| Tuesday, June
7, 2005 On
Education: we often have stories of how bad things are. Sometimes there may
be successes in spite of the system:
Hello. I am Susan Shepherd, a high school sophomore
from Fresno, CA, whose school year just ended -- meaning that anything I
write to you will not come back to haunt me until the end of August. I''ve
been following your education discussions for about a year and a half now,
and (perhaps unsurprisingly) many of the conclusions reached on your site
were the same conclusions I came to during my freshman year.
For example, reading, writing and math seem de-emphazised,
while science is gradually dumbed down for the hordes of students who enter
ninth and tenth grade not knowing d=r x t or how cells divide. Some of this
may seem like trivia, but there are many students I have spoken to who do
not know the basics of evolution, can not explain cancer more than two
months after the cancer unit has passed, and who have no concept of what
science (repeatable, demonstrable) is or is not.
And that, sir, is from a GATE-level classroom. At
Edison, one of the top 100 high schools nationwide (at least two years ago),
there are about twice as many non-GATE or Prep students as there are GATE
students, and these know far less. I have spoken with P students who have
not read a book in their lives, who are stumped by basic algebra, and who
have no knowledge of politics, government or history. Their grammar and
spelling fall anywhere from middling to atrocious. Some of the teachers seem
to have given up, while others do the best they can to teach classes full of
'students' who bring neither paper nor pencil to school. Many of the parents
do not seem to care. And discipline is also an enormous problem; profanity
and general rudeness is the rule rather than the exception.
(An aside: There is a running joke about how an
observer can pick out P-students from a distance. They wear sports jerseys,
have tiny backpacks or small sports bags, and swear a lot.)
In the meantime, teachers bend over backwards to
fulfill 'the standards' and to teach what should have been taught before. I
have one English teacher in mind as a prime example of this. We read two
books and two Shakespeare plays in his class, one book/play per quarter. The
rest of the time, we read stories of various types aloud in class. (! Isn't
that for elementary school kids? Never mind; certain kids read very slowly,
so this may have been necessary. Unfortunately.) During the entire school
year, we did only three forty-minute essay-type writing assignments. On
Thursdays the teacher brought out one of his old orange grammar books and
retaught the basics. "This is a noun/verb/apostrophe/semicolon." I lost
interest in his class rather early in the school year; perhaps from my
writing you can see why. But many other students liked his class. One of
them said that he taught her 'a lot' that she hadn't really learned before.
What he was doing ought to be taught in the third or fourth grade, not
tenth. Am I missing something?
The smartest students are seeking out AP-classes to
cover the loss. I switched to AP Biology midyear because we were repeating
seventh grade science. (Many of my former classmates had forgotten the
material, because the schools of today train students to have short-term
memory. The math classes are going ballistic over this; students keep
forgetting the basics over summer vacation.) Now three or four freshman want
to take AP Bio as sophomores. Others are reaching out for AP English and AP
European History. One or two take AP Psychology. Why? My guess is, they
aren't being stimulated enough in their regular classes. This is No Child
Left Behind, in all its macabre glory.
One last lament. The way certain schools are run has
become ridiculous. My sister, a seventh grader, asked if she could paint out
graffiti on her locker when the school was closed. The administrators kindly
informed her that to do so would be a violation of the Janitors' Union or
some such. And when debate started over soda machines, her middle school (Computech)
replaced the soda machines with ice cream machines. Edison did the same, but
replaced two machines instead of all of them. If this is an improvement, I
must have missed it.
Thank you for listening. Part of this felt like a
rant, but I thought you might be intrigued by a student's perspective.
Sincerely, Susan Shepherd greensudz @aol.com
Note: if you think any of this is worthy of posting, please do. As I said,
I'm safe 'til late August, and none of my peers read your site. Which is a
shame.
Thank you. Actually a review of basic
grammar with diagramming complex sentences is probably no bad exercise
for a few weeks in tenth grade; but it's easy to overdo.
