only true conformists excel in this game. Do we really want our math departments to be populated by conformists?”

Barvinok insists that it isn’t diversity to which he objects. Any coerced statement, he says, would trouble him as much. “Even if one is required to say ‘I passionately believe that water would certainly wet us, as fire would certainly burn,’” hewrotein his resignation letter, “the routine affirmation of one’s beliefs as a precondition of making a living constitutes compelled speech and corrupts everyone who participates in the performance.”

It is this compelled speech, which we all know has to adhere to the Kendi-an au courant antiracist doctrine, that makes DEI statements offensive and inimical.  If you diverge from the accepted narrative, your job application might not even get looked at, and you may not be promoted. This is neither inclusive nor promotes diversity, since it leads to everyone having—or at least professing—the same views on diversity.  Those who aren’t “included” keep their mouths shut. And do mathematicians really need to even deal with such issues? I haven’t heard a good argument for it. So long as professors and universities don’t discriminate on the grounds of race, gender, or any other such immutable trait, and concentrate on academic merit and service instead, all will be well.

Barvinok graduated first in his class in St Petersburg, but couldn’t get a good job because he was Jewish. (Yes, Russia was and is still rife with antisemitism.)  After Gorbachev came to power and things loosened up, he got a postdoc in Stockholm, and then moved to Cornell and finally to Michigan in 1994, where he became tenured.

The ideological rot in mathematics (and other sciences, I’m guessing) began soon thereafter, and occurred, Barvinok says, in three stages.

STAGE 1: The NSF kicks off the “broader impact” requirement for scientists

When did he first fret about the political environment in American universities? Looking back, he recalls steady growth in three broad trends that he began to notice sometime in the early 2000s. “Initially, as an American professor, you were in good standing if you taught well, did reasonable research, and were a good colleague, which was demonstrated by your willingness to do committee work,” he recalled. “The first trend I noticed was that to count as a ‘good citizen,’ you were increasingly expected to contribute, so to speak, to the betterment of humanity at large.”

In particular, he recalled the National Science Foundation introducing a requirement starting in 1997 to describe the “broader impacts” of research proposals and how that changed the experience of participating as an expert on panels convened to judge grant applications. In a few cases, applicants he knew as “excellent mathematicians” and “pretty decent individuals” would describe their research objectives with care, knowledge, and enthusiasm, whereas in the mandatory “broader impact” section, they would have “nothing better to say than that they plan to write joint papers with women and supervise female graduate students,” so mething that outraged some members of the panel

“I understood the outrage, of course, but for me it was an indication that this perhaps well-intended requirement was in fact ill-advised, as it pushed otherwise decent people to behave in a silly, sometimes obnoxious manner,” he reflected. “It also appeared that the university and college policies in hiring, and to some extent promotions and merit raises, were increasingly motivated by the desire to effect some positive social changes, in the form of a contribution to DEI.”

STAGE 2:  College administrations grow with new hires involved in DEI

The second trend that Barvinok began to notice in the aughts was the growth of college administrators and the growing coherence of the messages issued by the administrators across institutions. Today, the University of Michigan’s DEI bureaucracy is huge: According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Michigan’s DEI structure, with $85 million in initial funding and more than 100 employees contributing at least part time to diversity efforts, is widely considered among the most ambitious and well-funded offices in the nation.” Multiple pages on the University of Michigan website emphasize efforts to infuse DEI values into faculty hiring, research, and more.

Let me emphasize that I’ve been at the University of Chicago since 1986, and although DEI has grown and is more visible, it hasn’t been as noticeable here nor as oppressive as at Michigan, which has a much bigger DEI bureaucracy.

STAGE 3: DEI comes to dominate and invade all academic effort

The third trend he noticed was the changing nature of debate. More and more often, someone would claim that an argument was harming a particular demographic, often without specifying how. As he recalls it, “It was at this ‘harm’ stage that people became afraid to speak their minds.”

This is where the diversity of opinion began diminishing and those who didn’t feel “included” became too intimidated to oppose the trend.

