Category: universities behaving badly

NIH gets into the game of requiring job candidates to show track records of promoting diversity

February 2, 2020 • 10:30 am

At the end of last year, I pointed out that the University of California system was implementing a new procedure for hiring faculty. It involved candidates submitting “diversity statements” that recounted their knowledge about diversity, their past efforts to increase diversity in their institutions, and their plans for promoting diversity if they were hired.

While I favor a form of affirmative action to increase diversity in hiring, I objected to the diversity-statement procedure because it not only demands adherence to a specific ideology (candidates’ diversity statements were scored on a point system, with higher points given to those whose statements matched the philosophy of the evaluators), but also gives the diversity statement priority over all other qualifications: if a candidate’s diversity score didn’t meet or exceed the cutoff threshold of 11 points, the application was discarded without further review.

This procedure is unfair because of its use of an ideological test, because it doesn’t count other “outreach” activities that are valuable but don’t promote diversity (e.g., giving talks to high school children, writing popular articles on science), and because it bars minority candidates who haven’t engaged in diversity-promoting activities before they apply for jobs.

Imagine, for example, an African-American scholar who has spent her time with her nose to the grindstone, accumulating an admirable academic and teaching record without having had the time or the will to promote diversity. As valuable as she would be to a department—and believe me, universities are desperately looking for good minority candidates—she wouldn’t have a chance of being hired under this “threshold” process. (Such scholars exist, for I know of some.) I find this process ludicrous and counterproductive, as I find the use of all mandatory diversity statements.

Now, however, according to this report in Science magazine, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is giving a ton of money to 12 universities for “cluster hires” (groups of people hired at once to beef up programs)—and that hiring process, even if not designed to increase diversity, will require every candidate not just to submit a diversity statement, but to show a “track record” of working to promote diversity. (“Diversity”, as always, means racial and gender diversity, not any kind of intellectual, class, geographic, or economic diversity.)

Click on the screenshot to read the news item:

The article reports that the NIH is appropriating $241 million to create a program called Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation (FIRST). This will provide roughly $20 million to each of a dozen schools, each aliquot supporting a “cluster hire” of ten new faculty members.  Cluster hires have been used to increase diversity, but also for non-diversity initiatives, like “[accelerating] their capacity to do research in an emerging area, such as computational biology or nanofabrication.”

And the NIH initiative, despite having both diversity goals and “emerging area” goals, is requiring every candidate to prove that they have already promoted diversity. Note that this statement is required because restricting hires to individuals from underrepresented groups is illegal for the NIH. Here’s the crucial statement from the article (my emphasis):

Not all of the 120 new hires would need to belong to groups now underrepresented in academic medicine, which include women, black people, Hispanics, Native Americans, and those with disabilities, says Hannah Valantine, NIH’s chief diversity officer. In fact, she told the Council of Councils at its 24 January meeting, any such restriction would be illegal and also run counter to the program’s goal of attracting world-class talent. But Valantine says every person hired must have a track record of working to change a culture that too often makes scientists from underrepresented groups feel unwelcome on campus and isolated in the laboratory.

This is pretty explicit in imposing a diversity-promoting test on the cluster hires. Every person hired must have a track record. That again leaves out minority candidates who have been doing things other than “changing the culture”. (And it presumes that there is a culture that makes underrepresented scientists feel unwelcome, something for which there is no evidence save anecdotal statements.) Without that record, black or white, male or female, you don’t stand a chance of getting hired under the NIH program. And that in itself is “counter to the program’s goal of attracting world-class talent.”

Fortunately, there are organizations, like that run by Chad Topaz of Williams College, that will, for a donation, help candidates write a diversity statement. All you need is to hand over $100 or more to Topaz’s organization, and they’ll help you look like a great promoter of diversity. (I can only imagine how this works.)

Well, regardless of whether such bigotry exists (this is nearly always the default explanation for underrepresentation of some groups), there’s independent evidence of how valuable minority candidates already are in academia. As the article notes:

New faculty hires don’t come cheap. At Emory, a standard startup package for a new professor in the natural sciences or engineering exceeds $1 million, Freeman says. And Valantine says startup costs for a basic scientist with a wet lab at a medical school could run as high as $3 million. Minority scientists usually command a premium salary because they are in such high demand, Freeman notes. [JAC: Carla Freeman is Emory’s senior associate dean of the faculty.]

Yes, it’s true that minority faculty are in high demand: Chicago is always trying to hire them, but the pool of candidates is small. The failure to land such candidates surely doesn’t reflect bigotry on the part of departments, but, in my view, a paucity of candidates because of poorer educational opportunities available for minorities, including worse schools.

Factors like those make a mockery of the notion of “equal opportunity.” And yes, this lack of opportunity goes way back to bigotry that, in the case of African-Americans, started with slavery. It must be rectified, but one has to diagnose how to fix it—and the fix may not involve assuming that hiring committees are racist or sexist. My own view is that it’s going to require a lot of effort and money to equalize opportunity for all Americans from the outset of their lives, and we all know how hard that is. But it’s something we must do.

As I said, I favor affirmative action in such hires if one wants to increase diversity. But that affirmative action should have nothing to do with “diversity statements” or a track record of changing a culture that may not even exist. You just weight the underrepresented but desired characteristics during the hiring process.

The implicit assumption that bigotry accounts for the whole of minority underrepresentation in academia is probably unjustified. First, as the Science article notes, cluster hiring may be the wrong tool:

The scientific literature on cluster hiring is very thin. Freeman and administrators at a handful of other institutions provide anecdotal evidence of its value in fostering diversity, but there are no rigorous studies of how it compares to other approaches. Steven Brint, a sociologist at the University of California, Riverside, is looking at its impact on interdisciplinary collaborations, the most common goal for institutions that have tried it. And his preliminary findings on research productivity suggest cluster hiring may actually impede efforts to foster diversity.

“Overall, output increases for all researchers,” Blint says. “But the benefits are not evenly distributed. When we analyze the results by race and gender, our results suggest that senior scientists tend to benefit more from such hirings.” Not surprisingly, he adds, those senior scientists tend to be white men.

And this statement in the Science piece implicitly assumes that bias is the cause:

FIRST is the latest in a series of programs NIH has launched since 2014 following a 2011 study that showed black scientists are less likely to receive an NIH award than their white or Asian counterparts. NIH has set itself the goal of eliminating that disparity, and Valantine hopes FIRST will take an important step in that direction by using an unorthodox approach to recruiting academic researchers.

But a study published last year, which was highly anticipated, found—and, I’m sad to say, to some people’s disappointment—that there wasn’t any evidence for either race or gender bias in a detailed study of “mock evaluation” of NIH proposals. (The study isn’t perfect, but if it had shown such bias, nobody would discuss its weaknesses!) And the Science article doesn’t even mention this followup!(Click on screenshot):


But the 2011 study cited above also showed that the funding gap remained after controlling for investigators’ “educational background, country of origin, training, previous research awards, publication record, and employer characteristics”. After removing these factors, African-Americans still were 10% less likely to get an NIH award than whites. Does this prove bigotry in the process? Not necessarily, because the study below was also published last year:

It shows that a substantial amount of the NIH award disparity was due not to bigotry, but to choice of topics: black scientists were more prone to apply for funding in fields less likely to receive funding: fields involving “research at the community and population level, as opposed to more fundamental and mechanistic investigations”. It’s thus a fallacy to assume, at the outset, that a disparity in outcomes automatically reflects bigotry rather than other factors like preference.

But regardless of that, for the funding-rate disparity isn’t the main subject of this post, we still need to study racial and sex disparities, and, if they reflect factors that narrow opportunities, we need to fix those things. Since any fixes will take decades, I favor affirmative action in hiring as well as in accepting students. But I adamantly reject the use of mandatory diversity statements as a tool for promoting academic diversity. It’s the wrong fix. And now not only the University of California uses it, but at least ten other universities are poised to join in—at the behest of the federal government, of which the NIH is part.

 

Truman State rejects student clubs for no good reason, violating First Amendment

December 15, 2019 • 11:15 am

I once visited Truman State University (it’s in Kirksville, Missouri—Truman’s state) as a guest of Taner Edis, physicist, atheist, and anti-creationist. It was a pleasant visit, and Taner surely couldn’t have played a role in the latest shenanigans at This school, recounted in the article from FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) that you can see by clicking on this screenshot:

Student Naomi Mathew’s animal rights group was rejected for the “emotional risk” it could cause other students. Now she’s fighting back. (Rivera Eye Photography for FIRE)

Note that Truman State is a public university and thus subject to the strictures of the First Amendment. However, as the article recounts, the school has repeatedly turned down students’ requests to form what seem to be perfectly reasonable clubs and organizations—and has nixed them on ridiculous and subjective grounds. You can see more of this history in the letter from FIRE to the President of Truman state (pdf here).

Earlier, Truman State students sought to create a Vegetarian Club, which was rejected because an evaluator said that such a diet could be harmful to some people and that “there could be the potential risk of miseducating people interested in joining the club/lifestyle.” The club was rejected three times.

In October of this year, sophomore Naomi Mathew, pictured above, tried to start an “Animal Alliance” club to promote animal rights. Mathew did everything necessary to get official status, including procuring an advisor, identifying more than ten interested students, and filling out an application form. After a hearing, that club was also rejected because of the potential “risk brought about by [Animal Alliance’s affiliation with PETA]”, because there was “a high emotional and reputational risk” to the university, and because they were worried about having to get police for the club’s events.

FIRE’s letter shows that Truman State has a history of this kind of dumb censorship of clubs. To wit:

Note that several of these rejections involved clubs having to do with religion, and at any rate, the reasons given for rejection are laughable. But the rejections themselves are not: as FIRE argues, these are violations of the First Amendment, citing a Supreme Court decision overturning a college’s rejection of the radical Students for a Democratic Society group. The Court ruled that “denial of official recognition, without justification, to college organizations burdens or abridges [the associational right] implicit in the freedoms of speech, assembly, and petition.”

Yes, the university had “justification” to reject all these applications, but FIRE argues that the criteria it used don’t meet the objective criteria they lay out in the rules, but add subjective factors like “emotional risk” or whether they see the club’s advocates as “sufficiently passionate.” The rejection of religious clubs is particularly offensive, abrogating freedom of religion. And of course arguing against a vegetarian club because the lifestyle is unhealthy is laughable: tell that to a gazillion Indian people!  FIRE makes other arguments, too, but you can read their 12-page letter for yourself. In the net, FIRE asks for Truman State to stop using subjective criteria for evaluating clubs and organization and to recognize the Animal Alliance as a valid club. There’s also an implied threat at the end that should worry the school:

Universities may use objective criteria to grant or deny student groups’ bids for official recognition. But Truman State’s subjective process violates students’ First Amendment rights and results in a double standard, with some controversial groups approved and others ousted. FIRE will continue to monitor the situation and use all the resources at its disposal to ensure a just outcome.

Read: lawsuit, which will cost Truman State a lot of dosh and probably a legal defeat as well.

FIRE gives a contact information to Truman State as well, and I’ll be writing the President an email. It’s time for the school to stop abrogating students’ Constitutional rights. Though this sounds like a small matter, one can’t allow colleges to begin eroding the rights of students in public schools, because this truly is a slippery slope.

