NAS Blog

I could be wrong, but in the wake of all the mudwrestling that’s followed the NAACP’s recent branding of Tea Partiers as racists, I think that the ideological fulcrum of the “diversity” debate has significantly shifted ground. For once, the response by public figures has been direct and emphatic, instead of the usual backpedaling after some vague, apologetic mumbling about the need to “include” all groups, the value of a diverse work force or the wish to avoid offending anyone, etc., etc., etc. The public rejection of the NAACP’s allegations, moreover, has been bi-partisan, including prominent Republicans such as Sarah Palin and no less than Vice President Biden and President Obama on the Democratic side of the aisle. Hopefully, this means that absurd or silly allegations of racism will no longer compel politicans and bureaucrats to jump through the hoop as they’ve done so frequently in the past.

Especially encouraging, though, is this piece by Virgina Democrat James Webb in today’s Wall Street Journal. Webb argues that although “diversity” policies had their origins in the laudable and necessary efforts to redress the unique injustices suffered by black Americans, they have long since become obsessed with skin color or ethnic background, often with unconcealed hostility toward whites. Thus, newly arrived immigrants often benefit from these policies, even though their own experiences don’t remotely resemble those of blacks. It doesn’t stop there either, since in many academic institutions, “diversity” and “inclusiveness” now extend to ever -expanding categories of sexuality, life experiences or those with physical disabilities. A particularly hard sell for me has always been affirmative action for “women” within the diversity rubric, as though the largely white, middle-class feminist movement could claim grievances comparable to those suffered historically by blacks. Yet many academic job postings routinely specify that “women and ethnic or racial minorities are especially encouraged to apply.” That doesn’t compute.

Anyway, Webb says it’s now time to end racial preferences, stop discriminating against whites, and simply treat everyone equally under the law. Amen.

In this Chronicle post, Richard Kahlenberg responds to some criticism (which he labels as “right” and “left”) of his signature issue, namely promoting socio-economic diversity as another criterion in college admissions. I don’t think his responses are convincing. Moreover, he overlooks two assumptions his case rests on. I know that at least the latter of the two has been attacked because I have done so.

First, Kahlenberg leaps to the conclusion that just because a student comes from a relatively poor family and succeeds in school well enough to qualify for college admission, that student is a “striver” who has “overcome obstacles.” I don’t think that follows. Being relatively poor in the U.S. does not mean deprivation of anything essential. And with the lowering of academic standards, graduating from high school with “good” grades is pretty easy these days. Some kids from poorer homes no doubt have had to deal with serious problems and disruptions around them, but we shouldn’t assume that low-income status implies that. Besides, there are non-poor students who have managed to deal with difficulties.

Second, what is the reason for thinking that it’s a “reward” to go to an elite college or university? If, for example, a student from a relatively poor family in eastern North Carolina could get into East Carolina on his merits, is it much better for him to instead go to Duke? The assumption seems to be that schools with higher US News rankings are “better” schools, but what justifies that assumption? Courses are not necessarily taught better at Duke; they may be taught less well. Will the student have a brighter, more lucrative career with a Duke pedigree than ECU? Possibly, but it’s by no means certain. The reverse is possible, especially if the student is near the bottom of the more intellectually competitive student body at Duke. Finally, the more prestigious degree might help the student land his first job, but in the long run people are rewarded on their productivity, not their credentials.

I’m with Roger Clegg (see his comment) in thinking that the less colleges give preferences to applicants because of characteristics such as family ancestry and circumstances and the more they evaluate them on academic interest and aptitude, the better.

If you haven’t already done so, check out this piece by Ross Douthat in the New York Times. Following up on Russell Nieli’s compelling reasearch, which we referenced here last week, Douthat – himself a Harvard graduate – takes note of the deep and ever widening cultural divide between elite academic institutions and the values of rural, religiously observant working-class whites, who are notably absent from Ivy League campuses. Don’t think though, that this means anyone sees a need to seek them out for the sake of increasing “diversity” at Yale or Princeton. No, the academics at these cloistered, self-referencing institutions are likely to see only “crypto-klansmen and budding Timothy McVeighs” among the farmers, Eagle Scouts or aspiring R.O.T.C. candidates who currently have the toughest row to hoe if they apply to most top schools. If these applicants think that the deck is stacked against them, that’s because it is: the “perfessers” really don’t like folks like them.

