Category: colleges and universities

Harvard deep-sixes DEI statements

June 4, 2024 • 10:00 am

In light of the Supreme Court’s ruling against race-based college admissions (which involved Harvard), and the likely illegality of hiring faculty based on race, colleges are beginning to ratchet back on DEI-based admissions and hiring. (Although nobody’s yet taken a college to court for requiring DEI statements, I’m betting that such statements would be banned for constituting compelled speech.)

Now that MIT banned DEI statements for faculty job applications, the other great school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard, has just followed suit. According to the two articles below, Harvard has banned diversity statements.

Previously, these statements were required by many private and public universities (the University of California was a notorious offender), and they nearly all required three components:  a summary of what you did to advance diversity before you applied for the job, a statement of your philosophy of diversity (and it had to be more than simply “I believe all students should be treated equally”) and, finally, a statement of how you’d increase diversity at the institution were you hired.

It’s clear that all of these initiatives meant racial diversity: if you wrote about “viewpoint diversity” or “socioeconomic diversity,” your application would most likely be tossed in the circular file. (This was in fact guaranteed by rubrics in some schools that evaluated candidates for their diversity statements before looking at the rest of their applications, giving numerical marks to the three parts above. If you didn’t exceed a threshold value for your DEI statement, your application was tossed, regardless of your academic merits.)

This story from the NYT report the deep-sixing of diversity statements at Harvard, though I suspect the statements are just going to be disguised, just as race-based admissions will remain, too, but now adopting application questions like, “Describe the challenges you have overcome before applying here.” This gives you every opportunity to mention race.

But I digress. Read the NYT article by clicking on the first headline, and the Harvard Crimson article by clicking on the second.

Here’s the NYT’s reportage, which is indented; my comments are flush left:

Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the university’s largest division, said on Monday that it would no longer require job applicants to submit diversity statements, the latest shift at the university after months of turmoil over its values and the role of equity initiatives in higher education.

Instead, the division will require only finalists for teaching jobs to describe their “efforts to strengthen academic communities” and discuss how they would promote a “learning environment in which students are encouraged to ask questions and share their ideas,” Nina Zipser, the dean for faculty affairs and planning, said in an email to colleagues.

. . . In a statement that echoed Dr. Zipser’s email, Harvard said the “updated approach” would acknowledge “the many ways faculty contribute to strengthening their academic communities, including efforts to increase diversity, inclusion, and belonging.” The university added that the decision amounted to “realigning the hiring process with longstanding criteria for tenured and tenure-track faculty positions.”

To me, the second and third paragraphs imply that this is just a workaround to maintain hiring based largely on race, but using the code words are “strengthening academic communities” including “efforts to increase diversity, inclusion, and belonging.”

One problem with DEI statements is that they purport to equate ethnic diversity with viewpoint diversity, and while that is true to a very limited extent, it also assumes, patronizingly, that different ethnic groups have different viewpoints but that within a group viewpoints are relatively homogenous.  If that were indeed the case, which it isn’t, then maximum viewpoint diversity would require equal (not proportional) number of students or faculty from each ethnic group. If you really wanted viewpoint diversity, you’d use a different set of criteria for both student admission and hiring: criteria based on viewpoints themselves, including ideological stands.

Here’s some pushback from a Harvard professor who apparently holds the false equation of ethnic diversity with viewpoint diversity:

Yet backers of the diversity statements at Harvard and elsewhere have framed them as contemporary methods to promote a range of views, especially after the U.S. Supreme Court decision last year that ended race-conscious admissions.

“Furor over diversity statements in hiring is a red herring,” Edward J. Hall, a philosophy professor, wrote in The Harvard Crimson in April. He urged a redirection of anger toward “its proper target: not diversity statements themselves, but rather horribly distorted view that has taken hold about what they should contain.”

Well, I’m not sure what the “horribly distorted view” is, but the three components of a diversity statement mentioned above have been explicitly specified by several universities that use them.  And if you want to promote a range of views, are statements emphasizing racial diversity the best way? Why not ask people their views on various issues? Of course, if you’re looking for certain views, then you’re treading into the area of compelled speech. And, of course, most faculty, including those evaluating candidates, are liberals, which makes it hard for them to promote political or ideological diversity in the admissions process.

Finally, this statement disappointed me:

Last week, Harvard said that it would curb its statements about topics not “relevant to the core function of the university.” But it stopped short of fully embracing the notion of institutional neutrality, a principle promoted by the University of Chicago in which universities commit to staying out of political and social matters.

As I wrote recently, the Harvard statement on institutional neutrality, which is at this point only a proposal, is problematic in that its creators don’t seem to fully embrace neutrality but may be willing to make pronouncements about the “core function of a university” that really are statements more about politics or ideology. We really need to see Harvard’s final statement, which would have been much improved, I think, had Steve Pinker been put on the committee that wrote it.

Click to read the Crimson’s take:

The Crimson statement is pretty much the same as above, with Hall (now called “Ned” Hall), again defending the old-style statements:

Hall defended diversity statements as a way to understand how job candidates would educate classrooms of diverse students. But he criticized institutions’ expectations that candidates profess their dedication to “equity-based teaching” as a “horribly distorted view” of what such statements should contain.

Again, this distortion isn’t evident to me, and I’d like to know what Hall means when he says “classrooms of diverse students.”

Finally, Harvard waffles a bit again, leaving a little wiggle room for the traditional function of DEI statements:

Although language on DIB statements has been scrubbed from the appointment and promotion handbook, Zipser presented the changes as a way to balance facilitating diversity and inclusion with other priorities.

