Sunday, March 27, 2022



South Dakota Governor Signs Bill Banning CRT-Based Trainings at Universities

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R) signed a bill into law Monday banning public colleges and universities in the state from using "divisive" Critical Race Theory-inspired trainings or orientations.

"No student or teacher should have to endorse Critical Race Theory in order to attend, graduate from, or teach at our public universities," Noem said in a statement. "College should remain a place where freedom of thought and expression are encouraged, not stifled by political agendas."

House Bill 1012 outlines seven "divisive concepts" that may no longer be a mandatory part of trainings and orientations for college students or faculty members.

The Board of Regents, the Board of Technical Education and any institution under their control is prohibited from teaching, advocating for, acting upon or promoting that an individual is inherently superior or inferior, or should be discriminated against, based on their race, color, religion, sex, ethnicity or national origin.

The institutions are also barred from pushing concepts stating that a person's moral character is determined by their race, color, religion, sex, ethnicity or national origin, or that the individuals are racist, sexist oppressive or are inherently responsible for past actions made by other members of the same race, color, religion, sex, ethnicity, or national origin.

Training and orientations suggesting that an individual should feel discomfort or another form of psychological distress due to their race, color, religion, ethnicity or national origin is also banned from the academic institutions, as are trainings and orientations stating that "meritocracy or traits such as a strong work ethic" are racist, sexist or were created by members of a certain race or sex in order to oppress those of a different race or sex.

Additionally, students may not be directed or compelled to personally affirm, adopt or adhere to the seven "divisive concepts."

The bill also takes aim at affirmative action, stating that the aforementioned institutions "may not condition enrollment or attendance in a class, training, or orientation on the basis of race or color."

The legislation notes that it does not prevent "an employee or a contractor who provides mandatory orientation or training from responding to questions that are raised by participants in the orientation or training and which pertain to the divisive concepts."

**********************************************

Harvard cancels a black academic who debunked woke orthodoxy

Roland G. Fryer is a tenured professor of economics at Harvard — an anointed member of the elite by most definitions. He is also black, widely published and the recipient of numerous awards, including a MacArthur “genius” grant for his work on the black “achievement gap” in grade school. Fryer was a student of Nobel laureate Gary Becker and a close associate of other economists who focus on rigorous analysis of empirical data.

That’s led him to observations that were a bit unsettling to higher-education orthodoxies. For example, Fryer found that the academic achievement gap accelerates between kindergarten and eighth grade. He also found that, controlling for a few variables, the initial disparity disappeared.

“Black kindergartners and white kindergartners with similar socioeconomic backgrounds” achieved at similar levels. “Adjusting the data for the effects of socioeconomic status reduces the estimated racial gaps in test scores by more than 40% in math and more than 66% in reading.”

The number of books in a child’s household also made an appreciable difference. “On average, black students in the sample had 39 children’s books in their home, compared with an average of 93 books among white students.” Adjusting for that “completely eliminates the gap in reading” as children progress through first grade. These findings contradicted the standard view that black children are already locked into academic last place before they even reach school.

This is good news, in that it means the problem is not as intractable as it seemed. Or rather, it would have been good news to anyone who wants the racial disparity to disappear through interventions that are known to work.

But it was terrible news to activists who are invested in the idea that “systemic racism” explains everything. Socioeconomic standing and household reading, after all, can be improved.

I have borrowed from Fryer’s 2006 article “Falling Behind: New evidence on the black-white achievement gap” for my summary. Fryer, however, was just warming up to further provocations against racial orthodoxy. He also decided to take a look at the data about police stops and shootings. He confirmed that blacks were more than 50% more likely than whites “to experience some form of force in interactions with police,” something that Fryer said was “the most surprising result of [his] career.”

But when it came to shootings, he could find “no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account.” This flat-out contradicts the Black Lives Matter assertion that has been uncritically embraced by the academy, the press and numerous politicians who hold that police readily resort to deadly violence in dealing with blacks.

Fryer’s paper on this, “An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force,” was written in 2016 and published in final form in 2019 in the Journal of Political Economy, well before George Floyd’s death ignited riots and a frenzied affirmation in academe that police are the agents of brutal, racially motivated oppression.

From this, one might conclude that Professor Fryer had learned how successfully to kick over the traces of the liberal academic establishment. He was by no definition a conservative, but a kind of independent contrarian who was willing to go wherever the evidence took him. And for a while it appeared to have taken him to the heights of academic achievement. His work received a lot of criticism in places like The New York Times, but he also won substantial funding for his Education Innovation Laboratory at Harvard.