Of interest to law professors, lawyers, and curious individuals, NAS has recently published three articles about law schools:

“Conferring Privilege: DOJ, Law Schools, and the New Politics of Race” examines the Association of American Law Schools’ efforts to prevent racial colorblindness.

“’They So Despise Her Politics’ – Do Conservative Faculty Candidates Get a Fair Shake?” presents documents in the lawsuit of an unsuccessful faculty candidate for a position at the University of Iowa College of Law who believes she was denied the appointment because of her politics.

“Potemkin Admissions: Law Professors Propose to Hide LSAT Data” exposes a movement to persuade law schools to withhold LSAT scores from U.S. News and World Report. The idea is to make it harder for the public to see how much the pursuit of racial preferences drags down the quality of admissions.

“They So Despise Her Politics” has received attention from the Daily Iowan, Instapundit, TaxProf Blog, and One Minute Lawyer.

Princeton’s Russ Nieli has an illuminating essay on Minding the Campus entitled “How Diversity Punishes Asians, Poor Whites and Lots of Others.” It absolutely knocks the stuffing out of the contention we hear so often from college administrators that their reason for using certain preferences is that a more “diverse” student body will enhance learning and break down stereotypes. If they actually wanted to do that, they would look for students who really do bring different beliefs and perspectives and would drop the bias Nieli shows against students from military families, those who have been active in groups like 4H, and so on. They aren’t looking for Justice Powell’s phantom “educational benefits of diversity” but are merely looking to fill quotas.

Nieli advocates that elite colleges get over their diversity mania and follow what he calls the Cal Tech model: focus on enrolling students who are the most academically talented and the most eager to learn.

Anyone who’s followed Ashley Thorne’s posts describing the recently discontinued La Raza/Chicano “studies” program in the Tucson public school sytem may well have experienced a sense of the surreal: how on earth did this balkanized, ideological bomb-throwing find its way into any classroom anywhere? Could anyone actually have been serious about a “curriculum” that could only engender ethnic chauvanism and antagonism toward non-hispanics, especially whites? Unfortunately, yes, since the Tucson program is simply an extension/imitation of what’s been going on in academic precincts for quite some time now. Here you can easily find any number of undergraduate courses and “studies” programs devoted to fostering group identity, group chauvnism, group grievance, group entitlement, etc., etc. But as these two pieces (here and here) in the Chronicle of Higher Education illustrate, ethnic studies has apparently been catching some flak, even from within the academy, and the authors respectively write to mount a defense. Of course, they believe, lots of criticism predictably emanates from the incorrigible racism which perdures at all levels of American society, and which was recently made manifest in Arizona’s new statute which effectively terminated the Tucson curriculum. But one of the authors interestingly argues that ethnic studies programs at the college level have been weakened by academic “liberals,” who have used them as a means of celebrating “diversity’ rather than generating political activism and group advocacy (as in “empowerment”). That, he concludes, is where ethnic studies needs to refocus, as the La Raza program was apparently doing so well. As the comments thread indicates, a number of academic observers with first-hand experience of similar programs also think that’s exactly what’s wrong with them.

You may have thought – or wished – that American colleges and universities had finally exhausted the outer reaches of “diversity” on their campuses. Really, there’s simply GOT to be a finite limit to this thing, and we really will run out of special categories, special programs, special courses, special campus codes and relentless micromanagement by administrators, hiring committees and dormitory resident heads seeing that students and faculty members are sufficiently serious about “diversity.” Well, if that’s what you thought, brace yourself: according to this piece in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education, a new, significantly expanded version of “diversity” is about to arrive on campus, with lots of new student classifications and obligations to accomodate them. And here’s a surprise: this also means vastly greater possibilities for antidiscrimination litigation as well. Take students with various physical or learning disabilities, for example: they’re accustomed to all kinds of accomodations, whether in the use of guide dogs or the constant availability of special education teachers during their K-12 years that aren’t currently provided in most college programs. If all of they’re accustomed to receiving these services at the secondary level, then why can’t colleges and universities do likewise? There may be nothing wrong providing such accomodations, of course, but it’s not immediately obvious how they’re related to the idea of “diversity.” This is in addition, of course, to the endlessly proliferating categories of ethnic racial and sexual categories which will have to be recognized and accomodated. If you’ve been troubled by the imperial march of “diversity” up to now, this is not going to make for very edifying reading. Simillar to The Blob, it expands endlessly. The comments thread, though, suggests that a number of readers have finally reached their limits and are willing to say so. Hopefully, they’ll speak up at faculty meetings as well.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal (June 18), Timothy Knowles, “a former teacher, principal and district leader” laments the difficulty of eliminating “low-performing teachers.”  Granted, there are abundant reasons for tenure reform at the K-12 level.  College, however, is a different matter.

Marketing his new book, Cary Nelson, spear point of the AAUP, says

I’m a dyed-in-the-wool, devout believer that you only have academic freedom and free speech if you have job security.  If you don’t have job security, you can’t speak out forcefully, and I think that means academic freedom will be diminished.

I rarely agree with Dr. Nelson, a fellow I find usually animated by left-wing, social constructivist, and Sixties sentiments, but in this case he is right.

Mr. Knowles paints administrators as ex-teachers called to a higher mission.  However, in college, many administrators have little or no classroom experience, and Mr. Knowles seems oblivious to just how political, punitive, and self-serving careerist administrators can be (just look at how many of the cases at FIRE originate from administrative excesses).  Without tenure, my campus would have no discernible conservative voice at all.  I would have been fired by at least three different college presidents for a variety of transgressions:  organizing the faculty union, suing the college, publically criticizing multiculturalism, openly opposing “student learning outcomes.”

Students can survive a poor teacher (how many great teachers are there?), but they can’t survive a university monoculture that is an ideological echo chamber.  Tenure may sometimes protect incompetent knaves but, where it still exists, tenure also protects vital intellectual pluralism.

In this week’s Pope Center Clarion Call, Roger Clegg addresses the question of discrimination against Asian students. Of course, selective colleges don’t say, “We’re against those geeky, overly studious Asian kids. Let ‘em go somewhere else!” Rather, they just don’t want to have “too many” of them, so as to have enough room for all the “under-represented” groups, whose students are presumed to add so much interest to the student body. The result is the same, though: some students are rejected on account of their ancestry.

Back in January I wrote about anti-male prejudice at the University of Wyoming here and mentioned the birth of a new “male positive” discipline called Male Studies.  An organizing webinar in April has led to a full Male Studies conference in New York next October 1-2.  As the conference description makes clear, “This is not a gender studies conference. It is not a men’s studies conference in the generally accepted sense.”  That is, the conference will attempt to investigate, understand, and describe male experience rather than mock, condemn, even erase masculinity, manhood, and manliness.  How refreshing!  Anti-male prejudice and stereotyping permeate academia.  I have described my own experience here and here.

One of the funniest sequences in Evan Coyne Maloney’s documentary film  Indoctrinate U is when he wanders from campus to campus asking for directions to “the Men’s Center.”  If Male Studies takes hold, maybe someday Evan might actually be able to find one.

Here are the details and the call for papers from the convener, Dr. Miles Groth of Wagner College:

“Wagner College will host the first annual Conference on Male Studies, on Friday and Saturday, October 1-2, 2010. Six themes representing several disciplines will be addressed by panels and individual presenters:

▪  The deep biology of the experience of being male (genetics, biology, psychoneuroendocrinology, paleoanthropology);

▪  Literacy and education of boys and college males (pedagogy, sociology);

▪  Socioeconomic factors leading to males’ over-involvement in the criminal justice system, underemployment and limited opportunities as fathers, resulting from changes in child custody law (economics, forensics, law, public policy);

▪  Misandric representations of boys and mature males in the media and advertising (media studies including cinema, television and internet, and advertising);

▪  Accounts of the experience of being male (history, literature, autobiography);

▪  Pressing issues related to the emotional well-being of boys and older males, most notably depression and suicide (clinical psychology, medicine and psychiatry, social work).

Specialists in all of the above disciplines as well as related areas of research will present position papers or engage in carefully organized panel discussions of the themes. We expect participants to include scholars from more than the 12 countries who participated along with you in the April 7, 2010 inaugural teleconference and webinar broadcast.

Proceedings of the conference will be published in the first issue of a new journal, Male Studies, in 2011.”