“This broader perspective acknowledges the many ways faculty contribute to strengthening their academic communities, including efforts to increase diversity, inclusion, and belonging,” she wrote.

(By the way, is there a difference between “inclusion” and “belonging”?)

The last bit of the second sentence is emphasized for a reason: this is the primary goal of the new statements, but Harvard can’t say it explicitly.  Now I may be being cynical here, and I hope so, but the admission of colleges that they’ll find workarounds for the Supreme Court;s decision makes me think that they’ll find related workarounds for faculty DEI statements.

Jesse Singal on the ridiculous “punishment” given to NYU protestors

June 2, 2024 • 9:40 am

As the Chicago Maroon reported in February (see my post on it here), a group of pro-Palestinian protestors who had violated University of Chicago rules by participating in sit-in in the admissions office were required to submit essays as part of their punishment.  I guess the point was to give students a chance to reflect on—and presumably repent about—their disruptive conduct. But the result was the opposite: the students doubled down in their activism and demonization of the University. Here are just two of several letters I reproduced:

“… I participated in the sit-in on November 9 because it is proven that my University has investments in weapons manufacturing companies, and I could not continue to attend classes and go about my day-to-day without thinking about how the institution I am a part of is facilitating the genocide and displacement of millions of Palestinian people. There is a long and honorable legacy of the sit-in protest being used to peacefully remind large institutions of the harm that they are causing people through their actions, a legacy that was taken up by students of UCUP. And if UChicago, a supposed stalwart of free speech, retaliates against students for taking up this form of protest and trying to communicate with administration at the University they themselves attend, what does that mean about free speech at this institution? Although I can understand the stress this may have placed on the Deans-on-Call, that was not intentional. The stress I experienced for the past several months knowing that my University is invested in companies that build bombs, and the stress that I experienced when the administration repeatedly refused to meet with us to discuss our demands, however, has been caused by the University…”

Sahar Punjwani, Class of 2024

. . . . and another:

“… The University of Chicago has, in my time here, taught me a lot. This sit-in, my arrest, and your office’s obligation to begin disciplinary proceedings against me, have taught me a lot as well that the University would rather criminalize and punish its students—those most committed not only to values of free expression but also noble pursuits of justice, equality, and liberation, and, as it has not passed my notice, most of whom are Black/Indigenous and students of color, and low-income—than meet with them and be transparent about its investments in arms companies.…

… I believe myself to be an excellent student and upstanding member of the UChicago community. I would never and have never sought to violate university policy. I sought to exercise my right to free expression, as established and championed by the Chicago Principles; and, after having attended the numerous quad tabling events, art builds, and rallies leading up to this sit-in, I felt moved to participate in this sit-in in an abundance of despair over my university’s failure to recognize its role in or even name the Israeli genocide in Gaza, where now over 22,000 Palestinians have been killed. Knowing that a Palestinian child was being killed every 10 minutes, knowing the school year in Palestine was canceled as all schools had been bombed or turned into refugee shelters, I could not continue to merely attend my classes. It is precisely because of my education that I participated in this sit-in; my education here has fostered a young mind that cannot turn a blind eye to the genocide that is taking place with my tuition money…”

Kelly Hui, Class of 2024, Student Marshal [JAC note: Hui,  was one of the four students whose degree was withheld by the University over their participation in the later Encampment, spurring a lot of protest on graduation day yesterday (see next post).

As you see, if the essays were meant to “reform” the students, they failed miserably.  The self-reflection that was supposed to teach students that “free speech” does not justify disruption (or at least disruption without punishment) led only to intensified demonization of the University and increased emphasis on its support of the so-called Israeli “genocide”. As you see, Hui, one of the students disciplined for participating in the sit-in, is now subject to disciplinary proceedings over participation in the later encampment. She is of course entitled to her views, but clearly the “essay” assignment didn’t change them.

A similar and risible attempt to get protestors to “self-educate” is the subject of Jesse Singal’s latest Substack post, dealing with protestors at New York University (NYU) who were asked to “self-educate” after illegally disrupting campus activities. But their “self-education assignment”, involving completing a complex series of exercis in a module, is even more ludicrous than was Chicago’s.

Click to read:

The background (Singal’s words are indented, and one quote he gives is doubly indented):

As you may have heard, there is a war between Israel and Hamas. As you may have also heard, there has been a surge of pro-Palestinian and/or anti-Israeli activism on many college campuses. While NYU didn’t get as much attention as its bigger and more Ivy-covered brother uptown, Columbia University, a group of students there were disciplined for their actions during protests.

Now that the dust has settled, the generous administrators at NYU have offered these students a chance to evade disciplinary action. As Ginia Bellafante reported in TheNew York Times a couple weeks ago:

While the university eventually moved to have the criminal charges against the students dropped, it initiated a disciplinary process against some of them (the university will not disclose how many) that seemed as if it had been conjured in the writers’ room of a dystopian sci-fi series. In order to return to the university, some students would be required to complete a 49-page set of readings and tasks — “modules” — known as the Ethos Integrity Series, geared at helping participants “make gains” in “moral reasoning” and “ethical decision making.” In a letter to the administration, Liam Murphy, a professor at the law school, called it “an intellectual embarrassment,” betraying the university’s mission as a training ground for independent thought and forcing students merely “to consume pages and pages of pablum.”

