I remember how it was -- JR
Bias hotlines at US colleges have led to a witch hunt culture on campus
When I stepped on campus at NYU four years ago, I was handed a school ID by a public safety officer. On the back, I found a list of phone numbers: who to call if I was in danger, who to call if I was sick, and . . . a bias response line? Not long after, I found posters with the same number on the back of bathroom stalls, urging students to call and report bias on campus.
Discrimination and harassment are one thing, but I found myself wondering what exactly constituted “bias.” Since I had watched students and professors canceled for all manner of perceived transgressions, it left me wondering what range of incidents could fall under this umbrella.
I had never heard of them before, but evidently schools across the country, from Drew University to Penn State, and the University of Missouri, have similar hotlines. Countless other colleges and universities have bias response teams, many with online reporting forms.
As a champion of free speech, I was concerned, so I dug a little deeper. That’s when I found a 2018 report on my school’s hotline, which divided the calls they received into groups. Category 1 constituted alleged violations of the university’s anti-discrimination and anti-harassment policies. Category 2, however, included instances determined to be biased but not a violation. Those constituted 61% of the calls made.
Some examples of Category 2 incidents included “concerns that marketing materials displayed on campus do not accurately represent the University’s diverse population” or “concerns about a culturally-insensitive comment.” I was perplexed by the subjectivity of incidents that could unleash an administrative team on perceived transgressors.
To be clear, I do not condone harassment or discrimination under any circumstances, and I absolutely believe targeted students should have a place to turn. But they already do. As Alex Morey, an attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) told me, “Bias response teams are unnecessary, because existing laws preventing discrimination and harassment are already in place to curb unlawful behavior on campus.”
That leaves bias response teams to figure out the vague contours of “acceptable” speech at their own discretion. Indeed, a survey of administrators on such teams revealed an ill-defined mission that goes far beyond enforcing anti-discrimination policy. One administrator interviewed described their duty as combatting “whatever threat that might [be posed] to an inclusive campus.” Another said they determine “when the exercise of individual rights becomes reckless and irresponsible.”
These thresholds are subjective to say the least — and could invite any number of complaints. After investigating 230 college bias response teams around the country, a 2017 report by FIRE uncovered a whole host of complaints that range from laughable to downright censorious.
On-campus humor publication The Koala at the University of California San Diego, for example, was defunded by the school for poking fun at campus “safe spaces” after bias reports (including one requesting the school “stop funding” the publication) were submitted. An anonymous report at Ohio’s John Carroll University alleged that “the African-American Alliance’s student protest was making white students feel uncomfortable.” At the University of Michigan, a so-called “snow penis” sculpture was reported to their bias response team.
While not all reports result in punishment or investigation, introducing the bias response tripwire into a college community surely can’t be healthy for free speech.
“Encouraging people to report their peers for protected speech creates a climate of fear around everyday discussions,” Morey said. “The threat of investigations . . . too often results in students and faculty self-censoring rather than risking getting in trouble.”
In a world where accidentally mixing up the names of two students of the same race or saying epithets in a class about epithets could jeopardize your reputation — or your job —encouraging students to call a hotline on transgressors is downright dystopian.
If we can’t discuss touchy subjects and wrestle with controversial ideas on campuses, where can we? We come to college to ask the unaskable and answer the unanswerable questions of our time. Sometimes that means we might express something inartfully — or, yes, sometimes offensively. But discussion, debate and resolution are the remedies to that tension. Not a hotline.
https://nypost.com/2022/08/27/us-colleges-bias-hotlines-lead-to-campus-witch-hunt-culture/
************************************************Top Google Fellowships: If White or Asian, Good Luck
Google is setting strict caps on the number of white and Asian students that universities can nominate for a prestigious fellowship program, a policy legal experts say likely violates civil rights law and could threaten the federal funding of nearly every elite university in the United States.
The Google Ph.D. Fellowship, which gives promising computer scientists nearly $100,000, allows each participating university—a group that includes most elite schools—to nominate four Ph.D. students annually. "If a university chooses to nominate more than two students," Google says, "the third and fourth nominees must self-identify as a woman, Black / African descent, Hispanic / Latino / Latinx, Indigenous, and/or a person with a disability."
