RUTHFULLY YOURS

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The idea of public universities in the United States originally rested on a compact between the citizen and the republic. The agreement was that the citizen would provide funding for the university in order to train young people to advance the public interest and the common good. In recent years, however, this compact has shattered, and considerable efforts will be needed to rebuild it.

The clearest expression of what has gone wrong is DEI. At first glance, a commitment to “diversity, equity, and inclusion” might seem laudable. But DEI employs a propagandistic language to conceal its real intentions. It is, in fact, the opposite of what it appears to be.

We can review the acronym in parts. First, “diversity.” The initial connotation of the word suggests a variety of people, experiences, and knowledge. But in practice, universities use diversity to justify a policy of sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit, racial discrimination: a total inversion of the principles of colorblind equality and individual merit.

Second, “inclusion.” In kindergarten, teaching kids to be inclusive means encouraging them to share and be polite to classmates. But in the context of a university, inclusion is used as justification for excluding people and ideas that are seen as a threat to prevailing ideologies and sentiments. 

Finally, “equity.” The immediate association is with the principle of equality. But equity is actually a radically opposed idea. Equality is the principle that every man or woman should be judged as an individual, neither punished nor rewarded based on ancestry. Equity demands the opposite: categorizing individuals into group identities and assigning disparate treatment to members of those groups, seeking to “equalize” what would otherwise be considered unjust outcomes.

What this means in practice is that members of certain groups get favored, others disfavored: in short, inequality justified under the ideology of “equity.”

https://www.city-journal.org/article/more-of-the-same-at-yale

Yale University has announced its next president: Maurie McInnis, the current president of the State University of New York at Stony Brook and an art historian specializing in slavery and Southern culture. McInnis concluded her introductory video with an exhortation: “Most importantly, I will encourage us to ask ourselves what change we wish to see in the world and how we might best accomplish that. I can’t wait to begin!”

Uh-oh. McInnis may be eager for Yale to change the world, but the rest of us should be wary of the prospect.

The McInnis selection is a possible bellwether for how elite universities intend to govern themselves in the post-October 7 era. Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, Cornell, and other colleges are seeking new presidents, thanks to leadership shakeups in the wake of the Hamas terror attacks on Israel. While selective colleges serve a minuscule fraction of the U.S population, they exercise a disproportionate influence over the culture. Their graduates populate the federal judiciary, corporate boards, and key public and private bureaucracies. They lead big tech companies and the nonprofit sector. They are our public-health and criminal-justice “experts.” Yale in particular has been a leading proponent of the progressive view of America’s alleged racism. What does its choice of McInnis portend for key issues facing higher education: intellectual diversity, academic freedom, and administrative overreach? 

It was foreordained that Yale’s outgoing president, Peter Salovey, would be replaced by a woman. Until the post–October 7 rout, 75 percent of Ivy League leaders were female. Yale has bragged that McInnis is its first permanent woman president, as if selecting her from the heavily female administrative ranks of elite universities represents a bold move. The new president, for her part, has said that she will “play an important role as a role model,” as if females hadn’t already begun their takeover of higher education. 

Indeed, by now, being female is so humdrum an accomplishment that Yale was undoubtedly hoping for at least an intersectional twofer, of the sort that Harvard basked in before Claudine Gay’s self-destruction. McInnis makes up for not being black, however, by an academic focus on slavery. Her most recent book, Educated in Tyranny: Slavery at Thomas Jefferson’s University (2019), which she co-edited, argues that the University of Virginia, founded by Thomas Jefferson, had “slavery at its core.” Though Jefferson designed the university to “visually minimize the physical presence of the laboring black body,” McInnis writes, its grounds were a “landscape of slavery.” One of Jefferson’s goals in creating the university was to insulate Virginia’s youth from the abolitionist thinking that they might encounter in Northern schools, McInnis argues in the introduction. Her chapter, called “Violence,” seeks to document the beatings that the college’s students inflicted with impunity on local slaves.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/how-dei-corrupts-americas-universities

The idea of public universities in the United States originally rested on a compact between the citizen and the republic. The agreement was that the citizen would provide funding for the university in order to train young people to advance the public interest and the common good. In recent years, however, this compact has shattered, and considerable efforts will be needed to rebuild it.

The clearest expression of what has gone wrong is DEI. At first glance, a commitment to “diversity, equity, and inclusion” might seem laudable. But DEI employs a propagandistic language to conceal its real intentions. It is, in fact, the opposite of what it appears to be.

We can review the acronym in parts. First, “diversity.” The initial connotation of the word suggests a variety of people, experiences, and knowledge. But in practice, universities use diversity to justify a policy of sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit, racial discrimination: a total inversion of the principles of colorblind equality and individual merit.

Second, “inclusion.” In kindergarten, teaching kids to be inclusive means encouraging them to share and be polite to classmates. But in the context of a university, inclusion is used as justification for excluding people and ideas that are seen as a threat to prevailing ideologies and sentiments. 

Finally, “equity.” The immediate association is with the principle of equality. But equity is actually a radically opposed idea. Equality is the principle that every man or woman should be judged as an individual, neither punished nor rewarded based on ancestry. Equity demands the opposite: categorizing individuals into group identities and assigning disparate treatment to members of those groups, seeking to “equalize” what would otherwise be considered unjust outcomes.

What this means in practice is that members of certain groups get favored, others disfavored: in short, inequality justified under the ideology of “equity.”