Clearly you have managed to learn to write
English sentences despite your education...
Dag Vandermeer
Northshore School District
English Hill
Redmond, Washington
6 June 2005
Dear Jerry:
Although your SF (bought in hardcover!)has always been
my first love, my wife Lesley and I read with great interest your essays on
Education, Intelligence, Republic/ Empire, Technology and Computing. Public
education is dear to our hearts, as we and our two boys are all products
thereof (the men in America, my wife in England as a Welsh British
state-educated teacher of English and French).
Public education has some success still in this corner
of the Republic. A remarkable teacher from our neighborhood’s Sunrise
Elementary School has shaped the character of a generation through a time
when many of our schools are littered with decades of failed educational
schemes. I am proud that my son was one of her classroom students in 1996 as
well as during a run of Saturdays when we paid extra to learn the basic
principles of physics.
When did you last hear a young multitude, from 11 to
30 years old, unrehearsedly recite the entire Gettysburg Address? For me
that moment was Saturday, when as a spontaneous ovation to show her how well
her teaching endures, Mrs. Starr Klube’s family of students recalled and
declaimed with gusto from “Four score and seven…” to “… that we here highly
resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation,
under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the
people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.’. I
shall cherish the memory all my days.
In The Book of Pirates, Howard Pyle relates that “of
all ghastly and terrible things, old-time religious war was the most ghastly
and terrible. One can hardly credit nowadays the cold, callous cruelty…
(among) all that lawless malign element which gathers together in every
newly opened country where the only law is lawlessness, where might is
right…” He further expounds that “deep under the accumulated debris of
culture (there is) a hidden groundwork of the old time savage…the natural
disposition of everyone (is) to get all that he can. Little children, for
instance, always try to take away from others that which they want, and to
keep it for their own. It is only by constant teaching that they learn they
must not do so . . . (it is) only by teaching and training that people
learn…” (Emphasis added).
Our constant teacher and trainer is retiring this
year. A generation of her former and current students, from her first class
in 1986 to her present classroom family came together June 4th for a
surprise celebration in her honor. Students, graduates, parents and fellow
teachers gathered to surprise Starr, who though late coming to teaching
emblazoned a noble path for her students to follow down the years: “I don’t
give a hoot about ‘learning disability’” she said. Everyone can learn that
which is good about themselves, their lives and their nation. She believes
it and every year she proves it anew. All of Starr’s students learn
Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address by heart, as well as the Preamble to the
Constitution, when they study them along with the Declaration of
Independence, the Bill of Rights and the other primary documents of
America’s enduring freedoms, the open-source codes of a democratic Republic.
Here is a teacher who made a difference, a teacher
that both her students and their parents will long remember. Throughout the
higher elementary, junior high and high school grades; at universities, at
work in the trades, fighting in the armed forces or following her footsteps
in teaching; wherever her family of students go, whatever they do, they
carry her light with them.
R. F. Delderfield, in To Serve Them All My Days, the
classic novel of English public school life between the wars, has his great
retiring headmaster Algernon Herries say “All that the best of us can do is
to teach…the qualities of patience, tolerance, good fellowship and the
ability to see someone else’s point of view—qualities I see as the keystones
of democracy…”. Though Starr retires in 2005, she has kindled alight these
qualities in her students and as long as they and others pass them on, hope
remains that their beacons shall never be put out. Long live Liberty; long
live Reason; long live the Republic; long live Starr Klube.
{Conflict of Interest: None—there is no fiduciary,
sanguinary, employment or any other mutually beneficial relationship or
arrangement whatever between myself and my son’s former teacher}
Regards; and Long Live Chaos Manor and All Who Sail in
Her! Write forever.
Dag Vandermeer dagv56@ yahoo.com
Thank you.