Barvinok sees all these stages as related and thus, perhaps, an “organic progression”:

In Barvinok’s telling, the three trends he described—the institutional requirement to do public good, the growth of the academic bureaucracy, and the accusations of causing harm to silence opponents—are interrelated. “The more social goals one wants to effect, and the more ambitious they are, the more administrators one needs, who in turn may put forth new social goals or make the existing ones more ambitious,” he explained. “If you are convinced that what you do is in the public good, then clearly your opponent is causing harm.” Furthermore, if someone’s actions fail to advance progress (as self-styled reformers see it) quickly and smoothly, or have the opposite effect, there’s a tendency “to search for the enemies within, who hinder the effort, maybe unwittingly.”

As an example of how well the termites have been dining, Barvinok uses the case of UC Davis math professor Abigail Thompson (recounted on this website), who was demonized simply for publishing an article in Notices of the American Mathematical Society favoring DEI but arguing against mandatory DEI statements. That caused a maelstrom (read the link above). It was, for Barvinok, a watershed moment when he realized that, as in Russia, simply expressing a heterodox idea could get you in trouble.

But wait! The rot kept spreading. Here’s what happened after the death of George Floyd, when academic ideology became totally authoritarian:

On June 26, 2020, about a month after the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, an email addressed to the math department arrived in his inbox. In it, the department chairman told everyone that a math-department committee that focuses on the “climate” of the department, with the vetting of the department’s executive committee, had written a statement on the department’s response to racism.

It contained the following lines:

We understand and acknowledge that systemic racism permeates all aspects of our society. We acknowledge that systemic racism permeates the culture of our own institution and department. For this we are deeply sorry; we know that we have work to do.

Once again, Barvinok thought of the society he’d left as a young man.

“In my memory from Brezhnev to more recent Putin times, the slogan ‘We have work to do’ served as an unmistakable indicator that no work would be done, as those who work don’t have an appetite for sloganeering,” he told me. “Still, to gather my wits, I decided to do some work of my own and went to wash the deck of my house.” When he returned, an email to the whole math faculty by a fellow professor was in his inbox. The math department’s email, it read, “essentially states that the majority of my colleagues are racists, a false accusation which I refuse to join.”

Barvinok then responded himself. “I wrote a couple emails to the effect that the department has no business making political (or religious, or artistic, or gastronomical) statements on behalf of its members, and suggested that those who support the statement should just sign it,” he told me. “It became clear then that people were afraid to voice their opinion, unless it was aligned with what was perceived as the dominant narrative. There were many fewer people who expressed their disapproval of the statement publicly than those who did it privately.”

The Michigan fealty statement is very similar to the University of Chicago’s Lab School Science Department statement that I highlighted yesterday, a likely violation of our University’s principle of institutional neutrality. It’s harmful for reasons that Barvinok gives above.  Are we becoming like Russia?

Read and weep (Lab School, please ditch this statement!) The markings are from a parent.

It’s not that different from the Michigan statement, right?

The result is, as you’d expect, a reduction in expressed viewpoint diversity and a “non-inclusion” of those who don’t accept the loyalty oaths.  Friedersdorf issues a call for those who dissent to speak up:

Asurveyof 1,500 faculty in the U.S. conducted by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression found that half of respondents considered such statements “an ideological litmus test that violates academic freedom.” If Barvinok’s analysis is correct, that cohort could speak out against DEI statements without significant risk to their career, if only they coordinate and do so in numbers.

Then again, the longer the current system is in place, the harder it may be to reform––if hiring processes are biased in favor of a given ideology, and against those who dissent from it, the faction benefiting from bias will come to dominate the institution over time. As Barvinok put it in his letter to the American Mathematical Society, “I anticipate an argument that the AMS is ‘not involved in politics.’ But this is the kind of ‘politics’ that, rephrasing Pericles, will get involved with you, whether you like it or not, and hence inaction is just as political as action.”

For dissenters, the best time to speak up is now.

And so I have.  Onward and upward!

Here’s Barvinok lecturing at MIT in 2019:

Oh, and here’s an informative tweet about U. Mich. Look at those salaries!

Extremes of identitarianism at Ohio State: hirings based largely on DEI statements

November 22, 2023 • 11:00 am

This column from the Wall Street Journal’s op-ed section is going around our University’s “heterodox” faculty, and paints a dire picture of what happens when DEI goes to extremes.  The upshot: at Ohio State University (OSU), a public school, DEI is so pervasive in the hiring process that faculty get hired largely on their DEI statement, with academic merit a secondary consideration. People apply for professor jobs frantically tout their DEI credentials, including intersectionality, and the statements are so extreme that they make you cringe.

Not only that but, as in all such programs—DEI statements were required until recently for all appointments in OSU’s College of Arts and Sciences—getting hired depended on conforming to a certain type of DEI: the Kendi-an “antiracism” program.  You can’t use Dr. King’s “character versus skin color” assessment: that’s a one-way ticket to not getting the job. It’s ironic, then that the “diversity” bit of DEI really means conformity to a received ideology—something not lost on author John Sailer, a senior fellow at the National Association of Scholars.

I’ve been wary of quoting (or even reading) WSJ op-eds, as they’re predictably conservative. But that was dumb of me: although I’m a liberal, I need to challenge my ideas as much as does a conservative.  And a good way to do that is read what’s considered “good” conservative opinion. After all, I read the New York Times op-eds, which are just as predictably liberal. So I make no apologies for quoting this one, especially because it’s mostly facts and not opinion.

To see the damage that a vigorous DEI program in hiring can wreak on academic quality, click the headline below, or you can also find it archived here.

Sailer used a public-records request to get his hands on over 800 pages of “Diversity Faculty Recruitment Reports,” i.e., reports on every job candidate that were required to be submitted to the administration from search committees. And what is in those reports will curl the soles of your shoes (unless you’re wearing Louboutins).  Sailer’s words are indented.

In February 2021, then-president Kristina Johnson launched an initiative to hire 50 professors whose work focused on race and “social equity” and “100 underrepresented and BIPOC hires” (the acronym stands for black, indigenous and people of color). These reports show what higher education’s outsize investment in “diversity, equity and inclusion” looks like in practice. Ohio State sacrificed both academic freedom and scholarly excellence for the sake of a narrowly construed vision of diversity.

Each report required search committees to describe how their proposed finalists “would amplify the values of diversity, inclusion and innovation.” Some reports were dutiful and bureaucratic; others exuded enthusiasm. All were revealing. Racial diversity was touted as a tool to achieve viewpoint diversity, but viewpoint conformity often served as a tool to meet de facto quotas. One report said a candidate would “greatly enhance our engagement with queer theory outside of the western epistemological approaches which would greatly support us both in recruitment and retention of diverse graduate populations.”

It’s embarrassing to see the candidates, desperately wanting jobs, touting their intersectionality or, if they were the white males at the bottom of the heap, trying to confect some DEI credentials:

Other committees valued political ideology as an end in itself. In a search for a professor of chemistry, the report notes that one candidate’s “experiences as a queer, neurodivergent Latinx woman in STEM has provided her with an important motivation to expand DEI efforts beyond simply representation and instead toward social justice.” Another report concedes that “as a white male” one proposed finalist “does not outwardly present as a diversity candidate.” In his defense it notes that he recently published on critical race theory.

In some cases, the DEI statement was weighted equally, or nearly equally, with academic merit:

In some cases, committees evaluated diversity statements through an explicitly ideological lens. A committee searching for a professor of freshwater biology selected finalists “based upon a weighted rubric of 67% research and 33% contribution to DEI.” To evaluate the statements, the committee used a rubric that cited several “problematic approaches” for which a candidate can receive a zero score—for example, if he “solely acknowledges that racism, classism, etc. are issues in the academy.” It isn’t enough for a freshwater biologist to believe that racism pervades higher education.

The rubric meanwhile gave a high score for DEI-focused activism outside academia, for demonstrating an understanding of “intersectionality” and for embracing a vision of “anti-racism” that “requires consistent and long-term growth, reflection, and engagement (and that they are prepared to put in this work).”

Viewpoint discrimination aside, these assessments reveal an issue of basic priority. For a search in astrophysics, “the DEI statement was given equal weight to the research and teaching statements.” This would strike many as a poor metric for judging astrophysicists.

Indeed! And in astrophysics!

