By Steven Yates
January 28, 2024
“Racism is not dead, but it is on life support — kept alive by politicians, race hustlers and people who get a sense of superiority by denouncing others as ‘racists’” —Thomas Sowell
“The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.” —Thomas Sowell
The recent exposés on Claudine Gay, Harvard’s former president and current embarrassment, illustrate what we critics were saying about affirmative action decades ago: it promotes unqualified people into positions of responsibility, hurting their institutions.
Claudine Gay is such an obvious case of a Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity (DIE) appointment that I’d think even leftists would be appalled.
J.D. Vance’s tweet wasn’t atypical of conservatives noting the obvious: “She got her job not through merit, but because she checked a box.”
That would have been something she couldn’t plagiarize, one of the cardinal sins of academia at which she’d been caught red-handed.
Ms. Gay will be returning to her tenured faculty position.
What I am reasonably sure of: had I been caught copying from the writings of others in my doctoral dissertation, or articles for academic journals, without giving proper credit, it would have meant the end of my career aspirations as a professor which turned out to be unexciting in any event. I’m just another white guy, after all.
What led to this was Ms. Gay’s awkward response to allegations of antisemitism at Harvard in the wake of Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza. Pro-Palestinian student protests had erupted on a lot of campuses including Harvard where a well-publicized letter by “33 student groups” (names withheld) blamed October 7 on Israel, noting the longstanding humanitarian crisis in Gaza and holding Israel “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence” and that “the apartheid regime is the only one to blame. Israeli violence has structured every aspect of Palestinian existence for 75 years.”
The letter, which appears to have been scrubbed from the Internet, was read as implying that Israeli victims of Hamas “deserved it.”
To say this prompted an explosive reaction in the Harvard community doesn’t begin to cover it. Students associated with the letter found themselves doxxed. Donor money was withdrawn. Job offers were rescinded. Etc.
Jewish students claimed they felt threatened.
On December 5 (useful timeline here), Ms. Gay and two other university presidents on campuses that had experienced pro-Palestinian disruptions, Liz Magill at the University of Pennsylvania and Sally Kornbluth at MIT, were grilled by Elise Stefanik (R-NY) who asked point blank, “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules on bullying and harassment?”
Ms. Gay’s reply: “The rules around bullying and harassment are quite specific and if the context in which that language is used amounts to bullying and harassment, then we take, we take action against it.”
She’d evaded instead of answering the question.
Ms. Magill and Ms. Kornbluth supplied similarly evasive responses. Rep. Stefanik called for their resignations.
The next day Ms. Gay tried to clarify: “There are some who have confused a right to free expression with the idea that Harvard will condone calls for violence against Jewish students. Calls for violence or genocide against the Jewish community, or any religious or ethnic group are vile, they have no place at Harvard. Those who threaten our Jewish students will be held to account.”
On December 9, Ms. Magill resigned her position under similar circumstances.
She, too, will return to a tenured faculty position.
Harvard continued to back Ms. Gay as allegations of plagiarism unrelated to the above kerfuffle began to surface, including in her dissertation. Now on national radar, she scrambled to get corrected a number of past publications, trying to minimize the worsening damage to her reputation and that of Harvard.
More allegations came. On January 2, she resigned and issued this embarrassing statement:
“This is not a decision I came to easily. Indeed, it has been difficult beyond words because I have looked forward to working with so many of you to advance the commitment to academic excellence that has propelled this great university across centuries.”
Academic excellence? What does that phrase even mean these days?
Affirmative Action.
I’ve been writing on affirmative action for over three decades now, including what was, unfortunately, my first book. I say unfortunately because the book nearly ended my academic career. I was naïve, with no idea of either the power of the academic/cultural left, or the degree to which more responsible academic liberals hesitating over rising pseudo-subjects like “feminist ways of knowing.” Such claims as that race was a “lens” through which populations see the world were rising in prominence in academia, so that the ”dominant” group (white males) sees the world one way and that “oppressed” groups (everyone else) sees it another. One of my favorite queries in response to such projects was whether airplanes would fly, or bridges stand, for feminist and “Afro-centrist” scientists and engineers.
“Movement” conservatives, too, were terrified of being called racists. This has been their Achilles heel from the start. I’d hoped for backing from outfits like the Heritage Foundation, but found none.
Go back to 1971. That year, the Supreme Court handed down a landmark decision, Griggs v. Duke Power. This decision ended the right of a company to administer competency tests which plaintiffs contended were discriminatory. This effectively changed the meaning of discrimination from an action taken by an individual or organization to a statistical imbalance.
This bureaucratic way of looking at discrimination led to pseudo-concepts such as underrepresentation, or underrepresented groups, and from there to equity, which is not the same as equality. Equity presupposes policies that correct the imbalance even if these policies mean differential treatment of individual group members. The bureaucratic requirement: representation in organizations and on governing boards reflective of percentages in the general population.
Something that has never existed in any multi-ethnic society anywhere in the world.
This, and many other inconvenient truths are ignored, as prolific author Thomas Sowell who researched the matter thoroughly during the 1980s and 1990s informed us in numerous books. Sowell penned articles like “Affirmative Action: A Worldwide Disaster” where he argued persuasively that the range of policies going by that name, no matter how well-intended, (1) invariably provided favors to some groups at the expense of others; (2) encouraged resentment by those others that might have been mitigated by education for actual nondiscrimination; and so (3) make racial hostility worse, not better, not merely reinforcing undesirable racism but creating conditions for eventual violence between favored and nonfavored groups.