The Ethos Integrity Series was not the only command. Some students would be assigned a “reflection paper,” the details of which were laid out by the Office of Student Conduct. In it they would address several questions, among them: What are your values? Did the decision you made align with your personal values? What have you done or need still to do to make things right? Explicitly instructed not to “justify” their actions, the students were told to turn their papers in by May 29 in “12-point Times New Roman or similar font.”

Ben Burgis, who wrote a piece about all this in Jacobin that you should read, got a copy of the module, which he generously shared with me. You can read it here.

You should read Burgis’s piece but especially the copy of the module students were supposed to work through. The object, of course, was to convince the students, after reading and writing about morality and their own actions and values, that their illegal protests were immoral and wrong.  But as you see above, these protesters are already convinced that they were right, regardless of how much deep thought they’d devoted to their actions, and so these questions are a waste of time. NYU’s module includes, for example, a list of 42 “personal values” that you’re supposed to rank in order of importance. Here are the first ten:

Then there are a series of essays designed to promote self-reflection that leads to contrition. Here’s one:

Part 2: Essay about Sanctioned Action

In this essay, discuss the following questions using your responses from above to provide thorough reflection:

1. What was going on in your life leading up to and at the time of the sanctioned action? What influenced your decisions with regard to the sanctioned action?

2. Which of your values influenced your involvement in the situation that resulted in the sanctioned action, and which values were not considered in this situation? How so?

3. Why did you make the decisions you made regarding the action that lead to this sanction?

4. What were the outcomes of the situation and who was affected by those outcomes?

5. What have you learned (in general and about yourself) since the time of the situation that resulted in the sanctioned action?

Now think about how protesters are going to answer those questions. Here’s one more (it’s a LONG module):

9. What decision would a “Person of Character” make?

In fitting with a non-consequentialist perspective, Nash discusses asking what you would do if you were acting in character – meaning if you were acting in a manner to further your own personal, moral story that you are “attempting to live‟” (p. 15). Nash also suggests stepping into the shoes of a person who you respect and consider to be an ethical person. Identify a few of these people. The Persons of Character may be parents, professors, religious leaders, a co-worker or boss, etc. Look at the ethical dilemma from the perspective of one or two of these Moral Exemplars. What decision would these people make? Are these decisions a part of your set of options? If not, add them to the list.

You can image which “people of character” would be chosen!

The whole point is that this dumb series of modules is highly unlikely to change the minds of any protesters, particularly those who were so determined to act that they went beyond free, unsanction speech to violate university principles.  The module is not an “educational” experience in which students get to reflect on both sides of an issue. Rather, it’s designed to make students come to a predetermined conclusion—that their actions were wrong.

Singal also concludes that this exercise is fatuous, but favors leniency towards protesters, in the form of a warning for a first violation and punishment after subsequent ones. I agree with that, except that many of the protesters—like Hui mentioned above—were involved in multiple disruptions but were never given any initial warnings (Hui did participate in the essay exercise, which I suppose counts as a warning).

This stuck out to me as neatly exemplifying a certain very buzzword-heavy, bureaucracy-friendly approach to serious issues like ethics and social justice. My preference, at the end of the day, is toward leniency for nonviolent student protesters. If that means they have to fill out some idiotic form, fine. But why not do what Columbia did to some of the student protesters up there, and simply ask them to sign a document agreeing that henceforth, they will follow the student conduct guidelines? Then if they violate them again, no one can say they weren’t warned or didn’t have every opportunity to follow the rules.

This approach, on the other hand. . . it’s just debasing. It perverts the whole idea of moral inquiry and self-examination. It feels like what you get when the administrative class becomes too powerful within education.

Singal is right. Let students engage in civil disobedience if they feel strongly, and then impose the proper sanctions on them for doing so. (Until the war protests this year, accepting one’s punishment was an integral part of civil disobedience.)  But don’t try forcible education to change their views. That violates the entire purpose of a university, which is fostering free inquiry.

The protestors threaten graduation

May 30, 2024 • 9:30 am

One of the things that worried me about the protestors (i.e., the encampers), most of whom were affiliated with the consortium UChicago United for Palestine (UCUP, one of whose subgroups is the Students for Justice in Palestine), is that they will attempt to disrupt graduation on Saturday by making noise, chanting, and generally creating a ruckus with their pro-Palestinian vigor. These were, after all, the people who were largely behind the Encampment, and their main function seems to be disrupting campus activities. Even though they’ve gained nothing I can see from all legal or illegal demonstrations, and in fact have angered a lot of people with their performative activism, they’ve vowed to keep on keeping on, and that includes disrupting graduation. (The Encampment didn’t make the administration yield to any of the protestors’ demands.)

As The Chicago Tribune reported yesterday, the University of Chicago is withholding the degrees of four students who participated in the encampment, all pending resolution of formal disciplinary hearings about their participation. This doesn’t mean they won’t graduate if the hearings exculpate them, but if they’re found guilty they don’t get their degrees. As the Tribune said:

A U. of C. spokesman said the school could not comment on individual student disciplinary matters, but noted that the process is standard practice after a formal complaint is reviewed by the university’s Disciplinary Committee.

“The recent protests on campus brought about multiple formal complaints alleging that students violated University policies, including by engaging in disruptive conduct,” the university said. “Once a formal complaint is received and, if the Disciplinary Committee faculty lead concurs that the complaint is credible, the matter may be referred to the Standing Disciplinary Committee on Disruptive Conduct to determine if policies have been violated.”

The four students are still able to participate in graduation and other end-of-year events, and their degrees can be later conferred depending on the resolution of the disciplinary process. But if the committee finds that certain policies have been violated, their degrees could be denied, despite four years of coursework and tuition.