And even bodyt weight makes its way into the statements:

Candidates’ demographics also appeared to play a significant role in faculty hiring decisions. Throughout the reports, references to the race and sex of candidates abound. Many of the job candidates’ diversity statements emphasized their own “intersectional” identities—“a person of color and a member of the LGBTQ+ community,” “a first generation, fat, queer scholar of color” and so on.

Does being overweight contribute to viewpoint diversity? Are universities supposed to increase the diversity of avoirdupois? I suppose you can make the case that “fat” people are, like “queer people of color” considered oppressed.  But should university increase the variance of body weight?

At any rate, this DEI initiative, which now appears to have been deep-sixed (for one thing, the recent Supreme Court decision on affirmative action probably made this kind of hiring illegal). But it had already had its effects:

This emphasis seemed to have an effect—sometimes a remarkable one—on the demographic makeup of the proposed finalists. For a role in communications, four of the 46 applicants were Hispanic—and so were two of the three finalists. One role in medical anthropology had 67 applicants. The four finalists include the only two black applicants and the only Native American applicant. “All four scholars on our shortlist are women of color,” the committee said.

. . . . . Some search committees at Ohio State were surprisingly forthcoming about their use of racial preferences. “Diversity and inclusion featured prominently in all our discussions,” wrote one committee in the division of geodetic sciences. “Naturally, most weight was given to candidates from URM”—underrepresented minority—“backgrounds, but we also gave considerable weight to the diversity statements that were provided by all candidates.”

One faculty position advertised last year was in French and francophone studies with a “specialization in Black France.” It yielded a more racially diverse but still majority-white applicant pool. The committee was adamant about its intended outcome. “In our deliberations to select finalists, the importance of bringing Black scholars to campus was deemed to be essential. We thus chose three Black candidates.”

It added: “We decided as a committee that diversity was just as important as perceived merit as we made our selections.”

This is a remedy for academic disaster: judging people by their adherence to a progressive view of identitarian politics as much as by their academic quality.  The solution? Widen the opening of the pipeline by trying to ensure equal opportunity for people at the very beginning of their lives (granted, a very hard and expensive task, but the only way to go). By the time someone gets to the career stage of applying for jobs, the tradeoff between ethnicity and merit is already there, although those with more zealotry than neurons insist that you can have both diversity and merit—that there is no tradeoff. But that’s simply not true, for we see people left and right trying to increase diversity by lowering academic standards: ditching standardized tests and using “holistic admissions.” They’re even doing this in medical-school admissions, and the result will have to be an average decrease in the quality of doctors.

Another solution: just as all universities should adopt Chicago’s Kalven Report on institutional neutrality, so they should also adopt our “Shils report“, which lays out the criteria for hiring and promotion. Its conclusions are summed up on a statement on page 5:

There must be no consideration of sex, ethnic or national characteristics, or political or religious beliefs or affiliations in any decision regarding appointment, promotion, or reappointment at any level of the academic staff.

The whole report is 23 pages long, but the Provost’s office gives a summary:

On 15 July 1970, the Committee on the Criteria of Academic Appointment was appointed by President Edward H. Levi. This Committee was charged with writing a report that would become the basis for evaluating faculty up for promotion. 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
This Committee understood that unless such high standards existed and were used, the University would – indeed – become a pantheon for dead or dying gods incapable of attracting the best minds from around the world.

“Service” is construed as committee work or other work that helps the university meet the first three criteria. It is not construed as adherence to any belief system, as you can see in the sentence above.  And we still adhere to this. DEI statements are strictly forbidden here, though, of course, those of a “progressive” bent try to find ways to get around this.  Violating the Shils criteria, as the committee recognized is a recipe for erosion of academic quality as well as an abrogation of academic freedom, and it’s telling that Ohio State no longer adheres to its draconian and uniformitarian standards.

By the way, I just found this job ad for an astrophysics position at Penn State (another state school). The stuff you have to submit for the job are these (the arrow is mine):

I suspect that this kind of stuff is actually illegal, but to fight it in court one needs “standing”: plaintiffs who have been injured by the regulation. It’s obvious why academics cut out of the process for inadequate DEI statements won’t go to court, for they’d be forever demonized. Nevertheless, I think there are at least two court cases in the works involving required DEI statements.

