I remember how it was -- JR
Supreme Court’s Decision on Harvard Misses the Most Consequential Problem on Campus
The Supreme Court decision striking down affirmative action in college admissions is a triumph for fairness and the quintessentially American belief that the best man or woman should win. Yet, it is largely an empty victory, and it misses the most consequential issue concerning diversity on college campuses today — political diversity.
The basis for the Court’s decision is that Harvard and University of North Carolina, failed to provide a “measurable and concrete” justification for exempting their race-based admissions policies from the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. In essence, the defendants lost the case because their policies are too subjective and vague.
Yet the flip side is that, for the same reason, the decision cannot be enforced. A decision that cannot be enforced is no decision at all. Harvard and many other colleges have done away with the only truly objective — “measurable and concrete” — metric traditionally used in college admissions, namely standardized test scores, primarily SAT and ACT scores.
So now college admissions has become an entirely subjective process. A purely subjective process is inherently unfair. Within a few hours of the court’s decision, Harvard announced its defiance, saying in Delphic words that the “principle” that Harvard follows “is as true and important today as it was yesterday.”
If Harvard thinks that its “principle” is diversity, then Harvard suffers from clinical self-unawareness. For it is anything but diverse. It is exceedingly liberal. The student newspaper, the Crimson, in its most recent annual survey found that “More Than 80 Percent of Surveyed Harvard Faculty Identify as Liberal.” Just 1.5 percent of the faculty identifies as “conservative.”
When I attended my Harvard College reunion a year ago, I heard that the Crimson had surveyed the graduating class, finding that just seven percent identified as conservative. So I asked the president of Harvard, Lawrence Bacow, whether this represented an issue worthy of his attention and whether the College should do something about it.
“I will tell you,” he responded, “what I told Senator Cruz when he accused us of being an indoctrination factory. I told him there were 14 graduates of Harvard in the U.S. Senate, eight of whom were Republicans.” Mr. Bacow, apparently believing that was dispositive and, in any event, being uninterested in engaging on the point, turned his back and walked away.
His data, though, were inadequate, even inaccurate. In a 2020 article, the Crimson reported that, of the 40 Harvard graduates elected in 2020 to the House of Representatives, just six were Republicans. Harvard ousted from a Kennedy School advisory board the most famous of its GOP graduates in the House, Elise Stefanik, chairwoman of the Republican conference.
No sooner did the Supreme Court conclude that Harvard had been violating the Constitution than the university’s president-elect, Claudine Gay, said in a video that it was a “hard day.” She added that “a thriving, diverse intellectual community … is borne out in Harvard classrooms” where our students can “put their ideas into conversation with other points of view.”
Would that her aspirational statement were true. How can it be when students and faculty are overwhelmingly of one political persuasion. If the Crimson surveys are accurate, class discussions pit one conservative against 14 predominantly liberal classmates under the tutelage of a liberal professor or instructor — one student against 14 classmates and a discussion leader.
Inevitably, Harvard’s political uniformity affects virtually everything, undermining intellectual honesty, and leaving the institution and its students and faculty — and, in my experience, its president — defending ideological purity and rather than engaging in genuinely open discussion.
My own hope is that Harvard becomes more racially diverse based upon a race-blind, merit-based admissions process. And re-adopts the SAT and ACT in acknowledgement that there should be a “measurable and concrete” way to assess the fairness of its admission process. And addresses its extreme political conformity. Harvard’s admissions process would be a good place to start.
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I Had to Watch ‘White Teachers Are a Problem’ Video. Now I’m Suing My Employer
I’m a white writing professor, and apparently, that’s a problem. That was the unmistakable message sent to me at Pennsylvania State University—and that’s why I’m suing the school.
In November 2020, nearly half a year after George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis, I was subjected to a video titled “White Teachers Are a Problem” for a monthly professional development meeting for writing faculty.
The video’s featured speaker, Asao Inoue, is a self-described practitioner of anti-racism. Not an obscure one, either: About a year prior, Inoue gave the Chair’s Address at a prestigious writing studies research conference—the same field in which I earned my Ph.D.—and declared, “White people can perpetuate white supremacy by being present. … Your body perpetuates racism.”
At the heart of Inoue’s appalling comments is the baseless attribution of negative characteristics to a particular race.
Inside radical academic bubbles, that might be applauded; in the real world, that’s called discrimination. And it’s illegal. When discrimination enters the workplace, depending on its frequency and intensity, citizens can file a lawsuit alleging a hostile work environment against their employer.
At my Abington campus, my direct supervisor pushed an aggressive “anti-racism” campaign through private emails and monthly meetings. She laid the groundwork by echoing a colleague’s stance that “reverse racism isn’t racism,” thereby abandoning cherished human rights principles.
“[R]acist structures are quite real in assessment and elsewhere regardless of [anybody’s] good intentions,” she claimed. “Racism is in the results if the results draw a color line.”