That criterion, which an archived webpage shows has been in place since at least April 2020, is almost certainly illegal, civil rights lawyers told the Washington Free Beacon—both for Google and the universities.
"It is illegal for Google to enter into contracts based on race under the Civil Rights Act of 1866," said Adam Mortara, the lead trial lawyer for the plaintiffs in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, who are pressing the Supreme Court to outlaw affirmative action. "And it is illegal for universities receiving federal funds to nominate students based on race under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act."
That means nearly every top school in the United States could be at risk of losing its federal funding. Since Google’s discriminatory rule went into effect, a long list of universities has nominated students for the fellowship: Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Columbia, Cornell, Duke, Johns Hopkins, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan, the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, the University of California Berkeley, and New York University.
Those schools also have their own policies banning discrimination by race, gender, or disability—the three categories on which Google requires them to base fellowship nominations.
"The Google Fellowship program is a blatantly unlawful and immoral quota plan that pits students against one another by skin color and ethnic heritage," said Edward Blum, the founder of Students for Fair Admissions. "Our nation’s enduring civil rights laws were passed to specifically forbid this type of racial discrimination."
The fellowship shows how racial quotas, when sanctioned by a sufficiently powerful corporate actor, can metastasize and multiply across institutions. It also shows how private companies can circumvent Congress and federal law through a kind of bribery, providing a financial reward for illegal discrimination.
"Google is using its pocket-book to incentivize America’s elite universities to violate Title VI," said Dan Morenoff, the executive director of the American Civil Rights Project. "It’s using its financial support to directly counter Congress’s policy."
The bet, Morenoff added, is that "the feds won’t notice, won’t care, or won’t actually force the schools to choose between federal funding and Google’s."
That assumption reflects the race-conscious consensus that has captured both private and public bureaucracies. Uber Eats in 2020 waived delivery fees for black-owned restaurants, only to scrap the policy after a lawsuit. In 2021, NASDAQ mandated racial quotas for all companies listed on its exchange, a rule now being challenged in the Fifth Circuit. And from New York to Utah to Minnesota, state public health departments have allocated scarce COVID-19 drugs based on race—even after lawyers informed them that their allocation schemes were illegal.
Those plans, like Google’s fellowship criteria, were all posted on public websites. No effort was made to hide them, suggesting that race-discriminaton—against certain groups, at least—is now the norm for many professionals.
It is also the norm at many universities, some of which explicitly advertise the Google fellowship’s diversity criteria to students. In an August 16 email encouraging all computer science Ph.D.'s to apply for the fellowship, New York University said it would not nominate more than two white or Asian males, "in order to increase opportunities for students who are underrepresented in the field of computing." Duke University includes the same language on its "Research Funding" website.
Contacted about these concerns, New York University appeared to backtrack. "The language used in the internal announcement was not NYU's but rather was drawn from the FAQ that Google posted about the Fellowship program," a spokesman, John Beckman, told the Free Beacon, adding that "we are reviewing the language in the announcement."
The participating universities may be violating as many as three different civil rights laws, not just Title VI. If schools are nominating people for a fellowship, Morenoff said, courts might treat them as employment agencies under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination in employment. State civil rights laws, which are often more exacting than federal statutes, pose a separate challenge. New York’s Human Rights Law, Morenoff said, is the most broadly written antidiscrimination law in the United States, and almost certainly bars universities from nominating students based on race.
That said, it would take a lot for universities to lose federal funding—a punishment of last resort under Title VI—over the fellowship. It could, however, open universities to civil rights investigations, Morenoff said, as well as to lawsuits from private parties. Universities usually blink in the face of such pressure. Harvard, for example, rescinded a ban on nominating members of single-gender clubs for the Rhodes scholarship after a 2019 lawsuit alleged that the policy violated Title IX.
Google’s legal problems are just as extensive as the universities’. Mortara, Morenoff, and another lawyer said that the fellowship’s racial caps likely violate the 1886 Civil Right Act, the law that bans contracting on the basis of race. Because it imposes requirements on students as well as Google—for example, that students remain enrolled in a Ph.D. program for the duration of the fellowship—courts would probably consider it a contract.
"Might Google have some defense? It’s possible," Morenoff said. "But on its face, this is a violation of our oldest civil rights enactment."