CONTACT: Dr. Susan Thomas, President, Truman State University: 660-785-4100; suethomas@truman.edu

 

The “grievance studies” hoax: a forum at the Chronicle of Higher Education

July 26, 2019 • 2:15 pm

The “grievance studies” hoax conducted by Helen Pluckrose, Peter Boghossian, and James Lindsay is now so well known that it has its own Wikipedia page. I’m sure most of you know some details: the trio wrote and submitted 20 papers to journals dealing with what they call academic “grievance studies”: cultural, queer, race, gender, fat, and sexuality studies. At least seven of the papers were published, including the famous “dog park rape culture” paper, and one even won a prize.  And one of the accepted papers was larded with extensive quotations from Mein Kampf.

Just this week Boghossian, the only hoaxer who has a formal academic position, was disciplined by Portland State University, which, although it didn’t fire him, ordered him to take training in “protection of human subjects.” Until he does that and then convinces the University he understands the rules, he cannot do sponsored research, work on human subjects, or apply for grants. (I have no idea whether he’ll comply.) He had earlier been found guilty of not protecting human subjects—not the bogus subject in the hoax papers, but the reviewers and editors who were deceived by the trio’s papers. That’s a pretty lame accusation.

My own take on this is that while the hoax was duplicitous and deliberately so, it did expose the rot in some parts of the humanities in a way that would have been hard to do by other means. I can write critiques of papers on feminist glaciology or the othering, gendering, and fat-shaming of urban squirrels, but these paper-by-paper critiques showed only that an occasional howler slips through the cracks. (These papers are, however, seen as serious scholarship.) It’s another thing entirely to confect bogus papers that align with Regressive Leftist ideology, and then get these risible “studies” published in decent journals. (One remembers Alan Sokal’s famous Social Text hoax.) In other words, Pluckrose et al. got a lot more attention than I did. And that’s fine. For they did, to my mind, expose a creeping rot in the floorboards of academic humanities, which has becoming increasingly solipsistic, tendentious, propagandistic, and devoid of critical thinking but besotted with intersectionalist ideology. Were it up to me, I would not have punished Peter.

But academics went wild with rage, for, unable to stand the idea that the humanities has been infected with tendentious pomo junk scholarship, they performed what animal behaviorists call “displacement behavior”: they ignored the message and tried to kill the messengers. And you’ll see some of that in a discussion in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the meaning of the Grievance Studies hoaxes. There are seven pieces involving eight scholars on both sides of the issue.

Click on the screenshot to read the pieces, and of course give us your own take in the comments. Below I list the authors and a snippet of their conclusions:

Quotes from the named scholars are indented; my few comments are flush left:

Yascha Mounk. a lecturer on government at Harvard University:

. . . after all, it is possible to glean valuable information from the immoral actions of evil people. And even if all of the charges laid at the feet of Lindsay, Pluckrose, and Boghossian were true, they would have demonstrated a very worrying fact: Some of the leading journals in areas like gender studies have failed to distinguish between real scholarship and intellectually vacuous as well as morally troubling bullshit.

. . one thing remains incontestable in my mind: Any academic who is not at least a little troubled by the ease with which the hoaxers passed satire off as wisdom has fallen foul to the same kind of motivated reasoning and naked partisanship that is currently engulfing the country as a whole.

Carl T. Bergstrom, professor of biology at the University of Washington:

Peer review is simply not designed to detect fraud. It doesn’t need to be. Fraud is uncovered in due course, and severe professional consequences deter almost all such behavior. Nor is the peer-review process designed to weed out every crazy idea. Given the self-correcting nature of scholarship, it is far better to let through a few bad ideas than to publish only those that are so self-evident as to be without controversy.

. . . Attacking a field with satirical nonsense is ineffectual — and just plain lazy. If a field is intellectually vacuous, it is so because its central papers and most exciting conclusions are unjustified or even absurd. To effectively criticize a field, one must engage with its central tenets, its core assumptions, its accepted methods, and its primary conclusions. And then one must show where these are mistaken, incoherent, or preposterous. Sadly, the hoaxers chose a different path. They may have created a media splash, but their stunt is a hollow exercise in mean-spirited mockery rather than a substantive critique of the field.

I disagree—it does constitute a substantive critique of standards of scholarship in several fields.

Justin E.H. Smith, professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Paris Diderot:

Quite apart from whether “Sokal Squared” has accomplished what its authors claim, I confess I am astounded, though I really should not be by now, by the moralism and the piety toward rules and procedures that so many academics are expressing, as if hoaxing were always unethical and lacking in any potential salutary effects. These academics seem entirely unaware of the distinguished history of hoaxing, and to assume that it dates back no earlier than Sokal.

Natalia Mehlman Petrzela,  associate professor of history at the New School:

In targeting journals that focus on women and minorities, they also channeled their ire at groups still struggling for representation in the academy, from faculty hiring to footnote citations, a quantitative reality that challenges the core assumption of the “Grievance Studies” crowd: that lockstep obeisance to social-justice orthodoxy is corrupting academia. This suggests more about the hoaxers’ arrogance and the limits of their intellectual vision than it does about any inherent flaw in, say, taking seriously feminist spirituality.

. . . And that’s because the greatest crisis in academia is not the peer-review process of some small, specialized journals, but the defunding and devaluing of the humanities — including not just feminist and ethnic studies, but also history, philosophy, literature, and other fields these pranksters would likely deem worthy of continued existence. It is a sad fact that this process will only accelerate, thanks in part to a new rhetorical weapon: “grievance studies.”

Perhaps these areas of the humanities have devalued themselves. In fact, I suspect that’s the case.

David Schieber, doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of California at Los Angeles [Schieber reviewed and rejected one of the hoax papers, on masturbation as a form of violence.]

In their article announcing the hoax, the writers used selected quotes from my review to argue that I supported this paper (despite recommending a rejection). This selective use of my comments seemed disingenuous. They were turning my attempt to help the authors of a rejected paper into an indictment of my field and the journal I reviewed for, even though we rejected the paper.