Then the bottom fell out.

I have no shortage of bottom-falling-out stories for academics. They are sometimes caught doing atrocious things, sometimes punished for speaking up against academic policies they disagree with and sometimes disciplined because administrators seem entranced with bizarre ideas. We are in academia, after all, where egos are fragile and reputational destruction is the favorite sport. Reputational destruction, of course, comes in two popular flavors: race and sex. Since Professor Fryer is black, you might expect the line of attack will involve sex, and you’d be right.

According to The New York Times, Professor Fryer was accused in 2018 of engaging in “unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature toward four women who worked in the Harvard-affiliated research lab he created.”

I have no access to the details of the allegations, but Harvard did its work and came back with a report that amounted to a finding that he had flirted with a graduate student years ago, and that a woman he had fired found some of his language annoying. Naturally, these claims were stretched to their outer boundaries, but the initial faculty committee saw nothing of great moment.

In the #MeToo era, rules of double jeopardy don’t apply. Harvard decided to put the case before another tribunal — a secret one, but one that happened to include two black faculty members whose work had received some shade from Fryer’s academic writings. Sure enough, the second tribunal decided that Fryer had crossed all sorts of invisible lines.

As a tenured member of the Harvard faculty, Fryer couldn’t easily be fired, though administrators pushed to fire him, which would have been a first since the Civil War. But there are lots of other ways to ruin a faculty member. They suspended Fryer for two years, during which he was barred from teaching or using university resources. And they permanently closed his off-campus lab, the Education Innovation Laboratory.

This looks like an academic death sentence for an obscure violation, yet Fryer may well stage a comeback. In a new documentary, professional filmmaker Rob Montz has assembled, for the first time in video form, a compelling 25-minute presentation on what happened to Fryer at Harvard, complete with scary music.

Fryer didn’t participate in the documentary, which perhaps allowed Montz to say things that Fryer himself probably wouldn’t. I’ve never met Fryer, but we have several mutual friends who alerted me to his story, and I have heard several grapevine versions of what happened that run in the same direction: a tale of a vindictive former employee and others sharpening grievances for their own ends and a total denial of due process in favor of putting the man in the hands of his campus adversaries.

**************************************************

Professor fired for calling microaggressions ‘garbage’ can sue, judge rules

Nathaniel Hiers, a former University of North Texas adjunct math professor gets full support from the United States District Court for Eastern Texas after exercising his right of free speech.

The court said the university likely violated Hiers’ free speech rights when his contract was rescinded following a joke he wrote on a chalkboard.

Hiers found flyers in the math department faculty lounge about “microaggressions,” and then wrote a quip on the chalkboard: “Please don’t leave your garbage lying around,” with an arrow pointing to the flyers, which weren’t official university documents, the lawsuit says.

Judge Sean Jordan, made a ruling on March 11 in his 69-page order saying that the university officials should have known that math professor Nathaniel Hiers’ speech “touched on a matter of public concern and that discontinuing his employment because of his speech violated the First Amendment,” before they fired him for going public with his disagreement with the left-wing concept of “microaggressions.”

More details of this story from Just the News:

According to Jordan, “all parties agree” Hiers’ message “was intended as a joke,” yet math department chair Ralf Schmidt demanded the “coward … immediately” come forward. While Hiers copped to the message, he refused to apologize or participate in “supplemental diversity training” on top of the mandatory diversity training he was scheduled to take.

Less than a week later, Schmidt rescinded Hiers’ spring contract, claiming the chalkboard message was at least upsetting and “can even be perceived as threatening.”

According to Jordan, the professor has “plausibly alleged that the university officials violated his right to freedom of speech.”

Only days later, the school rescinded Hiers’ teaching contract. The school used the absurd excuse that Hiers could “be perceived as threatening” others with his opposition to extremist, left-wing orthodoxy

Hiers earned his doctorate in math in the spring of 2019 and was hired as an adjunct professor in 2019. Langhofer said Hiers intended to launch his academic career at UNT, eventually working his way up from an adjunct professor to a tenured faculty member.

Getting fired as an adjunct has made it hard to find a position elsewhere, Langhofer said. Hiers has been working as a substitute teacher around North Texas, including at Denton ISD, since his dismissal.

***********************************

My other blogs: Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

*******************************

No comments: