Monday, June 06, 2005

Harvard’s Diversity Grovel

In earmarking $50 million for “diversity,” President Summers is throwing away more than money

Harvard University has just pledged $50 million for faculty “diversity” efforts, penance for President Lawrence Summers’s public mention of sex differences in cognition. The university would have been better off hiring a top-notch conjuror, since only magic could produce a trove of previously undiscovered female and minority academic stars suitable for tenuring.

Even Harvard’s bottomless resources cannot buy a miracle, however. So instead of a magician, the university has brought forth the next best thing: a report on “diversity” that, like all such products, possesses the power of shutting down every critical faculty in seemingly intelligent people. For connoisseurs of diversity claptrap, Harvard’s just released “Report of the Task Force on Women Faculty” is a thing of beauty, a peerless example of the destruction of higher learning by identity politics. Because the report will undoubtedly serve as the template for future diversity scams in colleges across the country, it’s worth studying....

Every such “diversity” initiative immediately faces two major obstacles. First, its purpose is to recommend the identical set of actions that the institution, whether academic or corporate, has already been doing. Every college in the country has been frantically pursing “diversity” in hiring and admissions for decades. The task force itself commends the diversity policies of 17 rival colleges—the mere tip of the iceberg—without drawing the obvious conclusion.

The second obstacle follows from the first: there is nothing more that can be done. If untapped pools of highly qualified female and minority candidates existed out there, schools would have snapped them up long ago—if not your college, then its dozens of competitors, just as desperate to placate the quota gods. (The one course of action that might, in the case of black and Hispanic faculty recruitment, bear long-term results is the one that elite college personnel are least likely to choose: intensive mentoring of young students and the jettisoning of all “progressive” pedagogy in the schools.)

Just how repetitive is Harvard’s latest “diversity” push? I asked Harvard spokesman Sarah Friedell if the university had not already been paying considerable attention to “diversity.” She happily trumpeted the school’s efforts. “I will tell you,” she said, “huge attention is paid to diversity in terms of recruiting students and faculty. It is enormously important.” A former top administrator seconded her claims. “The annual numbers of tenure offers to women are etched into my soul,” he said. “Everyone thought about it all the time.” Indeed, the task force report itself alludes to Harvard’s numerous existing efforts to recruit women faculty, from an affirmative action slush fund to a universal drive, at each of Harvard’s faculties and schools, to “retain and promote larger numbers of women faculty.”

By now, however, crafty diversocrats have developed a host of strategies to cover up the essential meaninglessness of their existence.... So your latest diversity effort mimics everything that your institution has been doing for years? No problem! Just play Let’s Pretend: “Let’s pretend that we’ve never had a diversity initiative at our college and that this current proposal to hire more women and minority faculty represents a radical new take on college governance.” Thus, President Summers greeted the report’s release with the sonorous tones that a proposal to end tenure, say, might elicit: “Because [these recommendations] address fundamental issues about the way we conduct our core academic business, they have the power to make Harvard not only more welcoming and diverse, but a stronger and more excellent university overall.” You would think that an economist would know something about diminishing returns....

The only new hires that diversity initiatives generate are in college administrations, already overloaded with sinecures. The Harvard task force demands the creation of a most remarkable new position, a Senior Vice Provost for Diversity and Faculty Development. The provost’s office, mind you, is very high up in the administrative chain—directly beneath the president, in fact—and it is responsible for all aspects of Harvard’s academic life. Within that empyrean realm, the new Senior Vice Provost for Diversity and Faculty Development will occupy a “singular and permanent position,” dictates the task force. The Senior VP for D will sit with the president, the provost, and the deans of faculties on Harvard’s academic advisory group. And just in case the lesser functionaries in the provost’s office still don’t appreciate the exalted status of the new Senior VP for D, the task force provides that “she” (the report’s choice of words) “be given priority in terms of office space.” So much for non-hierarchical, anti-patriarchal collaborative sharing of collective resources. Naturally, the Senior VP for D will “also be supported by a group of dedicated staff.” .....

Diversocrats possess a primitive belief in the totemic power of words. If you can rename something, you have changed its essence. Harvard has already been obsessively compiling data on gender and race: the task force easily obtained faculty data from 1990 to 2005 by rank and gender—and within gender, by race. But the task force renames those data “metrics” and—poof!—it has proposed something new. Collect diversity data? That’s what Harvard did before May 16, 2005, when the task force released its report. After May 16, 2005, it will embark into the uncharted territory of compiling “metrics,” proving that now it’s really doing something about “diversity.”

The task force could have mentioned one more unintended consequence to affirmative action slush funds: peer resentment. A top Harvard science professor says that the preferences given to women and minority scientists in lab-space allocation and other perks do not always make for happy collegial relations. But any resentment that might emerge will just be more fuel for the diversity machine. Pursuant to the task force recommendations, Harvard is busily planning “climate surveys” of faculty to see whether women and minority professors feel “personally safe, listened to, valued.” Ordinarily, one could attribute the suggestion that there might be even a single professor in the warm, fuzzy cocoon of Harvard who does not feel “personally safe” to “diversity’s” solipsistic bathos. But just maybe, if your white male colleagues are grumbling behind your back about your unusual access to the Quadrupole Ion Trap Mass Spectrometer, your new computers, and your troop of lab assistants, you can begin to make out a case, however far-fetched, of not feeling “personally safe.”....

