RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/in-blow-to-academic-freedom-court-rules-universities-can-punish-faculty-for-lack-of-collegiality/?utm_

The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Thursday that a public-university faculty member can be punished for the “lack of collegiality” he purportedly showed when he criticized a higher-ed-degree program for prioritizing social justice over scholarship.

To academic-freedom advocates, the decision is a blow, and there are fears the “collegiality” rationale could chill unpopular speech at universities throughout the country.

By a vote of 2-1 in Porter v. Board of Trustees of North Carolina State University, the court ruled against professor Stephen Porter of NCSU, who had been removed from a degree program for complaints he made during a 2016 department meeting, in a spring 2018 email to colleagues, and in a personal blog post written that fall.

According to Porter, “the field of higher education study is abandoning rigorous methodological analysis in favor of results-driven work aimed at furthering a highly dogmatic view of ‘diversity,’ ‘equity,’ and ‘inclusion.’” He also called an academic conference in his field a “woke joke.”

Porter was accused of “bullying” his colleagues, and it was suggested he leave the degree program in question. The professor was soon forcibly removed. Porter also claimed his colleagues were making it impossible for him to recruit new doctoral advisees, jeopardizing his tenure.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/appeals-court-rules-university-can-punish-professor-for-criticizing-diversity-hiring/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

The academic left has no tolerance for faculty members who aren’t all in favor of the DEI agenda. It will look for any pretext to punish those who dare to disagree.

That was the case at North Carolina State where Professor David Porter complained about a departmental hire that he thought was ill-advised, done just to increase “diversity.” That bit of honesty caused the university to punish him. Porter sued, but the Fourth Circuit, in a 2-1 ruling, held that the university was in the right.

Hans Bader examines the case in this Liberty Unyielding post. 

A slice:

Yet the Fourth Circuit ruled that the professor’s email about a diversity-oriented faculty search, which complained that a colleague ‘cut corners [in] vetting’ a black finalist ‘out of a desire to hire a Black scholar whose work focused on racial  issues,’ was not on a matter of public concern — and thus not protected by the First Amendment, because it (a) ‘was an unprofessional attack on one of [his] colleagues,’ and (b) was ‘sent only to other faculty members.’ This “unprofessionalism” claim is diametrically at odds with the Supreme Court’s Rankin decision saying that ‘the inappropriate…character of a statement is irrelevant to the question whether it deals with a matter of public concern.’

https://www.frontpagemag.com/majority-of-black-people-support-supreme-court-ban-on-affirmative-action/

While the bulk of the mainstream media coverage of the Supreme Court decision banning colleges from basing college admissions on race consists of the expected leftist hysteria and propaganda, a small number of inside baseball stories largely aimed at talking Dems down from the high ladder, tell the truth.

You would never know it from most of the media’s coverage but the vast majority of Americans oppose using race to decide who gets into college.

84% of white adults oppose colleges considering race or ethnicity when deciding which students to accept

81% of Hispanics oppose it

76% of Asians oppose it

So do 71% of blacks

Asians are not even the top non-white group to oppose racial discrimination in college admissions, Hispanics are.

Black people, on whose behalf the whole affirmative action college debate has been waged, oppose it 71% to 28% and they’re the group most favorably inclined to it.

Awkward. Obviously.

Strikingly, black people don’t much like affirmative action and a majority backed the Supreme Court decision.

Indeed, more of them actually approved of the decision (more than 4 in 10) than disapproved (fewer than 4 in 10). And more Black Americans “strongly” approved (31 percent) than disapproved (26 percent).

https://www.city-journal.org/article/law-schools-hollow-commitment-to-viewpoint-diversity

Just hours after the Supreme Court announced its decision in the Students for Fair Admissions cases, the president of NYU, from whose law school I recently graduated, sent out an email to alumni, announcing on behalf of the institution that June 29—the date that race-based admissions schemes were found to violate the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection for all—was “a difficult day,” because “diversity is a core part of our identity.” Nonetheless, NYU would find a way to stand defiant: “we will not forsake our commitment to building and sustaining a scholarly community that is diverse and inclusive, a community to which you all rightly belong.”

Peer institutions sent similar messages to their alumni and posted on social media. Georgetown, though “deeply disappointed,” vowed that it would continue “ensuring that the full range of voices, histories and experiences are included in our academic community.” Yale “emphatically” affirmed that it remained “fully committed to creating an inclusive, diverse, and excellent educational environment” and “to ensuring that our university is home to a diverse range of ideas, expertise, and experiences.” The University of Southern California’s statement stood out for its flair. The Court’s decision was “very disappointing,” but USC would carry on providing an atmosphere “where differing backgrounds and points of view are embraced, where ideas collide, beliefs are challenged, and innovation thrives.”

Paragraph break, for flourish: “We will not go backward.”

Apparently our best and brightest missed the glaring contradiction at the heart of their messages. While lamenting a decision that they say strikes at their ability to foster, for instance, “a diverse range of ideas, expertise, and experiences,” they all take the same institutional position on a highly contested issue. Do USC students who agree with the Court’s decision—who would, if the student body reflected national opinion on the issue, constitute at least half the student population—feel that their university welcomes a point of view that their administration equates with backwardness? Does Yale advance its mission of hosting a “diverse range of ideas” by announcing that it considers a 6-3 majority’s decision beyond the pale?

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/07/05/theres-nothing-racist-about-ending-affirmative-action/

Race-based affirmative action, in US colleges at least, is over.

At the end of last week, the Supreme Court ruled that race cannot be used as a weighting factor in the collegiate admissions process. This brings an end to the era when an Asian applicant would need a far higher score to get into Harvard than a black applicant.

The Supreme Court case centred on the affirmative-action policies of Harvard University and the University of North Carolina (UNC). But the court’s judgement will also affect the more than 40 per cent of US universities that currently take race into account in admissions. In his majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts said that UNC’s and Harvard’s affirmative-action programmes ‘lack sufficiently focussed and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful endpoints’.

It was a blunt verdict, and one from which Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor dissented in almost histrionic terms. According to Sotomayor, ‘The majority’s vision of race neutrality will entrench racial segregation in higher education’. For Brown Jackson, this was a ‘tragedy’ that would ‘impede [the] achievement of our great nation’s full potential’. However, all data indicate that a substantial majority of Americans would agree with Roberts’ take. Critics of the ruling may try to denigrate it as furthering the cause of ‘racism’ or ‘white supremacy’. But that’s hard to maintain when the case against Harvard and UNC was brought by Students for Fair Admissions – a group composed entirely of East and South Asian plaintiffs.