Heather E. Heying, former professor of evolutionary biology at Evergreen State College:

Consider what led you into academia in the first place. If you have anything of the creator or discoverer within you, remember those drives and recognize that the rising quasi-religious zealotry from those in Grievance Studies has liberty, creativity, and discovery in its cross hairs. For the practitioners of Grievance Studies, the scientific method is a tool of the patriarchy, while beliefs outside of the narrow band of conformity required by the authoritarian left are evidence of fascist, alt-right leanings. This will sound like hyperbole to those without direct experience, but I and many others have observed it firsthand.

. . . Projects like the hoax reveal character, both good and bad. Whether out of error or expedience, many in the academy will dig in on behalf of Grievance Studies. Others will be driven by fear into silence. But if you share a deep commitment to rigorous inquiry, be one of the people who stand up and say: “This is wrong. It must stop. I will help.” Speak up in faculty meetings and in hallways. Join Heterodox Academy. Support FIRE. And when you encounter this distorted pseudo-scholarship delivered as insight, proclaim as loudly as you dare: #TheyDontSpeakForMe.

Laurie Essig, professor of gender, sexuality, and feminist studies at Middlebury College and Sujata Moorti, director and a professor in the gender, sexuality, and feminist studies program at Middlebury College:

Finally, even a cursory reading of the hoaxers’ work shows that much of what they’re claiming as proof doesn’t in fact implicate the field in anything but collegiality. Their claim that their article on the pedagogy of chaining white students received positive feedback? That’s just untrue. It was rejected. Perhaps the reviewers were simply trying to be helpful. That point gets lost in the media coverage and academic trolling from outside the field.

This “Grievance Studies” hoax belongs in a larger political and historical context. Feminist and gender studies are under attack, in Hungary, Russia, and right here in the U.S. As scholars working in the field, we should know. Our own program was attacked by the right for “causing riots” when Charles Murray came to give a talk on campus — which was untrue. This allegation was then used to bring a broader attack on the field, demanding it be shut down.

Many of us in the field receive death threats, rape threats, and calls for our non-existence. The “Sokol Squared” attack sits squarely within this larger assault, whatever the hoaxers profess of their political views or goals.

This is the ultimate displacement behavior: an attack on the hoaxers for participating in an attack on the humanities, and, of course, a victimization narrative that professors in gender and feminist studies receive death and rape threats. The latter is unfortunate, but in this case besides the point. How often do we see people cite their death threats as a substitute for defending their ideas? Of course these scholars are in feminist and gender studies, and of course they’re at Middlebury College, aka Woke University.

Book claiming that Israel deliberately maims Palestinian civilians as a form of punishment wins award in women’s studies

September 17, 2018 • 12:45 pm

According to the Algemeiner (yes, a Jewish site), a book by Jasbir Puar, Professor and Graduate Director of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, has won one of the two 2018 Alison Piepmeier Book Prizes awarded by the National Womens Studes Association (NWSA).  According to the Association, the prize is “for a groundbreaking monograph in women, gender, and sexuality studies that makes significant contributions to feminist disability studies scholarship.”

Puar’s book, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability, appears to be a postmodern work, with the main thesis, according to the Algemeiner article (click on link below) being that Israel maims rather than kills Palestinians as a way to keep them under control (see also Amazon summary below):

Published in November 2017 by Duke University Press — which has come under scrutiny for its editorial advisors’ ties to the Palestinian-led boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel — the book posits that the “Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have shown a demonstrable pattern over decades of sparing life, of shooting to maim rather than to kill.”

Yet it contends that this “purportedly humanitarian practice of sparing death by shooting to maim” is not rooted in a desire to minimize fatalities, but rather seeks to maintain “Palestinian populations as perpetually debilitated, and yet alive, in order to control them.”

The NWSA award’s review committee called The Right to Maim a “major milestone book,” which argues “that debilitation and the state production of disability are biopolitical projects both useful and productive for states under Neoliberal capitalism.”

This is the Amazon summary of the book (click on cover photo below to go there), so the Algemeiner apparently isn’t exaggerating the book’s thesis (my emphasis below):

In The Right to Maim Jasbir K. Puar brings her pathbreaking work on the liberal state, sexuality, and biopolitics to bear on our understanding of disability. Drawing on a stunning array of theoretical and methodological frameworks, Puar uses the concept of “debility”—bodily injury and social exclusion brought on by economic and political factors—to disrupt the category of disability. She shows how debility, disability, and capacity together constitute an assemblage that states use to control populations. Puar’s analysis culminates in an interrogation of Israel’s policies toward Palestine, in which she outlines how Israel brings Palestinians into biopolitical being by designating them available for injury. Supplementing its right to kill with what Puar calls the right to maim, the Israeli state relies on liberal frameworks of disability to obscure and enable the mass debilitation of Palestinian bodies. Tracing disability’s interaction with debility and capacity, Puar offers a brilliant rethinking of Foucauldian biopolitics while showing how disability functions at the intersection of imperialism and racialized capital. [JAC: reread that last sentence.]

I won’t go into the other article describing the ties of the Duke University Press to the BDS movement, but you might have a look at the link, because the claims, if true, are disturbing. It’s all part of academia’s continual demonization of Israel, which in this case seems to be based on deliberate distortion and lying, in contrast to the academically-approved extolling the Palestinian government, one of the most repressive and mendacious regimes around (propagandizing kids with anti-Semitic messages, using human shields, and so on). [NOTE: I was referring here to the government, not the people themselves. Though a lot of Palestinians behave reprehensibly under the sway of religiously-born hatred, I did not mean to imply that all or most of them do.]

I’ve requested the book on interlibrary loan so I can have a look at it it, but apparently it’s all online, as the Algemeiner piece gives this link.  Given the last sentence of the H-Disability review below, I don’t think I’ll enjoy the book.

 

This is from a review in H-Disability by M. Lynn Rose (my emphasis):

Chapter 3, “Disabled Diaspora, Rehabilitating State: The Queer Politics of Reproduction in Palestine/Israel” takes up “pinkwashing,” which is, Puar claims, Israel’s use of gay rights propaganda to detract attention from its occupation of Palestine. The focus on inclusivity, she asserts, is limited to cisgender and gender conformity, and stands beside gender segregation in Orthodox Jewish communities. In establishing Israel as a rehabilitative act (rehabilitating the debilitations of statelessness and genocide), the model Jewish body was decidedly nondisabled, masculine, and heterosexual. Rehabilitation banished the “Oriental” in the European Jew, recreated Europe in Palestine, and conceptually separated the Jew from the Arab. The fear of maiming then becomes “a spectacular imperial tool, projecting the fear of maiming by Palestinians onto Palestinians through the debilitating effects of the occupation; this mechanism is the displacement necessary to secure able-bodied citizenry of Israel” (p. 107).

“Will Not Let Die: Debilitation and Inhuman Biopolitics in Palestine,” chapter 4, focuses on the population targeted for injury, moving on from the focus in previous chapters on the population that is available for injury. Israel maintains biopolitical control through maiming, not killing; maiming, Puar claims, poses as a humanitarian manifestation of a “let live” mentality, but is actually a manifestation of the mentality of “will not let die” (p. 139). The section “No Future” takes up the fate of Palestinian children, targeted for stunting, PTSD, gunshot wounds, and so on. Puar calls her analysis an “anti-Zionist hermeneutic” (p. 153). “The ultimate purpose of this analysis,” she writes, coming full circle from her opening statement, “is to labor in the service of a Free Palestine” (p. 154).

The postscript, “Treatment without Checkpoints,” looks at debility within disability among the disability service providers at the checkpoints in Palestine, then extends the concept to other populations. Debilitated disability as a result of collective punishment demands a complicated activism. The desire for mobility extends beyond the individual body to the collective displaced population. Progress in achieving a positive disability identity, Puar concludes, will not come about until the end of Palestinian occupation.

The Right to Maim is not written for a general audience. It is a theoretical investigation into the meanings of disability, debility, capacity, queerness, and race in global biopolitical contexts. As such, it is not for everyone. Readers who have never worked their way through Mitchell and Snyder’s Narrative Prosthesis, for example, will find this work slow going. I do not see its place in any undergraduate class, though it could be useful in theory-based graduate seminars. Readers who are fluent in theoretical scholarship, especially in disability theory, will find this to be a fulfilling read.

The “pinkwashing” canard, in which gay rights in Israel were supposedly allowed as a distraction from the country’s nefarious colonizing desires, is simply stupid. If the Orthodox Jews demonize gays, then that’s their right, but they aren’t allowed to violate the law. But beside that stands the arrant fact that Palestine, along with many other Muslim lands in the Middle East has no gay rights at all! Being gay in Palestine will put you perilously close to execution, as it will in Iran, Pakistan, and other places. It’s ridiculously but conventionally postmodern to raise the cry of pinkwashing—an accusation which there’s no evidence save anti-Semitism—while ignoring the blatant homophobia (indeed, making gay acts capital crimes) of Muslim countries. Puar’s emphasis on pinkwashing discredits her as an objective scholar. But of course she’s not objective, as you can see in the second paragraph of the H-Disability review.

Puar’s claim that Israel aims to maim the Palestinians as punishment and control, a ridiculous claim on the face of it, is clearly in the service of her agenda: “to labor in the service of a Free Palestine.” Can anyway take her lucubrations seriously when she so openly states her aim? Regardless, however, I’ll look very carefully for evidence that Israeli government policy is to maim Palestinians as a tool to subjugate them. Until now I always thought that BDS and anti-Zionist claim was that Israel simply wanted to kill noncombatant Palestinians (something I see no evidence for, either), but now it’s devolved to maiming them. And if Israel shoots to maim people rather than kill them if those people are attacking Israeli soliders or civilians, I’d find that admirable rather than detestable. Isn’t it better to shoot someone in the legs than to kill them? If you wanted to control a populace, wouldn’t it be better to kill them rather than maim them? Isn’t death a better deterrent than maiming?

But of course no matter what Israel does to defend itself, it’s going to be criticized. I’m simply waiting for people like Puar to call out the Palestinians for firing rockets at civilian populations, using small children to build tunnels for terrorism, using human shields, and demonizing homosexuals (after all, Puar is involved in queer studies.)

We’ll wait a long time for that, as Puar has not just a beam in her eye, but a whole truckload of them. And her goal, as she stated, is to “labor in the service of a free Palestine”, which may well mean the elimination of Israel as well.

And shame on Duke University Press, Rutgers, and the NWSA for giving awards for and taking so seriously the brand of ideologically-motivated “scholarship” practiced by people like Puar. (I will of course revise my opinion if I find any evidence for her thesis.) In the meantime, this looks like just another example of academia rewarding anti-Semitism. I suppose academic discourse and publishing has always been arcane and ideological, but never in my lifetime have I seen it be so tendentious—at least in the humanities.

If you want to listen to Puar yourself, here’s nearly two hours of her 2013 keynote address from CLAGS’ (The Center for LGBTQ Studies) conference on Homonationalism and Pinkwashing at The Graduate Center, CUNY, New York City. Her talk begins at 02:45.

American University cancels “Unsafe Space” Title IX discussion on dubious grounds

October 17, 2017 • 11:30 am

I’ve written before about the Spiked website’s “Unsafe Space” tour, which is going around to various colleges discussing controversial issues. This is no Milo Yiannopoulos “Rile ‘Em Up” tour; rather, it has people like Wendy Kaminer, Jonathan Haidt, Nadine Strossen (past head of the ACLU), Steve Pinker, Laura Kipnis, Bret Weinstein, and Sarah Haider discussing issues like identity politics, the role of the Regressive Left in Trump’s election, and other issues that, while controversial, aren’t meant to incite demonstrations or violence. In fact, I have tickets to the November 6 presentation at Harvard with Kaminer, Pinker, Brendan O’Neill, and Robby Soave.

One of the panels was scheduled for September 28 at American University; here it is:

Note that the venue wasn’t American University (AU), but Reason Magazine. Why? Because, according to a post by participant Elizabeth Nolan Brown,  AU canceled the panel on the grounds that space wasn’t available because the panel was classified as a “meeting” rather than “event.” (That apparently hasn’t led to cancellations at AU before.) Brown thinks that the real reason, which seems likely, is that the AU branch of the American Association of University Women (AAUW) had organized a campaign titled “Keep Our Campus Safe”, which has its own Facebook page. The header gives its obvious intent (click on screenshot to go to the page)—NO DISCUSSION!

To their credit, the AAUW didn’t try to shut down the discussion, and called for counter-speech, but they also characterized the panel as “hate speech” and “violence” that could induce trauma (my emphasis):

The Unsafe Space Tour is coming to AU. What do they want to talk about? Completely revising and undoing decades of work by activists around campuses across the country to make campuses safer for victims of sexual violence.

So let’s show them what WE think of Title IX.

Come join AAUW at AU to show the Unsafe Space Tour that WE SUPPORT TITLE IX!

During the Q+A portion of the event, line up with us and let them know exactly how YOU feel about Title IX at AU.

. . . A note on First Amendment rights to free speech: AAUW at AU fully supports free speech. This does not mean we support forcing marginalized students to hate speech and other forms of violence and trauma.

That last bit is weaselly, because they say that this panel, and the “hate speech” that it was supposedly to purvey, is not free speech.  And, when the panel was moved, the AAUW site posted this, along with two comments from Annamarie Rienzi, affiliated with the student group, Young Americans for liberty, that hosted the event.


As we’ve discussed before, the Obama administration’s “Dear Colleague” revisions to Title IX are problematic, and certainly deserve discussion, as they’ve led to a horrible mess and mass confusion, about how sexual assaults and harassment on campuses are to be adjudicated. It is not “hate speech” to have such a discussion. But the AAUW clearly wasn’t interested in doing anything but harassing speakers during the Q&A (at least they weren’t going to “shut it down”). But then saying that they’re “STOKED” to announce that the discussion has been canceled (it was just moved) gives away their real motivation: to keep this discussion from taking place.

While Nolan Brown isn’t that interested in recrimination, and wants to discuss what the panel actually said, I am perturbed that a respectable academic women’s group wanted to drive this discussion away, apparently on the grounds that even questioning the revision of Title IX’s stipulations is “hate speech”—something that cannot be tolerated.

h/t: BJ

Harvard behaves badly—twice

September 15, 2017 • 11:00 am

I’ll try to make this post short, as I’m resting in my hotel in Warsaw and want to catch up on the news from London. But I couldn’t resist, thanks to several readers (special h/t to Scott), calling attention to two questionable acts that my Ph.D. alma mater has committed.

The first involves the New York Times story below (click on screenshot):

Ms. Jones was convicted for killing, via neglect, her 4-year-old son (the details are unclear; the body was never found, and Jones herself was subject to childhood abuse). She served 20 years in an Indiana prison for her crime;.she was sentenced to 50 years but was released way early because of her exceptional behavior and accomplishments. While incarcerated, she turned herself into a history scholar and somewhat of a polymath; as the Times reports, she earned her bachelor’s degree at Ball State and audited class at Indiana University. And she went further:

In a breathtaking feat of rehabilitation, Ms. Jones, now 45, became a published scholar of American history while behind bars, and presented her work by videoconference to historians’ conclaves and the Indiana General Assembly. With no internet access and a prison library that hewed toward romance novels, she led a team of inmates that pored through reams of photocopied documents from the Indiana State Archives to produce the Indiana Historical Society’s best research project last year. As prisoner No. 970554, Ms. Jones also wrote several dance compositions and historical plays, one of which is slated to open at an Indianapolis theater in December.

She applied to several graduate schools, and got into Harvard and New York University (as well as other schools, though not Yale). Her reviews by Harvard’s history department were stellar (“Elizabeth Hinton, one of the Harvard historians who backed Ms. Jones, called her ‘one of the strongest candidates in the country last year, period'”). But in a highly unusual move, Harvard administrators rescinded Jones’s acceptance, denying her the chance to go to her first-choice school. Jones will enroll in New York University this fall.

The reasons why Harvard’s administrators rescinded the deparmental admission aren’t clear. There was some mention in the article that Jones wasn’t completely forthcoming about her crime, but the article also says she admitted what she did and noted that she inflicted on her son the abuse she got herself.  If she lied, that’s grounds for rejection, but that doesn’t seem clear.

Rather, there appear to be other reasons for rejecting her—ones that I don’t like (these came from emails and memos obtained by the NYT):

While top Harvard officials typically rubber-stamp departmental admissions decisions, in this case the university’s leadership — including the president, provost, and deans of the graduate school — reversed one, according to the emails and interviews, out of concern that her background would cause a backlash among rejected applicants, conservative news outlets or parents of students.

That’s ridiculous. Jones did her time for the crime, and why should she be shunned further, especially after such an arduous effort to turn her life around? She deserves the same chance as anyone else gets, and that includes the admission to Harvard that she earned. If people are concerned about her background, they should suck that up. Someone deemed rehabilitated should not be made to suffer further.

Here’s more:

“We didn’t have some preconceived idea about crucifying Michelle,” said John Stauffer, one of the two American studies professors [two professors flagged her acceptance for the higher administration].  “But frankly, we knew that anyone could just punch her crime into Google, and Fox News would probably say that P.C. liberal Harvard gave 200 grand of funding to a child murderer, who also happened to be a minority. I mean, c’mon.”

WHAT? Why should Harvard worry about what Fox News will say? Shouldn’t they be confident that “P.C. liberal Harvard” did the right thing by giving someone who behaved odiously a second chance after she turned her life around? The paragraph above sickens me.

Finally, things get patronizing and maybe a bit racist:

She applied to eight [graduate schools], with Harvard her first choice because of historians there whose work on incarceration she admired.

While those historians embraced her application, others at Harvard questioned not only whether Ms. Jones had disclosed enough information about her past, but whether she could handle its pressure-cooker atmosphere.

“One of our considerations,” Professor Stauffer said in an interview, “was if this candidate is admitted to Harvard, where everyone is an elite among elites, that adjustment could be too much.”

Oh for crying out loud! If the department not only deemed her qualified, but judged her one of the top candidates in the whole country, where did the fear come from that she couldn’t “handle its pressure-cooker atmosphere?” Could it be because she was in prison, or maybe because she was black? If she’s qualified, she’s qualified, and should get the chance to handle the “atmosphere” (which, having gone there, I don’t see as a “pressure cooker”. You take few classes and your main responsibility is your thesis).

For a determinist, there are three reasons to send someone to jail who’s committed a crime: rehabilitation, deterrence of others, and sequestering a criminal from society so she doesn’t do further harm.) The justice system decided that Ms. Jones has satisfied all of these requirements. Why would Harvard continue to punish her when she’s shown contrition (she’s dedicating her graduate work in criminology to her son), she’s clearly rehabilitated, and 20 years is sufficient deterrence? Even the prosecutor who sought and got Jones the maximum sentence thinks that Harvard is behaving badly:

“Look, as a mother, I thought it was just an awful crime,” said Ms. Marger Moore, now a lawyer at a large firm in Los Angeles. “But what Harvard did is highly inappropriate: I’m the prosecutor, not them. Michelle Jones served her time, and she served a long time, exactly what she deserved. A sentence is a sentence.”

I wish Jones the best of luck, and I send raspberries to Harvard for their bad behavior. Unless Jones flat-out lied on her application, and I am dubious about that, she fully deserves admission to Harvard’s graduate program in history.

*********

In a second bad move, Harvard has bowed to government pressure and deplatformed Chelsea Manning, withdrawing her invitations to be a visiting fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. As you may know, Manning was convicted of espionage for releasing classified documents to WikiLeaks; she was sentenced to 35 years in prison but Obama commuted her sentence after four years. She is now free. But some bigwigs objected to her status of visiting fellow at Harvard:

The school withdrew the invitation to Manning—a transgender activist and former U.S. Army soldier who was imprisoned after disclosing over 700,000 classified government documents— after CIA Director Mike Pompeo cancelled his scheduled appearance at the school Thursday.

“Ms. Manning betrayed her country and was found guilty of 17 serious crimes for leaking classified information to Wikileaks,” Pompeo wrote in a letter to Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, director of Intelligence and Defense Projects at Harvard Kennedy School on Thursday. “Indeed, Ms. Manning stands against everything the brave men and women I serve alongside stand for.”

Pompeo’s cancelled appearance came hours after Michael Morell, a former deputy director of the CIA, resigned from his Senior Fellowship at the Belfer Center at Harvard Kennedy School. In his resignation letter, Morell cited deep opposition to Manning’s actions, and wrote that “the Kennedy School’s decision will assist Ms. Manning in her long-standing effort to legitimize the criminal path that she took to prominence.”

After the twin denouncements, Elmendorf withdrew the invitation that had been issued on Wednesday.

“We did not intend to honor her in any way or to endorse any of her words or deeds, as we do not honor or endorse any Fellow,” Kennedy School Dean Douglas W. Elmendorf wrote.

Dean Elmendorf added this:

“I now think that designating Chelsea Manning as a Visiting Fellow was a mistake, for which I accept responsibility,” Kennedy School Dean Douglas W. Elmendorf wrote in a statement posted to the school’s website shortly after midnight.

Well, opinions differ on the rectitude of what Manning did, and her punishment was surely overly severe, but once she was invited to be a visiting fellow, it was wrong of Harvard to withdraw that invitation. While Manning is still invited to give a speech at Harvard, the fellowship withdrawal stinks, for it smacks of government interference in an academic decision, and of cowardice on the part of Harvard.

University of Oregon’s draconian free-speech policy

December 29, 2016 • 10:00 am

In his column at the Washington Post, Eugene Volokh reports on an incident at the University of Oregon (UO) that was previously covered only by right-wing websites. What happened is that a UO tenured professor of law, Nancy Schurtz, had a Halloween party at her home, and dressed in blackface and a white doctor’s coat—but not out of racism or mockery. She invited several students to her party, and some of them complained about the blackface costume. It also became a topic at the UO Law School, and, based on the complaints, the University commissioned an investigation, which yielded a 29-page report.

In the report, Schurtz explained why she dressed in blackface. She was surprisingly clueless about the implications of wearing blackface in America, and thought she was making a positive statement. This is from the report:

Shurtz explained her costume choice in some detail. She said that she had read the book, Black Man in a White Coat, which she had really enjoyed. When she read the book she felt like she related to the author, found Damon Tweedy to be an amazing man, and enjoyed his writing. Shurtz had also recently attended her daughter’s white coat ceremony as part of her daughter’s first year at medical school. Amongst her daughter’s incoming class, Shurtz had noticed a shortage of students of color, and specifically an almost complete absence of black men. She feels strongly that black men are underrepresented in higher education, and she felt that on Halloween she could be a black man in a white coat in order to represent this topic. She clarified that she did not dress as Damon Tweedy or try to look like him specifically, but that she dressed as the book, or as a black man in a white coat. She stated that she had been thinking about this book and this costume for some time. When asked if she had thought her costume was going to be controversial, Shurtz replied in the negative. She said she had thought to herself that she could represent this black man and she could talk about a black man being a professional, which are issues that are important to her. She said her intention had been to honor Damon Tweedy.

She wasn’t called out at the party, but afterwards was rebuked by a student, and apologized:

To the best of Shurtz’s recollection, there were approximately 13 students in attendance, two alumni with three of their corresponding guests/family members, three faculty members, and four other individuals, for an approximate total of 25 guests. At least two of the students in attendance from the law school community were students of color. Of all the attendees, 24 out of 25 were either directly affiliated with the law school, or were a guest of those affiliates. The interviews unanimously revealed that nobody told Shurtz during the event that her costume was inappropriate, that it was offensive, or that she should consider removing the black makeup. In addition, all those who were interviewed conveyed that Shurtz appeared to have worn the costume in earnest, and that she did not seem to understand the ramifications of her costume. Following the event and that same evening, one student sent Shurtz an email conveying disappointment over the costume, and that the costume choice may have caused offense. The following morning, November 1, 2016, Shurtz responded to this student, and copied both of her class listservs, conveying why she had chosen the costume. Another student spoke with Shurtz in person to impress upon her the fact that her costume was likely to result in repercussions. Shurtz also reached out to two students of color who were in attendance at the event to personally apologize for her costume choice.

The University also noted that at this party Schurtz was not acting as a representative of the University. Nevertheless, the report considered her actions “disruptive to the educational environment”, and even the subsequent discussions at the UO Law School, which took up class time, was considered a form of toxicity and disruptive harassment. Some minority students even said they were trying to leave the University:

. . . Actual impacts that we heard from those interviewed included shock, anger, surprise, anxiety, disappointment, and discomfort with remaining at the event. Given the number of students who were present for the event, the publicity surrounding the incident, the severity of the costume choice and the level of offense, and the significant and ongoing impacts upon both the attendees as well as the student body, it is clear that Shurtz’s costume was substantially disruptive to the educational environment. Outcomes and impacts upon the broader student body have been described at length above, but a summary of such impacts includes outright hostility and division between the students, the environment being described by some as “toxic,” class time being spent on discussing the event and the students’ reactions, the open forum, minority students feeling that they have become burdened with educating other students about racial issues and racial sensitivity, students using other offensive racially-based terminology during class times in the context of discussing this event and broader racial issues, feelings of anxiety and mistrust towards other professors beyond just Shurtz, students now avoiding spending time on campus as a result, and some students who are attempting to transfer to a different law school.

And so the University of Oregon found Schurtz guilty of “discriminatory harassment” and suspended her. Here are the report’s conclusions.

VII. CONCLUSION

Based on the interviews conducted and our review and analysis of the information obtained during this investigation, we conclude:

1. That Nancy Shurtz’s wearing of the costume at the stated event constitutes a violation of the University’s policies against discrimination. We further find that the actions constitute Discriminatory Harassment under those policies.

2. That the actual disruption and harm to the University resulting from Nancy Shurtz’s wearing of the costume at the stated event are significant enough to outweigh Nancy Shurtz’s interests in academic freedom and free speech.

Respectfully Submitted,
Edwin A. Harnden
Shayda Z. Le
Barran Liebman LLP

Should Schurtz have worn the blackface costume? Surely it was a very unwise decision, as almost anyone over the age of 10 knows the racial connotations of wearing blackface. But remember that it was done out of an antiracist sentiment.

Should Schurtz have been suspended or discipline? I don’t think so, for her actions were those of a private individual in her private home, and not acting in the capacity of a University professor. Perhaps she should have been subject to a conversation with the administration, informing her that this wasn’t a good thing to do for the sake of the students, but dismissing her is a violation of free speech (and yes, wearing blackface, odious as it is, constitutes free speech if it’s not done in the workplace with the effect of creating a hostile climate).

But there are wider implications for free speech at the University, as Volokh points out. Blackface seems like a cut-and-dried case because of its history of association with racism, but there are other potentially “offensive” matters that Volokh brings up:

Let’s take religion. Say a professor posts something on his blog containing the Mohammad cartoons (as I have done myself); or say that he displays them at a debate or panel that he is participating on; and say that he has invited students in the past to read the blog or to attend the panel. Then some Muslim students, both ones who are at the event and those who just hear about it, get upset. His colleagues and the administration decide to discuss the matter in detail, which fans the flames — something that could happen with the cartoons as easily as it can with Shurtz’s makeup. Under the logic of the Oregon report, such a post would equally be punishable “harassment.”

And, of course, this would be even clearer as to deliberate negative commentary on a particular group:

  • Sharp criticism of Islam.
  • Claims that homosexuality is immoral.
  • Claims that there are biological differences in aptitude and temperament, on average, between men and women.
  • Rejection of the view that gender identity can be defined by self-perception, as opposed to biology.
  • Harsh condemnation of soldiering (that would be harassment based on “service in the uniformed services” or “veteran status”).
  • Condemnation of people who have children out of wedlock (that would be harassment based on “marital … status” and “family status”).

The University’s report also said this:  “The University does not take issue with the subject matter of Shurtz’s expression, or her viewpoints, but the freedoms under this policy end where prohibited discrimination and/or discriminatory harassment begin.” Volokh responds: “Actually, to be honest, the university does “take issue with the subject matter of Shurtz’s expression, or her viewpoints,” and concludes that the offensiveness of that subject matter and viewpoints makes it “harassment” and strips it of protection.”

Blackface is odious, but its racist connotations have to be seen as somewhat mitigated in this case, and even if they weren’t, it’s clearly protected by the First Amendment. What’s more worrying is that the U of O has seen fit to punish a professor and suppress her speech when it constitutes “disruption” (seen as discriminatory harassment), although much of that disruption came about in subsequent discussion in the Law School—discussion in which Schurtz did not participate.

The greater danger, which I think is more than speculative, is that other forms of “disruption”, as given in Volokh’s list above, will also be punished and hence banned, and then we’re on the way to a complete elimination of free speech—unless that speech doesn’t offend anyone. But that upends the whole purpose of the First Amendment.