And what does $50 million buy you? This astounding sum, offered by Lawrence Summers as a down payment on his absolution for mentioning the science of sex differences, comes without any explanation as to how he arrived at it or what it will purchase. One would hope that the Senior VP for D, whatever her exalted position and her bevy of dedicated helpers in the provost’s office, doesn’t come near to costing that amount. Given that Harvard and its competitors across the country have already beaten the bushes for years for “diversity” candidates, even $500 million would seem unlikely to produce any major change in Harvard’s “diversity” profile.....

Hiring quotas (Harvard will call them “goals”) might also plausibly have a justification if widespread discrimination prevented qualified women from getting hired, just as construction unions kept out blacks in the 1960s. By imposing such “goals” on itself (enforced by the Senior VP for D’s “metrics”), Harvard is implicitly labeling itself a discriminator of this magnitude. And indeed, in a February 17, 2005, letter to the faculty, Summers took the sexist guilt of his university (and the world) onto his shoulders. “My January remarks,” he wrote, “substantially understated . . . discrimination [against women], including . . . patterns of thought to which all of us are unconsciously subject.” The paradox of an institution simultaneously dedicating $50 million to bringing in more women faculty while declaring itself resistant to women seems entirely lost on the task force. It would be interesting to know which science departments in particular Summers thinks suffer from unconscious bias—presumably, any department without parity of male to female professors.

And that leads to the final inconvenient question: Just how much are you willing to lower your standards to achieve “diversity?” If more women and minority faculty could be had who met Harvard’s standards for Caucasian and Asian males, the university would have hired them years ago. The only way it will achieve increased female and race “diversity” in the foreseeable future is to set a lower standard for female and minority hires. And this President Summers seems prepared to do.

The deconstruction of objective standards into race and gender politics is common throughout the humanities. If Summers acts on his embrace of deconstructive relativism—he called on February 15 for “rethinking our assumptions in [such] areas [as ‘excellence’]”—standards in science will be the next to go. Any department that claims that it cannot find qualified candidates to meet the Senior VP for D’s “metrics” could face the charge that it is using white male “concepts of excellence.” Thank you very much, but I think I’ll stick with those “concepts” in the interest of ensuring that my medicine works and the airplane I’m using stays in the air....

The aristocratic ease with which Harvard has just dumped $50 million down a bureaucratic sinkhole tells you all you need to know about why attending Harvard for eight months costs more than most families earn in a year. Eventually, students and parents may start asking why anyone would want to.

More here





RACIST GRADUATION CEREMONIES

It is graduation season again. Last month, my wife and I happily participated in this privilege by observing our last child graduate from one of California's state universities. Because our daughter is African American, we had the dubious honor of attending two ceremonies — one for African Americans only, and then the next day, one for the general population of graduates. This was our third child to graduate from college, and all three universities — two in California and one in Washington — had these twin exercises.

Personally, I no longer see the need for two graduation ceremonies for the same individuals. I am not so naive that I do not know the original purpose of these "extra" affairs, but I feel that their usefulness has expired. To some, it is questionable if they were ever necessary. During the civil rights era of the 1960s and early 1970s, many minority educators felt these special programs were needed for the morale and well-being of many minority students. Forty years ago, there was a belief in some minority communities that minorities were totally neglected and often not treated fairly in white-dominated colleges and universities. There was a strong belief that school administrators could not care less if these students passed, failed or graduated. Consequently, ethnic specific programs and activities were instituted to make college life more appealing to minority students.

These graduation ceremonies were generally smaller in size and designed to publicly recognize minority students for their academic achievements and to give these students an added sense of pride, importance and belonging — something that may have been absent from the general graduation exercise. In the black community, it was an extension of the "I'm black and I'm proud" theme. However, many changes have occurred in our universities. Minority students are not only represented in much higher numbers on campuses, they also are much more involved in college life and student activities.

Further, minority students are now publicly acknowledged for their accomplishments at graduations like other students. At the African American graduation ceremony I recently attended, the young man acknowledged as "Man of the Year" also received this award in the general graduation exercise.

Not only are these "special" ceremonies obsolete, they are divisive. They promote further separatism and segregation. Should white students have their own private graduation exercise? I don't think most people would appreciate that. Minorities would be the first to label it racist. Would we like to terminate the general graduation programs and let every group have a private ceremony? I don't think that we want this either.

In the general public graduation exercise my wife and I attended, the black and Latino students wore special sashes, which they had received at "their" ceremonies. Could we handle whites having their own "sashes"? The days of "white only" have ended. Great! However, shouldn't the same be true for "black only," "Latino only," "Asian only," etc.?

When we speak of a nation striving for "integration" and "diversity," what does this mean? Are these terms only to apply to some groups and not to others? As we seek freedom and become freer, we segregate more and become more exclusive.

At the African American-only graduation exercise, one of the speakers, after charging the students to be successful in life, concluded by saying, "After all, we are not the racists; they are." I would like to know who "they" are and who "we" are. I think "we" have become "they."

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"


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