Later, citing a resolution on “Black Linguistic Justice!” from an increasingly politicized research organization, my supervisor issued two directives: “Assure that black students can find success in our classrooms” and “Assure that all students see that white supremacy manifests itself in language and in writing pedagogy.”
Translation: The English language is racist, teaching writing is racist, and grading black students by consistent standards is racist.
Tough spot if you’re a white writing instructor and one of your black students doesn’t submit a big paper. Even tougher if you work at a “majority minority” campus: Out of 20 undergraduate campuses across the Penn State system, to its credit, Abington is the only with a majority of minority students.
But the toughest position goes to every black student in this environment—an educator seems to believe they’re incapable of achieving academic success on their own merit.
Misguided as my supervisor was, she wasn’t just one rogue professor in the bunch. Anti-racism fever ran rampant through the school’s institutional culture.
To commemorate Juneteenth 2020, Abington’s DEI director told us: “Stop being afraid of your own internalized white supremacy” and “Hold other white people accountable.”
That same week, amid faculty panic over a masked-up return to campus, one colleague invoked “history and white male privilege” to forecast, without discernible evidence: “One can already see a mile away that there will be some who resist wearing masks, etc. Such resistance is also more likely to be led by white males and in classrooms taught by women and people of color.”
In September 2021, I complied with my state-mandated duty to report bias in these (and other) incidents. The Penn State Affirmative Action Office summoned me into a Zoom meeting, where its associate director informed me, “There is a problem with the white race,” and then directed me to continue attending anti-racist workshops “until you get it.”
The next anti-racist workshop was titled “The Myth of the Colorblind Writing Classroom: White Instructors Confront White Privilege in Their Classrooms.” During this meeting, my supervisor provided this quote: “Without attending to issues of inequity and particularly the role race [plays] in constructing social inequities, we remain unaware of and thereby unwittingly reproduce racist discourses and practices in our classrooms.”
As the target audience for this message, I sensed that I’d soon get accused of racism for holding my students to reasonable (and necessary) standards. I could feel my $53,000-a-year, nontenured, and nonunion job hanging in the balance. So I asked for examples of how I could bring equity into my classroom and what this actually looked like in practice.
Rather than help me to “get it,” the Affirmative Action Office deemed my questions to be evidence of bullying and harassment. Yet, my supervisor’s yearslong actions were “in line with the Campus Strategic Plan.” Human Resources asked me to sign a performance reprimand, then Penn State inserted those charges into my annual performance review.
Now I’m fighting back.
With a right-to-sue letter from the Justice Department, it’s time for Penn State to account for real racial discrimination, harassment, and retaliation. I’ve got the support of Allen Harris Law and a nonpartisan civil rights group called the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism.
“Anti-racism” isn’t quite the right term to describe the performative activism that’s happening across academia and corporate America. Let’s call this hustle what it is: plain and simple racism.
And just like racism, the so-called anti-racist movement threatens everything in its path: freedom of speech, due process, healthy workplace relationships, professional excellence, academic rigor, and the psychological welfare of teachers and students alike.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/06/29/im-a-white-professor-heres-why-im-suing-penn-state/
****************************************************University of Boston Students Encouraged to Seek Therapy After SCOTUS Decisions
This week saw the student body of Boston University School of Law being offered emotional support services following the Supreme Court’s decisions on affirmative action, religious liberty, and student loan forgiveness.
Late Friday afternoon, the law school’s Student Government Association (SGA) distributed a statement critiquing the Supreme Court’s rulings in the cases of Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, 303 Creative LLC. v. Elenis, and Biden v. Nebraska.
These cases, dealing with contentious topics, led to decisive outcomes that reverberated through the corridors of Boston University.
Fox News Digital obtained a leaked email where the SGA unabashedly criticized the Supreme Court’s decision in the Students for Fair Admissions case. This particular ruling determined that race-based affirmative action in college admissions is, indeed, unconstitutional.
The SGA stated, “[The assenting judges] went so far as to say that the race-based admission system uses race as a negative and operates it as a stereotype. They may couch their opinion in legal jargon, but we all know what this opinion aims to do: advocate for a ‘colorblind’ admission process.”
As a counter to this, they quoted Justice Sotomayor’s dissenting view: “ignoring race will not equalize a society that is racially unequal.”
In an absurd step, the students were reminded that the university has resources in case the SCOTUS decisions were just too much for the seemingly woke student population.
“As a reminder, BU also offers a number of wellness resources that are willing and able to help students navigate these times,” the memo said.
While the law school isn’t specifically providing specialized counseling, they did recommend existing resources for those students who felt they needed them.
Two of the resources named were BU Behavioral Medicine and BU Student Wellbeing. BU Behavioral Medicine, according to its website, offers therapy, on-call service for mental health emergencies, and mental health diagnoses, among other services.
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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)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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