https://www.frontpagemag.com/heather-macdonald-at-restoration-when-race-trumps-merit/
If anybody’s surprised by the depravity, the moral depravity that’s been coming out of American institutions, educational institutions for the last three weeks, may I say, on behalf of David Horowitz, I told you so. For decades, David has warned that the universities had become the purveyor of lies, not the seeker of truth. David has warned that Islamism and its intersectional variants was becoming as ingrained in academic life as the classical canon once was. And that was a very long time ago in a golden era. The lie currently before us is that it is Israel that is the rights violator in the Middle East. Well, we can test this easily enough. Try holding a gay pride march in Gaza.
Vast swatches of the professoriate and administrators believe that four-year-olds should be told about the fun that awaits them if they declare themselves members of the opposite sex. Well, again, try that in a madrassas and see how far you get. Timeless antisemitism plays a large role in the disgusting spectacle of pro-Hamas demonstrations that we’ve been seeing on college campuses and in city streets. But something more recent and bigger is also at play, and that is hatred towards the Judeo-Christian civilization and a will to self cancelation on the part of elite members of that civilization; that hatred towards the West has become the primary export of the American University into the world at large. This morning I’m going to speak about a key falsehood that emanates from the self-annihilation of the West, and that is the claim that any racial disparity in any institution is by definition the result of racism and white supremacy. This claim has been percolating in American universities for a long time, but after the George Floyd race riots, it became a universal charge among elite institutions from big law to big business to big stem. Museums, conservatories, orchestras, scientific journals, criminal justice leaders all loudly took up the charge that any racial disparity is the product of discrimination against blacks.
Let me give you some examples. Medicine, if any medical school does not have 13% black medical students and 13% black professors, it is by definition a racist medical school. Cancer research labs, alzheimer’s research labs—if they don’t have 13% black oncologists or black neurologists, they’re racist labs. Gifted and talented programs, those of you from the West know about shutting down, getting rid of the exams in Lowell High School. We’ve seen this in Thomas Jefferson, New York City; Stuyvesant is facing a constant charge: it’s racist because its student bodies are not 13% black. This is a long standing one coming up: the teachers licensing exam, police licensing exam, firing of fire departments. If they don’t have 13% black members, they are racist. I’ve been talking about underrepresentation. The same argument applies with overrepresentation above all else in the criminal justice system. If blacks make up more than 13% of our prison population, that’s because the criminal justice system is by definition racist. If blacks are more than 13% of students in high school and in grammar schools who are disciplined for insubordination, for violence, that is because teachers hilariously the most liberal profession in the country, are racist against black students.
So what is the solution in the eyes of the elites to these criminal and racist disparities? It is to throw out the standards, the color-blind standards that are resulting in the lack of disparities. Medical schools: after the second year of medical school students take something called Step one of the U.S. medical licensing exam. Well, step 1 did not have proportional numbers of people scoring well. Because of academic mismatch, because of racial preferences, black medical students were at the bottom of the step 1 score scale. So what do we do? We get rid of grades. We decided last year that we would no longer grade step 1 of the medical licensing exam, but go to a pass-fail basis so that residents choosing their residencies after the second year would not know where students stood on the academic curve. The MCATs, the standardized exams to get into medical school, they have already been rejiggered to try to reduce disparate impact. A quarter of the questions now deal with social issues, with psychology. It has not worked. Black college seniors are still at the absolute bottom of the MCAT scores. So what we’re doing now in many schools is that we’re waiving MCAT submissions for black college seniors applying to medical schools.