Undergraduate tuition for the prestigious institution exceeds $67,000, and rises to more than $93,000 after including housing, food and other miscellaneous expenses.

The four students under investigation (the article implies there are others as well), along with many in the community in general, are furious that any such punishments are being levied on those who violated University rules. (The old notion of taking your punishment for civil disobedience seems to have vanished.)

My own view, which I’ve expressed here often, is that punishments for the guilty are needed if we’re going to tamp down the degree of illegal disruption on campus. So far the University doesn’t seem to have had much stomach for punishment, but that, of course, will only guarantee that disruption of campus life will continue.  The war in Gaza is going to last a while, and it’s easy to see that unless there are sanctions on the table, illegal disruptions could continue for several years. (I’m not, of course, opposed to pro-Palestinian demonstrations so long as they don’t violate the “time, place, and manner” rules of the University. Legal demonstrations are a manifestation of the free speech for which the University of Chicago is famous.)

Unfortunately, UCUP is not only threatening to disrupt graduation (an illegal activity), but is making concrete plans to do so. Have a gander at these two posts from the UCUP Instagram page (each screenshot links to the post):

Note: “Be sure to bring drums and noise makers as we rally for Rafah.” You know what that means: a lot of shouting, chanting, and banging during a ceremony that is really important to many graduates.

You might expect that UCUP would let these graduates enjoy the formal termination of their studies here, but you would expect wrongly. UCUP wants to disrupt, and are apparently heedless that they would lose sympathy from the community if they screw up graduation.  But changing minds is not, I think, their main aim.

Here’s another screenshot.

Rally at 10 AM on Saturday, with the location to be arranged (it’ll be given out on private chatrooms). Since the convocation (the ceremony) is scheduled to start at 9:15 a.m., this will be right when the ceremony is under way. I’ll be around to report what happens.

Gaza protests seem to be occurring far more often at “elite” colleges

May 28, 2024 • 11:00 am

This article from The Washington Monthly concludes that pro-Palestinian protests are occurring largely at elite colleges in the U.S., but does suffer from a lack of statistical analysis. Readers are thus forced to use the EB Test (Eyeball Test), which does seem to support that conclusion, but as a scientist I’d like to see some p values.

Click the headline to read; the magazine appears to be pretty nonpartisan, perhaps leaning a bit towards the Left:

Here’s the intro, which also explains why they use percentage of students with Pell Grants, which are grants given to medium- or low-income students, , and the grants don’t need to be repaid. Because the maximum Pell Grant is about $7,300 per year, Pell students tend to go to “non-elite” colleges that don’t charge very much.  Thus the higher the percentage of Pell-funded students, the less “elite” the college is (remember, for schools like Harvard, the yearly tuition, fees, and costs of living are nearly $85.000 before financial aid is applied).

Here’s their intro:

. . . . one thing is not especially diverse about the protests: the campuses on which they’ve been happening.

Many of the most high-profile protests have occurred at highly selective colleges, like Columbia University. But since the national media is famously obsessed with these schools and gives far less attention to the thousands of other colleges where most Americans get their postsecondary educations, it’s hard to know how widespread the campus unrest has really been.

We at the Washington Monthly tried to get to the bottom of this question: Have pro-Palestinian protests taken place disproportionately at elite colleges, where few students come from lower-income families?

The answer is a resounding yes.

Using data from Harvard’s Crowd Counting Consortium and news reports of encampments, we matched information on every institution of higher education that has had pro-Palestinian protest activity (starting when the war broke out in October until early May) to the colleges in our 2023 college rankings. Of the 1,421 public and private nonprofit colleges that we ranked, 318 have had protests and 123 have had encampments.

By matching that data to percentages of students at each campus who receive Pell Grants (which are awarded to students from moderate- and low-income families), we came to an unsurprising conclusion: Pro-Palestinian protests have been rare at colleges with high percentages of Pell students. Encampments at such colleges have been rarer still. A few outliers exist, such as Cal State Los Angeles, the City College of New York, and Rutgers University–Newark. But in the vast majority of cases, campuses that educate students mostly from working-class backgrounds have not had any protest activity. For example, at the 78 historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) on the Monthly’s list, 64 percent of the students, on average, receive Pell Grants. Yet according to our data, none of those institutions have had encampments and only nine have had protests, a significantly lower rate than non-HBCU schools.

They give four graphs to support the conclusion, which you can inspect using the EB test. Each point represents one college, and is colored blue if that college had no pro-Palestinian protest, red if there was a protest but no encampment, and green if there was an encampment.  The first graph below shows that “elite” college with fewer students admitted also have a very low percentage of Pell-receiving students, while schools with high percentage of Pell students tend to be those with pretty high admission rates.

Note that nearly all schools with a Pell percentage of 60% or more students (that is, the less selective colleges) have blue dots, reflecting no protests, while those with lower  (40% or less) Pell students have more bluered and green dots, indicating protests. The EB test suggests the hypothesis of “elite = protests” is right, but a statistical analysis would be better (for example, dividing the graph into quartiles along the X axis.

Here’s the notes on the second graph, which plots percentage of Pell students versus tuition and fees for only PRIVATE universities. Their notes:

When you separate out private and public colleges, the difference becomes even more stark, as the next chart demonstrates. At private colleges, protests have been rare, encampments have been rarer, and both have taken place almost exclusively at schools where poorer students are scarce and the listed tuition and fees are exorbitantly high.

. . . Out of the hundreds of private colleges where more than 25 percent of the students receive Pell Grants, only five colleges have had encampments.

You can see that by looking at the plethora of red and green dots (protests and encampments, respectively) at the upper left of the plot, which represents colleges with high tuition and fees and low percentage of Pell students.  Using the EB test alone you see that there are more protests at less affordable colleges.

But what about public universities? The relationship isn’t as clear for public universities, though again there’s a deficit of protests at colleges with more then 50% Pells students. The authors have an explanation for the weaker relationship in public schools. As they say,

Protests and encampments have been more common at public colleges. This is in part because these colleges just have more students, and only a few students are needed for a protest. Even at public colleges, though, there is a clear relationship between having fewer Pell students and having had a protest or encampment, as the chart below illustrates.

The relationship is not as “clear” to me, which is why one needs statistics. Still, nearly all schools with less than 15% Pell students have had a protest or encampment.

Their tentative hypothesis from the above is this:

One possible explanation is that the more selective and wealthier colleges attract and encourage students who are more public minded and socially active.

To test that, they did the same correlation of percent pell students on the X axis versus the 2023 “service ranking” of schools, which are metrics used by the authors to determine the degree of “public mindedness and social activeness”; they incorporate things like “the number of students at a college who serve—before, during, or after attending the school—in AmeriCorps, the Peace Corps, ROTC, and local community nonprofits through work study; the percentage of students registered to vote and the degree to which the school makes student voting easier; and whether a school is listed on the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification, which recognizes colleges that document their broader public engagement efforts.”

The authors note that this relationship (graph below) shows the following:

. . . . schools that have high scores on the Washington Monthly service rankings (the bottom of the Y axis) are a bit more likely to also have had protests and encampments. But in general, the distribution looks more random, especially compared with the previous three charts. In other words, having high levels of student democratic engagement—at least according to the Monthly’s metrics, which are the most extensive we know of—is far less correlated with protests and encampments than admitting low percentages of poor and working-class students.

Well, yes, but again statistics would be nice here, though the plot does look a bit less dispositive that the several above.

The obvious conclusion, which the authors arrive at and I share: students at elite schools  are poorer and “are just focused on other concerns.” As they say:

They may have off-campus jobs and nearby family members to see and take care of. They might sympathize with the protesters—a nationwide poll of college students in May found that 45 percent support the encampments, 24 percent oppose them, and 30 percent are neutral. But in the same poll, only 13 percent rated conflict in the Middle East as the issue most important to them. That was well behind health care reform (40 percent), educational funding and access (38 percent), and economic fairness and opportunity (37 percent). Students burdened with multiple responsibilities—like having to work a low-paying job to pay for college to get a better-paying job—are unlikely to devote what little free time they have to protesting about an issue they don’t see as a high priority.

They also float the idea that schools with more Pell grants are more Left-leaning, and thus more prone to having protests.  This would rest on the notion that bigger schools that are less elite are also located in more conservative areas.

Regardless, the data above–though again I’d like statistical verification–show that the more elite a college is, the more likely it is to have pro-Palestinian protests. This of course jibes with “common wisdom”.  It is the entitled students who protest the most.

The University of North Carolina system eliminates DEI

May 24, 2024 • 10:30 am

As expected, the entire University of North Carolina system has abandoned any formal bureaucracy based on DEI, though apparently some vestiges of DEI will remain. The vote passed the Board of Governors almost unanimously, and, better, the basis for the banning appears to be the adoption of a form of institutional neutrality, i.e., like Chicago’s “Kalven Principles.”

There are two articles below, the first from Inside Higher Education and the second from the Citizen Times of Asheville, NC. Click on either headline to read.  As both articles note, this change is part of a nationwide pushback against the more invidious aspects of DEI. (There are some useful aspects, but they don’t have to go under DEI or be part of a huge and expensive bureaucracy.)

From Insider Higher Ed:

The piece:

The University of North Carolina System Board of Governors voted on Thursday morning to eliminate a policy requiring diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) offices, and to ask individual campus chancellors to cut positions and spending on DEI.

The vote, which passed 22 to 2, will institute a new “equality within the university” policy to replace DEI. Chancellors at the System’s 16 campuses must each submit a report outlining steps they’ve taken to comply with the DEI ban to System president Peter Hans by September.

“Our public universities must take a stance of principled neutrality on matters of political controversy … it is not the job of the university to decide all the complex and multi-dimensional questions of how to balance and interpret identity,” Hans said at the board meeting. “This policy will preserve the university’s role as a trusted venue for that vital debate.”

Board member Pearl Burris-Floyd, who is Black and voted yes on the policy change, stressed that the decision should not lead to the widespread disappearance of essential services for minority students, and that the board has not “turned their backs on them.”

“Even if it’s not called DEI, we have a way to help people and make that path clearer for all people,” she said.

DEI bans have been enshrined into law in Texas and Florida, where they’ve led to dozens of layoffs and the closure of student resource centers. Lawmakers in North Carolina had proposed a similar legislative mandate, but ultimately deferred to the UNC board.

The vote also comes shortly after the board of the System’s flagship, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, voted to divert $2.3 million in DEI funding to police and campus safety in the wake of pro-Palestinian student protests.

Note the “stand of principled neutrality on matters of political controversy” averred by the President. That’s simply Kalvenish institutional neutrality, and kudos for the UNC system to adopt it. I don’t know if people will lose their jobs (I’d prefer dismantling via transferring people or not replacing them), but that’s not my call. The system has to go.

And from the Asheville Citizen Times:

An excerpt:

The UNC Board of Governors adopted a policy requiring “institutional neutrality” and eliminating funding for diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in a nearly unanimous vote May 23 at its regular meeting in Raleigh, with all but two members voting in favor.

The vote repeals two DEI policies adopted in September 2019, which required each of the state’s 17 public campuses — which include UNC Asheville, Western Carolina University and Appalachian State — employ roles such as a chief diversity officer and to set goals for advancing diversity and inclusion, among other requirements.

The Board of Governors has 23 voting members. The two “no” votes came from members Joel Ford and Sonja Phillips Nichols. Two board members, Gene Davis and Pearl Burris-Floyd, spoke in the meeting regarding the policy and why it had their support prior to the vote.

What I don’t get is why the two people who supported DEI were not among the “no” votes. Perhaps they weren’t voting members. At any rate, note the emphasis on “institutional neutrality” in the first paragraph. I hope that the UNC system enforces it, for keeping our own University neutral requires constant vigilance. Administrators and chairpeople seem to be unable to keep their gobs shut on political and ideological issues.

Here’s how they’ll enforce it:

The chancellor and student affairs director at each institution must provide written certification of compliance and what actions they’ve taken to comply with “the University’s commitment to institutional neutrality and nondiscrimination” by Sept. 1.

They’ll also have to report reductions in force and spending, “along with changes to job titles and position descriptions, undertaken as a result of implementing this policy and how those savings achieved from these actions can be redirected to initiatives related to student success and wellbeing,” the policy says.

But of course many places will try to do an end run around it. Appalachian State (part of the system) may be one:

Appalachian State University Interim Chancellor Heather Norris, regarding the policy change when it was proposed, reaffirmed the school’s commitment to supporting students.

“While there are a lot of unknowns, and we cannot answer questions about specific implementation details at this time, I can assure you our university’s commitment to supporting all of our students is unwavering, and we remain dedicated to providing a compassionate, high-quality college experience that is focused on student success,” Norris said in an email obtained by the Citizen Times.

To me that seems like coded language for “well, we will obey the formal rules, but we’re still gonna have DEI.” And of course this is going to happen with respect to the Supreme Court’s prohibition of race-based admission. Colleges everywhere are now asking prospective students to write essays on hardships they’ve overcome, and that, of course, is a blatant invitation to invoke race as one of those hardships.  Even that kind of ask may be illegal, so this whole mishigass isn’t over yet.

 

Rick Shweder on three kinds of college free speech, and which one should be used

May 24, 2024 • 9:15 am

Rick Shweder is a cultural anthropologist with the title of Harold H. Swift Distinguished Service Professor of Human Development here at the University of Chicago. Like many of us, Rick is involved in trying to preserve and teach the Chicago Principles of Free Expression as well as the Kalven Report.

His latest effort is a well-written piece for the City Journal about the various types of “free” speech available.  He’s concerned mostly with what goes on in private universities like ours, and his message is that both public and private universities should adhere to pure First Amendment free speech, which, in colleges, comes with court-approved “time, place, and manner” (TPM) restrictions. But be aware that his discussion is centered on private universities.

Click below to read:

First, here are Shweder’s three speech options that, he says, are available to private colleges (his words are indented):

Both Columbia and Harvard are private institutions and can set their own speech policies. Such schools, broadly speaking, have three options in crafting their codes. First, they can provide students with speech rights mirroring those guaranteed by the First Amendment. Second, they can prohibit “offensive” or otherwise unwelcome speech. Third, they can require academic manners of speech on campus. Any private institution must choose from, or strike a balance between, those three options.

I’ll take the options separately:

The pure free speech option:

The first option, which we’ll call the “First Amendment model,” is the preferred speech policy at most secular private universities in the United States. That policy protects (and restricts) campus speech much the way our courts protect (and restrict) speech in the public square. Harvard president Claudine Gay likely had this model in mind when she refused to give a categorical “yes” or “no” answer to the genocide-advocacy question.

. . . and how it’s supposed to work:

My University of Chicago colleague, Geoffrey Stone, author of “The Chicago Principles,” explains why a First Amendment–embracing private-university president may have struggled to answer Stefanik’s question:

If the University embraces the principles of the First Amendment for public speech, then advocating the genocide of a group in public discourse could not be punished or prohibited unless it creates a clear and present danger that the conduct that is advocated would in fact occur. That is the lesson the [Supreme] Court learned from decades of allowing speech to be prohibited if it advocates unlawful conduct (such as refusing to comply with the draft or attempting to overthrow the government). The real harm from the advocacy of genocide is not that it is likely to cause genocide, but that it is seen as offensive and hurtful. That is not a sufficient justification for prohibiting speech in public discourse. Another concern is that it might cause people to discriminate against or even physically harm Jews. But that doesn’t satisfy the demands of the First Amendment any more than would public speech accusing people who perform abortions of being murderers.

First Amendment principles distinguish between advocacy (which is constitutionally protected) and likely incitement of an immediate and grave harm (which is not), and between verbal harassment directed at a particular group (which is constitutionally protected) and verbal harassment directed at a particular individual (which is not). If Harvard were committed to upholding the First Amendment model (which is doubtful), Claudine Gay would be right to say that context matters in determining whether a call to genocide constitutes prohibited speech.

No university in America today, however, fully embraces First Amendment principles. For example, heckling and shouting, provided it does not deprive anyone of their right to speak, is constitutionally protected speech in the public square but is banned at most private universities.’

Note, however, that courts make a distinction between what’s said in the public square and what’s said on college campuses, so that heckling and shouting and disruption can be banned in even public universities without violating the First Amendment.  The University of Louisville, a public university in Kentucky, emphasizes that TPM restrictions apply to their campus to preserve freedom of speech and do not violate the Constitution:

The First Amendment requires that the government not discriminate against particular viewpoints. The Supreme Court has, however, upheld the idea that speech may be regulated under “Time, Place, and Manner” regulations. The burden of such regulations is still fairly high, requiring the government to show that their restrictions on speech are (1) content neutral (that the government does not outlaw content specific viewpoints), (2) narrowly tailored to serve a governmental interest (i.e., cannot be overly broad to regulate more than what is necessary to achieve government interest like, for example, public safety), and (3) ample alternative means to express ideas. At UofL, for example, the time, place, and manner regulations are a reflection of the value of encouraging diverse ideas, community engagement on campus, and academic freedom while also preserving interests including campus safety.

Students or student organizations have the right of freedom of expression to the extent allowed by law. The University reserves the right to make reasonable restrictions as to time, place, and manner in certain situations as outlines to the Code of Student Rights and Responsibilities.

The government interest in (2) above is in preserving freedom of speech itself by not allowing unwarranted disruptions that could impede discussion.

The prohibition of “offensive” speech.

The second policy option, which acknowledges private schools’ right to regulate the content of on-campus speech, goes beyond most schools’ bans on heckling. This option, which we’ll call the “regulatory approach,” aims to restrict speech that is repellent, alarming, or disparaging of a particular group. Shafik’s recent congressional testimony, in which she endorsed penalties for hurtful or repugnant speech, suggests Columbia embraces the regulatory approach, as private universities are legally free to do.

Is it possible to reduce “offensive” speech without implementing formal sanctions? Harvard professor Danielle Allen thinks so. In the Washington Post, Allen proposed that students abide by the following self-censoring principle: “If the communications you use while protesting would constitute harassment if targeted at a specific individual, the presumption will be that the protest method is likely to create a pattern of generalized intimidation incompatible with a culture of mutual respect.”

But this isn’t a good test, for “offensive” speech need not constitute harassment even if targeted at a specific individual, for specific individuals could claim that they’d be harassed if faced with, for instance, pro-life messages (Shweder’s example), anti-affirmative-action messages, or an infinite number of messages that might offend people but wouldn’t be “harassment” in the normal sense.  The showing of paintings of Muhammad at Hamline University, for example, was claimed to create intimidation and harm, but this was perfectly consonant with a college atmosphere that promotes discussion. Nevertheless, the professor who showed the images was let go.

Preservation of “academic manner” of speaking.  

As Shweder presents it (and he’s clearly thinking of what has happened on our campus), preserving the “academic manner of speech” overlaps substantially with preserving the TPM restrictions, which themselves create an atmosphere that promotes free discussion:

This third option, which we’ll call the “manners approach,” reflects those principles. It refuses to regulate the content of speech. Instead, it focuses exclusively on the form of speech and procedures of civil intellectual engagement that define and give character to a free-thinking and critically reasoning academic speech environment. Some manners of speech, such as shouting down invited speakers, are widely recognized to be incompatible with the mission of a university.

After all, why should a private school permit a political demonstration in which slogans are shouted at captive audiences in offices or classrooms within earshot? Such speech events are asymmetric, non-cooperative, and dogmatic. Typically, the discourse scene for the event is aggressively controlled by a group of energized and committed true believers, and neither debate nor dialogue nor discussion nor rational argument is invited or welcome. The manners approach invites private universities to distinguish their quadrangles from a public park or a rally ground. One of the many problems demonstrations like those at Columbia present is that they breach the peace of the university and subvert the trust and cooperation necessary to sustain dialogue and debate in a community of scholars.

I would claim that this doesn’t really differ from the First Amendment option, as that option itself regulates TPM, creating an “academic manner” of speech.

Now it’s pretty clear that Shweder believes that all private universities, as well as public ones, should adopt the First-Amendment model, and if Harvard and Penn had done that (they sort of have one, but apply it inconsistently), then the Presidents wouldn’t have gotten the Congressional drubbing they did. It was more the hauteur with which the three Presidents answered, as well as their failure to explain why the “it depends” nature of calls for genocide really can be Constitutional, that brought two of the three down (Gay might have survived had she not committed plagiarism).

At the end, when Shweder asks the question “Which of these three options—the First Amendment, regulatory, or manners approach—should private universities pursue?”, he gives a quote from 1946 by Columbia University President Frank Fackenthal that suggersts that the First Amendment approach is the one that private schools should use, ergo one that all universities should use. (Religious universities may be an exception, but Shweder doesn’t consider them.)

I’m in full agreement with this conclusion but finish with the two quibbles I have with the article. To repeat:

First, I think there is a time and place to use signs and banners, though they’re no replacement for reasoned speech. And they are constitutional. Putting down the megaphones, however, is a good idea, as amplified speech serve only to disrupt campuses. It certainly did here, as some faculty had to move or cancel their classes near the Quad when denizens of the encampment began changing through megaphones outside the permitted hours.

Second, and more important, TPM restrictions are fully consonant with the First Amendment.  Therefore, if universities do make rules limiting the time, place, and manner of public speech, and those rules are not unreasonable and meant to further academic discourse, they are still adhering to Constitutional forms of speech.  This is important to realize, for a lot of misguided faculty members construe disruptive encampments, sit-ins in buildings, and the use of megaphones, etc. as “free speech”. It is not—at least not according to our Constitution. Thus I disagree with Shweder when he said this:

No university in America today, however, fully embraces First Amendment principles. For example, heckling and shouting, provided it does not deprive anyone of their right to speak, is constitutionally protected speech in the public square but is banned at most private universities.

Heckling and shouting and deplatforming are also banned at many public universities, and, at any rate, deplatformng speakers, heckling and shouting are fully in line with First Amendment principles for some places—including universities. Thus it’s wrong to say that “no university in America today. . . fully embraces First Amendment principles.”  Certainly the University of Chicago does, as well as public schools like the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Michigan State, and the University of Texas system.

The realization that the Chicago Principles of Freedom of Expression are the rules most conducive to allowing free academic discourse is why more than 100 U.S. colleges and Universities, both public and private have adopted them.

Free, free speech!

Harvard Corporation overrules faculty, denies 13 seniors the right to graduate for participating in the school’s encampment

May 23, 2024 • 9:40 am

This report from the Harvard Crimson (click headline below to read) is unusual for two reasons. First, it represents something rare these days: serious punishment of protesters (pro-Palestinian ones in this case) who violated the “time, place, and manner” restrictions for speech. (As a private University, Harvard doesn’t have to abide by the First Amendment, but avers that it does.)

Second, it is an almost unprecedented case of the Harvard Corporation, noted as “the smaller and more powerful of Harvard University’s two governing boards,” overruling the wishes of the faculty, which voted by a large majority to confer degrees this year on 13 seniors who were not considered “in good standing”. The reason, as you might guess, is that these students were part of the pro-Palestinian encampment that had been declared a violation of Harvard policy with the possibility of punishment for participants.

Such a clash between the Corporation and the faculty is something I haven’t seen, but it’s going to cause a big fracas, for the faculty will demand that they alone have the right to decide who graduates.

You may remember that the Corporation, which includes 13 members, supported Claudine Gay after she gave an awkward (but technically correct) disquisition on genocidal speech before Congress. And the Corporation also tried to prevent the newspapers from reporting on accusations of plagiarism leveled at Gay later. Only when the plagiarism was shown to be pretty wide-ranging did they ask Gay to resign, leaving Alan Garber as the interim President (as you see from the first link above, Garber is also a member of the Corporation).

From the article:

The Harvard Corporation rejected an effort by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences to confer degrees on 13 seniors facing disciplinary charges for participating in the pro-Palestine encampment, an unprecedented veto that opens a new front in the internal battles that have convulsed Harvard for the past year.

The Corporation, the University’s highest governing body, deliberated late into the night on Tuesday as it stared down an impossible decision: render Harvard College’s disciplinary processes toothless by approving the FAS-amended list or undercut the authority of the University’s largest faculty by declining to uphold their amendment.

“Today, we have voted to confer 1,539 degrees to Harvard College students in good standing,” the Corporation wrote in a joint statement on Wednesday. “Because the students included as the result of Monday’s amendment are not in good standing, we cannot responsibly vote to award them degrees at this time.”

Faculty members, at the annual FAS degree meeting, plunged Harvard into something of a constitutional crisis as they voted to amend the list of degrees for conferral at Commencement during what is normally a sparsely attended pro forma session.

Instead, 115 faculty members showed up to a meeting in which a decisive majority voted to confer degrees on the 13 seniors. The students were notified of disciplinary charges from the Harvard College Administrative Board just three days earlier.

During the meeting, faculty members claimed that it had the authority to add the students back onto the list because the disciplinary actions from the Ad Board were subject to approval by the FAS — the “ultimate disciplinary body” for the College, according to the University’s governing statutes.

Whether it intended to or not, the Corporation’s statement signaled that it does not believe the FAS has the authority that some of its faculty members think it does.

This now pits many faculty members against the Corporation at a time when many stakeholders across the University have raised serious questions about the Corporation’s stewardship, accusing the board of repeated leadership failures over the past eight months.

Government professor Steven Levitsky warned in an interview on Tuesday that the Corporation could spark a faculty uprising if it does not sign off on the FAS-approved list of degrees for conferral.

“I would expect a faculty rebellion, possibly a faculty rebellion against the entire governance structure, because there’s already a fair amount of mistrust toward the Corporation to begin with,” Levitsky said.

I’m not sure about the faculty rebellion, but given that, like in most schools, Harvard faculty are overwhelmingly on the Left, this means that a lot of them support the encampment, surely maintaining, even though it’s illegal, that it was after all a form of “free speech.”

The Corporation rejected the faculty vote because it didn’t assess each student’s punishment nor did it “claim to restore the student[s] to good standing.” Finally, restoring graduation rights to the encampment students would, said the Corporation, create a double standard with respect to other students who couldn’t graduate because they were not in good standing.

Although the Corporation somewhat bungled its handling of L’Affaire Claudine Gay, I think it made the right decision here. Without any possible punishment for violating rules, there’s no deterrent to future violations. And the Board is acting fairly in continuing with the disciplinary process, which may allow some of these students to graduate, albeit late:

While the faculty attempted to take matters into their own hands by reinstating students, the Corporation insisted on Wednesday that the Ad Board’s appeal processes must first run their course.

“We fully support the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ stated intention to provide expedited review, at this time, of eligible requests for reconsideration or appeal,” the Corporation wrote. “We will consider conferral of degrees promptly if, following the completion of all FAS processes, a student becomes eligible to receive a degree.”