You see this hiding in plain sight. Universities publish in their own materials prima facie evidence of their commitments to racial discrimination, quotas, and disparate treatment on the basis of identity in hiring, admissions, promotions, and in other programs.

https://www.nysun.com/article/harvard-in-new-filing-in-court-suggests-its-jewish-students-were-too-fearful-in-the-wake-of-october-7?lctg=1474955502&recognized_

Harvard reportedly spent more than $25 million, mostly on the law firm WilmerHale, defending the racial preferences in college admissions that the Supreme Court struck down as unconstitutional. After losing the landmark Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard case in June 2023, Harvard again turned to WilmerHale to prepare its president, Claudine Gay, for a December 2023 congressional hearing on Harvard’s response to antisemitism. 

President Gay’s performance at the hearing was widely denounced.  Both she and the president of the University of Pennsylvania, Elizabeth Magill, who also relied on WilmerHale for pre-hearing preparation, resigned after apologizing for giving overly legalistic answers suggesting that whether calls for genocide against Jews violate their university policies would depend on the “context.” 

Now Harvard is facing a third embarrassment. This past week, one of the same lawyers who tried the Asian-American admissions case, Felicia Ellsworth, who sat in the first row behind Ms. Gay in the December congressional hearing, joined three other WilmerHale lawyers and four from another firm in filing a motion to dismiss and strike a complaint filed in court by Jewish students alleging antisemitism at Harvard.

The students, Alexander  Kestenbaum and Students Against Antisemitism, Inc., said that on October 19, 2023, a mob stormed Harvard Law School. “Fearing a violent attack, students in the study room removed indicia of their Jewishness, such as kippot, or hid under desks,” their complaint says. In a memo supporting the motion to dismiss and strike, the lawyers for Harvard said that the Jewish students do not “describe an environment in which an objectively reasonable person would fear physical violence.”

By basically calling Harvard’s own Jewish students unreasonable for fearing violence less than two weeks after the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led terrorist attack on Israel, the lawyers risk proving the complaint’s point about Harvard antisemitism, rather than persuading Judge Richard Stearns to dismiss it. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/goodbye-harvard/

I went to Harvard. I don’t remember exactly when. I visited Boston several times during the 1980s and 90s, and on one of those occasions I decided to take the appropriately named Red Line up to Cambridge and check out the campus of America’s oldest university. It was cute. It was certainly prettier than my own alma mater, Stony Brook, which at the time must have been one of the world’s premier showplaces of brutalist architecture at its most brutal. But on the other hand I’d seen a lot of campuses that were more beautiful than Harvard’s, among them Chapel Hill, Duke, Ann Arbor, Michigan State, Berkeley, and Stanford. Yes, the buildings – and the trees – were old and stately. But there was a stuffiness about the place. You could feel it. Or maybe I’m just guilty of committing the pathetic fallacy. Admittedly, a couple of my closest and very smartest friends went to Harvard; so did a few of the dumbest people I’ve ever met. You can get a great education there, but that’s true of a lot of places. What sets Harvard apart is that it inculcates in its students (not all, but many) an obnoxious sense of superiority, readies them to rise to the heights of the American establishment, and encourages them to subscribe to that establishment’s most cherished orthodoxies.

Pretty much every one of my closest friends in high school ended up at an Ivy League college. I had the highest SAT scores in my graduating class of more than a thousand, but partly because my father wasn’t eager to shell out Ivy-level tuition and partly because of what now seems to me an odd indifference to the whole business on my own part, I ended up at a state school. I’m glad I did. When an accreditation team came to check out our English department – that was the subject in which I received my B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. – they said it was better than Harvard’s. But who cared about things like that? Stony Brook, founded in 1957, was still half-finished, an active construction site where, when it rained, you had to slog through mud to get from one hideously ugly building to another. Harvard had over three centuries’ worth of cachet. Its name was synonymous the world over with academic excellence. However much of an idiot you might be, a Harvard diploma could take you anywhere. Even our own department chairman felt obliged to rub in the difference. When a bunch of us Ph.D. students got to the point at which we were supposed to start thinking about applying for jobs, our chairman gathered us together and explained how he and his faculty colleagues dealt with applications from newly minted Ph.Ds. “We put them in two piles,” he said. “Ivy and non-Ivy.” The next step for the latter, he made clear, was the trash bin.

https://www.newsweek.com/conservatives-must-keep-pressure-higher-ed-stop-dei-opinion-1912635

Pressure from Republican politicians and conservative donors is beginning to cause Harvard, MIT, and other elite institutions to grudgingly step back from progressive illiberalism.

Consider Senator J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) and Representative Michael Cloud’s (R-Tex.) new Dismantle DEI Act, which would eliminate mandatory diversity statements as well as Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) administrators and initiatives in the federal government. Critically, the measure hits National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health research funding, two of the worst DEI offenders, dramatically changing the incentive structure of American academic research.

Some conservatives cling to an optimistic conceit that a quiet majority of university faculty oppose woke policies and are suddenly acquiring the confidence to challenge radical activists, but this is not borne out by the evidence. Lawmakers like Vance and Cloud have a key role to play in the ongoing battle to restore political neutrality and expressive freedom to the nation’s institutions, schools, and wider public culture.

Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences recently announced an end to the use of mandatory diversity statements in hiring. Diversity statements require applicants for jobs, promotions, or grants to demonstrate how they will advance DEI principles as a condition of success.

This requirement discriminates against conservative and classical liberal applicants who, reflecting the views of a majority of Americans, prioritize equal treatment, objective truth, and freedom of speech above equal outcomes and emotional safety for minorities. Diversity statements are loyalty oaths which violate applicants’ freedom of conscience and discriminate on the basis of philosophical belief.

Harvard’s scrapping of diversity statements follows a similar move from MIT, the first elite blue-state institution to do so. Harvard has also vowed to remain neutral on political questions that do not concern the university’s narrow self-interest.

Why the shift?