I argued in Civil Wrongs that this is what we’d seen: not an alleviation of distrust and conflict between groups but more of it. With more groups aboard the affirmative action bandwagon (invoking yet another academic pseudo-concept, intersectionality), the kind of tribalism we’d once hoped to transcend had roared back in the guise of identity politics. By the 1990s this included radical feminists and “gendered” this, “gendered” that; homosexuality and the rise of fake phobias (homophobia); and by the 2010s, transgenders and the notion that men can become women and women can become men — and boys, girls; and girls, boys! — through “gender affirming care.”
Pointing out that this is biologically nonsensical can be career-ending in the present environment! Those arguing against allowing biological men to compete in women’s sports are pilloried with accusations of transphobia: the fake phobia that emerged during the 2010s. Former NCAA swimmer Riley Gaines is the best known example of someone who faced physical attack by militant transsexuals when she criticized their participation in women’s sports at San Francisco State University.
This began in the policy world with preferences for some at the expense of others. The intellectual world had given us the cultural Marxist notion of straight white Christian “cisgendered” (yet another ridiculous pseudo-concept) males as the “historical oppressors” of all these other groups.
Truth: there are many workplaces and other environments where whites and blacks, men and women, work together and get along just fine because they are at work on common problems.
Activists and professional publicity hounds, however, fan the flames of mutual distrust at every opportunity, often with brazen dishonesty. Corporate media feeds on this because it gets clicks. Just look at how the George Floyd conflagration was handled. It’s clear that Derek Chauvin had no chance whatsoever of getting a fair trial. He is, for all practical purposes, a political prisoner of the DIE mentality.
DIE Begins to Collapse. How Much of Academia Will Go Down With It?
American academia is losing credibility.
The reasons for this go beyond dogmatic commitment to DIE — which, so far, has continued even though a more conservative Supreme Court has struck down affirmative action as unconstitutional (it always was, as it violates the constitutional concept of equal protection under the law).
One can look at how academic institutions handled the covid fiasco, for example, how they hopped uncritically on board with masking, lockdowns, and then the mRNA shots.
Or one can just note the ridiculous expense of getting a degree now. When I was an undergraduate (1970s), you could attend a public university for around $500 per semester and a good private one for perhaps three times that. Compare that to today’s fees of sometimes $10,000s per year, and many wonder if listening to leftist professors for four or more years is worth being saddled as much as six figures of student loan debt (the debt is paid to the federal government but was originally backed by banking leviathans such as JP Morgan Chase which aren’t about to allow it to be written off!).
I digress slightly. The population of men on campuses has been dropping for well over two decades now. At some campuses, women now exceed 60 percent of the student body. The anti-male sentiment of academic feminism, now prevalent in the humanities and social sciences, is the elephant in the front room.
Men are being polite. They aren’t going where they aren’t wanted. How comfortable can they be in an environment where one of the official dogmas is that they are latent rapists: where they hear that one out of every four women will be sexually assaulted during their college years?
Whites are also the one group whose status or standing in society is dropping. For over two decades now we’ve been hearing more and more about “deaths of despair”: premature deaths from treatable conditions, opioid and fentanyl use including overdoses, and suicides.
Working class whites now subsist in a culture that blames them as a group for history’s mistakes, like slavery. It claims they still benefit, in ways they find utterly invisible, from “systemic” or “structural” racism: the first premise of the critical race theory that began to come of age during the politically correct 1990s. Public school administrators deny belligerently that their schools teach this to white children although they’ve been caught numerous times, especially during the covid lockdowns when education went online and parents could see for the first time what had been going on in a lot of classrooms.
One of the ploys has been to eject parents from public school board meetings and threaten to accuse them of “domestic terrorism.”
In what ways, though, are white people they responsible for the black crime rate in Southside Chicago: for the fact — for fact it is — that black lives often don’t seem to matter to other blacks.
I have the strong impression that they mattered far more in Dr. King’s day, and that this exemplifies the utter failure of DIE ideology — assuming its goal ever was to benefit the black community and not simply provide a road to influence for a few unscrupulous opportunists (white as well as black).
What is clear is that most of higher education is determined to hang onto DIE no matter what. Give a close reading to this job listing which came my way just the other day (though I’ve not applied for an advertised academic job in over ten years now I never unsubscribed from this list).
At [redacted] Community College we value the ability to serve students from a broad range of cultural heritages, socioeconomic backgrounds, genders [sic.], abilities and orientations. We prioritize applicants who demonstrate they understand the benefits a diverse student population brings to a community college. The successful candidate will be an equity-minded [sic.] leader committed to student success achieved through collaboration with faculty, classified staff, administration, students and community partners who are also dedicated to closing equity [sic.] gaps.
An equity-minded individual is a person who:
- Understands the importance of holding ourselves accountable as educators for closing equity gaps and engaging in equitable practices;
- Reframes inequities as a problem of practice and views the elimination of inequities as an individual and collective responsibility;
- Encourages positive race-consciousness [sic.] and embraces human difference;
- Supports institutional practices that both develop and sustain culturally responsive teaching and learning environments; and
- Strategically builds support for and participation in equity-related initiatives across both our internal and external communities.
Just like a single Supreme Court decision reversing Roe v. Wade didn’t circumvent the pro-abort death culture that doubtless cost Republicans in the 2022 midterms, a decision striking down affirmative action requirements on constitutional grounds isn’t going to thwart the antiwhite racists (“antiracists”) who have risen to prominence over the past decade or so, especially when the above-mentioned opportunists can parlay DIE programs and consultations in corporate America into six-figure incomes.
Meanwhile, DIE itself is riddled with inconsistencies and other outright hypocrisies.
*My inversion of DEI to get DIE is deliberate, of course.
© 2023 Steven Yates – All Rights Reserved
E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com
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