In addition, Google may be violating Title VII, whose ban on employment discrimination extends to employment training programs. The fellowship could be considered such a program, Morenoff said: Though fellows are not employed by Google, they are paired with a "Google mentor" and encouraged to apply for internships with the company. California state law, Morenoff added, also prohibits discrimination in employment training programs.
In response to a detailed inquiry about these legal concerns, Google defended the nominating criteria and denied that it was breaking the law.
"Like many companies, we actively encourage a broad range of individuals to apply to our PhD Fellowship program in order to attract the widest and most representative pool of applicants possible—this follows all relevant laws and is extremely common to do," a Google spokesperson said. "Selection for the fellowships"—that is, selection from the pool of nominees, not the nomination process itself—"is not based on demographics in any way. Fellows receive unrestricted funding for their studies, and if they are interested in working at Google, they are welcome to apply for jobs and go through the same hiring process as any other person."
This is not the first time Google has pushed the envelope with its diversity initiatives. The company’s former director of diversity strategy, Kamau Bobb, was reassigned in June of 2021 in the wake of a Free Beacon report that revealed his history of anti-Semitic comments, including that "Jews have an insatiable appetite for war." Around the same time, Google told employees in a series of diversity trainings that "America is a system of white supremacy" in which everyone is "raised to be racist" and that "colorblindness" is "covert white supremacy."
In 2017, the company also fired a programmer, James Damore, after he questioned Google’s diversity policies in an internal memo. The memo—"Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber"—proposed ways "to increase women's representation in tech without resorting to discrimination," a practice Damore called "unfair, divisive, and bad for businesses."
Google's diversity quotas extend beyond the United States. The Ph.D. Fellowship recruits students from across the world, with different nominating criteria for each region. Universities in East Asia and Europe, which are only allowed three nominations each, do not have to worry about race or disability. But gender is another story.
"If a university chooses to nominate more than two students," the rules for Asia and Europe read, "the third nominee must self-identify as a woman."
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Britain's strictest headteacher hits back at Ofsted after inspectors found his school 'oppressive'
A teacher dubbed Britain’s strictest head has defended his discipline methods after a school he was drafted into was criticised as ‘oppressive’ by Ofsted.
Barry Smith, an education consultant and former school leader, said too many secondary school pupils were ‘openly contemptuous and abusive’ towards staff.
He said it was so bad that some teachers suffered from something akin to ‘battered-wife syndrome’ – and they almost feel they deserve the daily abuse from some pupils.
Mr Smith is part of a movement to reinstate ‘adult authority’ in schools. His approach is based on the acronym SLANT, which demands that pupils Sit up, Listen, Ask and answer questions, Never interrupt and Track the teacher – or look at them when they talk.
But critics claim such behaviour is the result of ‘military-style’ rules that are too harsh for modern teenagers and make them miserable.
An Ofsted report published last week about Abbey School, a secondary in Faversham, Kent, where Mr Smith helped establish a discipline regime last year, stated: ‘In lessons, most pupils comply with leaders’ strict expectations of behaviour.
‘However, the way leaders implement these expectations does not contribute positively to the culture of the school. For the majority of pupils, these approaches are applied in a manner that is overly restrictive. Many pupils find this oppressive.’
Abbey School gained its best GCSE results this summer. At A-level, the proportion of A* to C grades is up from 41 per cent in 2019 to 67 per cent.
Mr Smith claims that without his methods, too many teenagers get away with treating teachers with ‘habitual contempt’, telling The Mail on Sunday: ‘The loss of adult authority has a terrible impact on schools.
'Casual contempt is very commonplace in some schools. Too often, head teachers accept it and Ofsted accepts it and rates schools “good”. Pupils and adults in schools deserve far better.’
He also expects pupils to call teachers ‘Sir’ or ‘Miss’, speak in sentences, be polite and ‘treat adults with the same level of courtesy that teachers deliberately demonstrate to pupils’.
He said: ‘These are basic social skills. If you go to private school, you often meet teenagers brimming with confidence. Pupils in state schools need to… compete. Having your head down, avoiding eye contact and monosyllabic responses are not going to cut it in the job or university interview.
‘I make it clear, every lesson is something to be treasured and every interaction is about deliberately modelling genuine mutual respect. The results pay off – positive relationships which lead to concrete achievement.’
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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)
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