tonyz
08-22-2020, 09:11
I thought that this piece deserved its own thread - the subversion of young minds is a terrible thing and a ringside seat into how we got where we are is useful.
It is fascinating to observe academia purposefully dividing our nation by polluting young minds with absolutes and stifling opposing positions.
Do they really intend to advance socialism with false cries of systemic racism?
Is this agitation merely a pretext for the revolution they seek?
Let’s have a peek inside...
Conformity to a Lie
Academia’s monolithic belief in systemic racism will further erode American institutions and the principles of our civilization.
Heather Mac Donald
Summer 2020
EducationThe Social Order
City Journal
The lethal arrest of George Floyd in Minneapolis in late May triggered widespread riots and a torrent of contempt for America from virtually every institution in the country. Businesses large and small, the education establishment, and the press rushed to condemn the country’s purportedly endemic racism, implicitly accusing the majority of Americans of destroying “black lives.” Banks and law firms pledged that hiring and promotions would now be even more race-conscious than before. Hundreds of millions of dollars poured forth from corporate coffers into activist groups; the corporate benefactors hoped to dismantle America’s white supremacy, they announced.
Colleges and universities also promised increased diversity spending, though in amounts dwarfed by those corporate outpourings. Nevertheless, the academic response to Floyd’s death and the ensuing violence will have the greatest impact on the nation’s future. Academia was the ideological seedbed for that violence and for its elite justifications; it will prove just as critical in the accelerated transformation of the country.
Fealty to “diversity” and denunciations of white privilege have been a unifying theme in academia for decades, of course. What’s different this time is the sheer venom of the denunciations. College presidents and deans competed for the most sweeping indictment of the American polity, rooted in the claim that blacks are everywhere and at all times under threat.
“We are again reminded that this country’s 400-year history of racism continues to produce clear and present danger to the bodies and lives of Black people in every part of the United States,” wrote Ted Ruger, dean of the University of Pennsylvania law school. Amherst College president Carolyn “Biddy” Martin announced that the “virulent anti-black racism in this country has never NOT been obvious, and yet there are those who continue to deny it.” Martin was making a plea, she said, “to white people in particular, to acknowledge the reality of anti-black racism, its long history, and its current force; to recognize how embedded it is in our institutional structures, social systems, and cultural norms; and to assume our responsibility for ending it.” UCLA chancellor Gene Block declared that “racism permeates every sector of our society, from education to employment, from housing to health care, from board rooms to court rooms.”
It was not just name-brand colleges that pumped out sweeping accusations. Queens University of Charlotte, North Carolina, for example, demanded that “our society, systems, and institutions” stop “treat[ing] black and brown Americans violently and perpetuat[ing] deep inequality.”
Some presidents hastily crafted a redo of their initial George Floyd statements after their first effort was deemed insufficiently damning of America. Middlebury College president Laurie Patton apologized for not focusing enough on the “root cause and specific harm” of the black community’s “profound pain” in her initial letter to the college. “I needed to name the specific and systemic violence experienced by Black people,” Patton said. “I now understand that members of our community needed to hear that.” Patton’s second effort took no chances. The Floyd death was the “result of centuries of entrenched racism in a nation built on and maintained by unjust and inequitable systems of power, including the policies and practices of law enforcement,” she wrote.
The self-abasement would have been welcome at any Communist show trial. Holy Cross’s president admitted that he had neglected, in his first missive, to “recognize that black women, girls, and boys are impacted” by the “same violence” experienced by black men. “I sincerely apologize,” Philip Burroughs wrote, “that my message caused members of our community to feel unseen.”
The risk of insufficiency still lurked, however. Burroughs tried to ensure against further rebuke with a blanket coverage clause. While he was currently “reflecting both on the past racial history of our country and the continued struggles around racism and racial violence,” he said nervously, “I do not want to ignore many other diverse communities that have also been ostracized and dehumanized.”
Some presidents apologized even before their racial-injustice statements were found wanting. Duke University president Vincent Price announced: “I cannot as a white person begin to fully understand the daily fear and pain and oppression that is endemic to the Black experience.” Only a naïf would think that such sops to the mob would suffice to ward off future assaults. College leaders regularly accuse their own organizations of racism; Yale’s Peter Salovey has been a particularly enthusiastic practitioner of the genre.
The George Floyd moment, however, brought out the competition. Duke’s Price insisted that his university must take “transformative action” to eliminate the “systems of racism and inequality that have shaped the lived experiences of too many members of the Duke community.” Middlebury’s Patton confessed with punctilious exactitude that racism “happens in our residence halls and in our classrooms, at the tables of our dining halls and in our locker rooms, on our sidewalks, within the offices where we work, and in our town.”
Biddy Martin announced that Amherst already knew that the college had not done enough to ensure black students’ “freedom from racist bias, even racist acts, much less to ensure their sense of belonging and equal ownership of the culture and life of the College.” The work that lay ahead “begins, as it must,” she said, “with truthfulness when faced with the evidence of our shortcomings.”
All such institutional self-accusations by college presidents leave out the specifics. Which faculty members do not treat black students fairly? If that unjust treatment is so obvious, why weren’t those professors already removed? What is wrong with an admissions process that lets in thousands of student bigots? In other moments, college presidents brag about the quality of their student body and faculty. Are they lying? Shouldn’t they have disclosed to black applicants that they will face “racist acts” and “systems of inequality” should they attend?
Of course, the college presidents were not lying the first time around. American campuses today are the most tolerant organizations in human history (at least toward official victim groups). The claim that colleges are hotbeds of discrimination is a fantasy. Every university twists itself into knots to admit, hire, and promote as many black students and faculty as it possibly can, in light of the fierce bidding war among colleges for underrepresented minorities.
It has been taboo to hint at the reason that the millions of dollars already expended on campus diversity initiatives have yet to engineer exact proportional representation of blacks in the student body and on the faculty: the vast academic skills gap. Now this truth will be even more professionally lethal to anyone who dares mention it. The highest reaches of the university have declared as a matter of self-evident fact that systemic racism is the defining feature of American society, one that explains every inequality. Fighting against that racism has now officially become colleges’ reason for being.
Princeton’s president, Christopher Eisgruber, has ordered the school’s top faculty and administrators to submit plans on how they will “combat systemic racism within and beyond the University.” Every aspect of Princeton will be reexamined with a “bias toward action,” Eisgruber said. In June 2020, Eisgruber and the Princeton Board of Trustees set a model for such action by removing Woodrow Wilson’s name from Princeton’s famed public-policy school. The university had declined to make that change in 2016, in a reasoned analysis that balanced Wilson’s service to the university and to the country against Wilson’s views on racial segregation. None of the reasons to keep Wilson’s name had changed; the new development was Eisgruber’s desire to signal his “anti-racism.”
The dean of the Jacobs School of Engineering at the University of California, San Diego, pronounced himself “absolutely dedicated” to turning the engineering school into an “anti-racist organization.” Doing so “crucially includes unconscious bias work we must do within ourselves,” he added. How that work will interact with research on nanoparticles and viral transmission, say, was unspecified.
It is fascinating to observe academia purposefully dividing our nation by polluting young minds with absolutes and stifling opposing positions.
Do they really intend to advance socialism with false cries of systemic racism?
Is this agitation merely a pretext for the revolution they seek?
Let’s have a peek inside...
Conformity to a Lie
Academia’s monolithic belief in systemic racism will further erode American institutions and the principles of our civilization.
Heather Mac Donald
Summer 2020
EducationThe Social Order
City Journal
The lethal arrest of George Floyd in Minneapolis in late May triggered widespread riots and a torrent of contempt for America from virtually every institution in the country. Businesses large and small, the education establishment, and the press rushed to condemn the country’s purportedly endemic racism, implicitly accusing the majority of Americans of destroying “black lives.” Banks and law firms pledged that hiring and promotions would now be even more race-conscious than before. Hundreds of millions of dollars poured forth from corporate coffers into activist groups; the corporate benefactors hoped to dismantle America’s white supremacy, they announced.
Colleges and universities also promised increased diversity spending, though in amounts dwarfed by those corporate outpourings. Nevertheless, the academic response to Floyd’s death and the ensuing violence will have the greatest impact on the nation’s future. Academia was the ideological seedbed for that violence and for its elite justifications; it will prove just as critical in the accelerated transformation of the country.
Fealty to “diversity” and denunciations of white privilege have been a unifying theme in academia for decades, of course. What’s different this time is the sheer venom of the denunciations. College presidents and deans competed for the most sweeping indictment of the American polity, rooted in the claim that blacks are everywhere and at all times under threat.
“We are again reminded that this country’s 400-year history of racism continues to produce clear and present danger to the bodies and lives of Black people in every part of the United States,” wrote Ted Ruger, dean of the University of Pennsylvania law school. Amherst College president Carolyn “Biddy” Martin announced that the “virulent anti-black racism in this country has never NOT been obvious, and yet there are those who continue to deny it.” Martin was making a plea, she said, “to white people in particular, to acknowledge the reality of anti-black racism, its long history, and its current force; to recognize how embedded it is in our institutional structures, social systems, and cultural norms; and to assume our responsibility for ending it.” UCLA chancellor Gene Block declared that “racism permeates every sector of our society, from education to employment, from housing to health care, from board rooms to court rooms.”
It was not just name-brand colleges that pumped out sweeping accusations. Queens University of Charlotte, North Carolina, for example, demanded that “our society, systems, and institutions” stop “treat[ing] black and brown Americans violently and perpetuat[ing] deep inequality.”
Some presidents hastily crafted a redo of their initial George Floyd statements after their first effort was deemed insufficiently damning of America. Middlebury College president Laurie Patton apologized for not focusing enough on the “root cause and specific harm” of the black community’s “profound pain” in her initial letter to the college. “I needed to name the specific and systemic violence experienced by Black people,” Patton said. “I now understand that members of our community needed to hear that.” Patton’s second effort took no chances. The Floyd death was the “result of centuries of entrenched racism in a nation built on and maintained by unjust and inequitable systems of power, including the policies and practices of law enforcement,” she wrote.
The self-abasement would have been welcome at any Communist show trial. Holy Cross’s president admitted that he had neglected, in his first missive, to “recognize that black women, girls, and boys are impacted” by the “same violence” experienced by black men. “I sincerely apologize,” Philip Burroughs wrote, “that my message caused members of our community to feel unseen.”
The risk of insufficiency still lurked, however. Burroughs tried to ensure against further rebuke with a blanket coverage clause. While he was currently “reflecting both on the past racial history of our country and the continued struggles around racism and racial violence,” he said nervously, “I do not want to ignore many other diverse communities that have also been ostracized and dehumanized.”
Some presidents apologized even before their racial-injustice statements were found wanting. Duke University president Vincent Price announced: “I cannot as a white person begin to fully understand the daily fear and pain and oppression that is endemic to the Black experience.” Only a naïf would think that such sops to the mob would suffice to ward off future assaults. College leaders regularly accuse their own organizations of racism; Yale’s Peter Salovey has been a particularly enthusiastic practitioner of the genre.
The George Floyd moment, however, brought out the competition. Duke’s Price insisted that his university must take “transformative action” to eliminate the “systems of racism and inequality that have shaped the lived experiences of too many members of the Duke community.” Middlebury’s Patton confessed with punctilious exactitude that racism “happens in our residence halls and in our classrooms, at the tables of our dining halls and in our locker rooms, on our sidewalks, within the offices where we work, and in our town.”
Biddy Martin announced that Amherst already knew that the college had not done enough to ensure black students’ “freedom from racist bias, even racist acts, much less to ensure their sense of belonging and equal ownership of the culture and life of the College.” The work that lay ahead “begins, as it must,” she said, “with truthfulness when faced with the evidence of our shortcomings.”
All such institutional self-accusations by college presidents leave out the specifics. Which faculty members do not treat black students fairly? If that unjust treatment is so obvious, why weren’t those professors already removed? What is wrong with an admissions process that lets in thousands of student bigots? In other moments, college presidents brag about the quality of their student body and faculty. Are they lying? Shouldn’t they have disclosed to black applicants that they will face “racist acts” and “systems of inequality” should they attend?
Of course, the college presidents were not lying the first time around. American campuses today are the most tolerant organizations in human history (at least toward official victim groups). The claim that colleges are hotbeds of discrimination is a fantasy. Every university twists itself into knots to admit, hire, and promote as many black students and faculty as it possibly can, in light of the fierce bidding war among colleges for underrepresented minorities.
It has been taboo to hint at the reason that the millions of dollars already expended on campus diversity initiatives have yet to engineer exact proportional representation of blacks in the student body and on the faculty: the vast academic skills gap. Now this truth will be even more professionally lethal to anyone who dares mention it. The highest reaches of the university have declared as a matter of self-evident fact that systemic racism is the defining feature of American society, one that explains every inequality. Fighting against that racism has now officially become colleges’ reason for being.
Princeton’s president, Christopher Eisgruber, has ordered the school’s top faculty and administrators to submit plans on how they will “combat systemic racism within and beyond the University.” Every aspect of Princeton will be reexamined with a “bias toward action,” Eisgruber said. In June 2020, Eisgruber and the Princeton Board of Trustees set a model for such action by removing Woodrow Wilson’s name from Princeton’s famed public-policy school. The university had declined to make that change in 2016, in a reasoned analysis that balanced Wilson’s service to the university and to the country against Wilson’s views on racial segregation. None of the reasons to keep Wilson’s name had changed; the new development was Eisgruber’s desire to signal his “anti-racism.”
The dean of the Jacobs School of Engineering at the University of California, San Diego, pronounced himself “absolutely dedicated” to turning the engineering school into an “anti-racist organization.” Doing so “crucially includes unconscious bias work we must do within ourselves,” he added. How that work will interact with research on nanoparticles and viral transmission, say, was unspecified.