Bari Weiss proposes ending DEI

November 9, 2023 • 12:38 pm

Bari Weiss, head of the Free Press, just published this article on her website, but it appeared in Tablet, in identical form, a few days ago. You can click on the headline below to read it, or go here to see it on her site.

As the subheader on her FP article says, “It’s not about diversity, equity, or inclusion. It is about arrogating power to a movement that threatens not just Jews—but America itself.”

Some excerpts:

Twenty years ago, when I was a college student, I started writing about a then-nameless, niche ideology that seemed to contradict everything I had been taught since I was a child.

It is possible I would not have perceived the nature of this ideology—or rather, I would have been able to avoid seeing its true nature—had I not been a Jew. But I was. I am. And in noticing the way I had been written out of the equation, I started to notice that it wasn’t just me, but that the whole system rested on an illusion.

What I saw was a worldview that replaced basic ideas of good and evil with a new rubric: the powerless (good) and the powerful (bad). It replaced lots of things. Colorblindness with race-obsession. Ideas with identity. Debate with denunciation. Persuasion with public shaming. The rule of law with the fury of the mob.

People were to be given authority in this new order not in recognition of their gifts, hard work, accomplishments, or contributions to society, but in inverse proportion to the disadvantages their group had suffered, as defined by radical ideologues. According to them, as Jamie Kirchick concisely put it in these pages: “Muslim > gay, Black > female, and everybody > the Jews.”

. . . Over the past two decades, I saw this inverting worldview swallow all of the crucial sense-making institutions of American life. It started with the universities. Then it moved on to cultural institutions—including some I knew well, like The New York Times—as well as every major museum, philanthropy, and media company. Then on to our medical schools and our law schools. It’s taken root at nearly every major corporation. It’s inside our high schools and even our elementary schools. The takeover is so comprehensive that it’s now almost hard to notice it—because it is everywhere.

Including in the Jewish community.

Weiss sees DEI as especially dangerous to the small community of Jews because although they’ve achieved a great deal despite historical persecution, they’re now perceived, courtesy of the DEI philosophy, as white oppressors, and thus are fair game (indeed, the fairest game) for hatred. Their Jewishness not only trumps that merit, but puts them, as noted above, at the very bottom of humanity’s heap.

More:

But “DEI” is not about the words it uses as camouflage. DEI is about arrogating power.

And the movement that is gathering all this power does not like America or liberalism. It does not believe that America is a good country—at least no better than China or Iran. It calls itself progressive, but it does not believe in progress; it is explicitly anti-growth. It claims to promote “equity,” but its answer to the challenge of teaching math or reading to disadvantaged children is to eliminate math and reading tests. It demonizes hard work, merit, family, and the dignity of the individual.

An ideology that pathologizes these fundamental human virtues is one that seeks to undermine what makes America exceptional.

It is time to end DEI for good. No more standing by as people are encouraged to segregate themselves. No more forced declarations that you will prioritize identity over excellence. No more compelled speech. No more going along with little lies for the sake of being polite.

The Jewish people have outlived every single regime and ideology that has sought our elimination. We will persist, one way or another. But DEI is undermining America, and that for which it stands—including the principles that have made it a place of unparalleled opportunity, safety, and freedom for so many. Fighting it is the least we owe this country.

I wonder if this piece could have been written as effectively without the concentration on Judaism, which smacks a bit of special pleading. After all, halfway through the article she says this:

It isn’t only Jews who suffer from the suggestion that merit and excellence are dirty words. It is strivers of every race, ethnicity, and class. That is why Asian American success, for example, is suspicious. The percentages are off. The scores are too high. From whom did you steal all that success?

It is the denigration of merit in favor of identity that is the most destructive aspect of DEI.  That is one reason that a number of us, concerned with the erosion of merit in our own fields of science, cowrote a paper called “In Defense of Merit in Science,” Of course we had trouble publishing it, and of course it was widely attacked. Merit is going out of style.

I still believe that some form of reparations are due those who have been held back by bigotry, but I am still unable to specify what kind of reparations.  Weiss would probably not agree with me there, but I am with her in suspecting that the DEI movement, and its partner “identity politics”, are warping American society in many ways. It is not getting more unified, but more fragmented, with groups competing for hegemony. And I have no confidence that this trend will be reversed.