https://amgreatness.com/2020/07/21/the-two-step-of-the-elite-professors/
The question to pose to our humanities signatories is this: why have your fields proven so discouraging to African Americans? It takes quite a bit of cluelessness and self-regard to deflect your poor performance onto others.
Grave calls for the end of systemic racism are echoing throughout academia, broadcast in open letters and in-house emails, official declarations on college websites and commentaries in campus newspapers, pledges by college presidents, and promises by professors to remedy longstanding injustice. If one were to grade these self-righteous expressions, they would earn a D- for credibility, but an A+ for brazenness.
The lack of credibility we can prove by consulting the Left’s own measure of disparate outcomes. The now-famous list of demands issued by a good portion of the Princeton University faculty in an open letter to President Christopher Eisgruber has several signatories from humanities departments. Among the demands is this:
Redress the demographic disparity on Princeton’s faculty immediately and exponentially by hiring more faculty of color.
We might point out the illegality of reserving jobs by race, but the credibility problem lies elsewhere. In order for systemic racism to exist in the hiring process at a prestigious university such as Princeton, there has to have been a pipeline of African American job candidates who have faced discrimination. If a group identity is not proportionately represented in the professoriate and more individuals in that group need to be hired, we presume that a pool of persons from that group is waiting to be tapped for a job.
But here is the situation in the humanities. According to the Digest of Education Statistics, in 2016-2017, of the 1,347 individuals who earned a Ph.D. in English, only 54 of them were “black.” That’s a rate of 4 percent. The following year yielded a better number, but not by much: 65 out of 1,295 doctorates (5 percent). Both ratios fall way below the national African American share of the population, just below 13 percent.
In foreign languages and literatures (several professors in these areas signed the Princeton letter), things are much, much worse. In 2016-2017, the tally was 12 black honorees in a total of 1,168 doctorates granted—barely 1 percent. The following year’s result: 20 out of 1,213.