==================
Subject: Stealth bomber shows up in Google satellite
pics!
http://tinyurl.com/dyv9e
------ Roland Dobbins
===================
Subj.: flying in the day of the TSA
Dear Dr. Pournelle, after reading several of the
articles on recent fines and diminishing personal liberties, I noticed a
specific phrase in the official documentation "Permitted and Prohibited
Items" linked from the TSA site from a couple of the articles (to avoid
possible legal problems?):
http://www.tsa.gov/interweb/assetlibrary/
Permitted_Prohibited_5_16_2005_v3.pdf
"The prohibited and permitted items chart is not
intended to be all-inclusive and is updated as necessary. To ensure
everyone's security, the screener may determine that an item not on the
prohibited items chart is prohibited [*1]. In addition, the screener may
also determine that an item on the permitted chart is dangerous and
therefore may not be brought through the security checkpoint [*2]."
[*1] N.B. note that the wording does not require
explicitly that the item be necessarily a threat to security, only that it
becomes instantly prohibited... [*2] N.B. thus potentially generating new
fine-based revenue...
So it doesn't really matter whether something is
accidentally or intentionally brought to the security checkpoint, only
whether the screener considers that the object could be a threat or not...
Guidelines are provided, but screeners have no obligation to be held by
them? When do we start seeing minimum quotas for fine-based revenue to
justify the presence of the screeners?
Best regards, James Siddall jr
Zero Tolerance!
Subject: Another view on "This is not right" buffy
willow
http://www.zerointelligence.net/archives/000671.php
Jerry: This from a site focusing on the mindless
application of zero tolerance policies in our school systems:
Regards, Bas
Principal decides she doesn't like zero tolerance
after all (Category: Washington <http://www.zerointelligence.net/archives/cat_washington.php>
)
'This Is Not Right' <http://komotv.com/news/story_m.asp?ID=37150>
Cecilia Beaman <mailto:beamancm@hsd401.org> ,
principal at Pacific Middle School <http://www.hsd401.org/pacific/> in the
Highline Public School District <http://www.hsd401.org/> , found out just
what zero tolerance is like when her bread knife was found by Transportation
Security Agents during a pre-flight security screening.
This past weekend she and several other chaperones
took 37 middle school students to a Heritage Festival band competition in
California. The trip included two days at Disneyland.
During the stay she made sandwiches for the kids and
was careful to pack the knives she used to prepare those sandwiches in her
checked luggage. She says she even alerted security screeners that the
knives were in her checked bags and they told her that was OK.
But Beaman says she couldn't find a third knife. It
was a 5 1/2 inch bread knife with a rounded tip and a serrated edge. She
thought she might have lost or misplaced it during the trip.
On the trip home, screeners with the Transportation
Security Administration at Los Angeles International Airport found it deep
in the outside pocket of a carry-on cooler. Beaman apologized and told them
it was a mistake.
"You've committed a felony," Beaman says a security
screener announced. "And you're considered a terrorist."
Beaman will be fined $500 for the felony infraction as
well as being placed on a TSA security list. Her statements ring a bell with
anybody who has read the reactions of students who have been hit with the
zero tolerance bat.
"This is not right," she told us. It's not right!" ...
"I'm a 57-year-old woman who is taking care of 37 kids," she told them. "I'm
not gonna commit a terrorist act." ... And I said what about my
constitutional rights? And they said 'not at this point ... you don't have
any'." ... "This is not the way my country should be treating me," she said.
Let's see if I can word the proper ZT responses to her
objections:
1) The rules are necessary to keep order. Of course
you don't think it is right when it happens to you. The only people who
object to zero tolerance are the ones affected by it.
2) It does not matter what your intent was. You knew
about the rule and you broke it.
3) You do not get all of your rights here. In order to
do our jobs and maintain a safe environment we have custodial powers over
you.
4) You brought it on yourself. You had plenty of
opportunity to avoid the situation and were advised about the rules several
times. Don't forget that everything that happened is your fault for breaking
the rules.
If she had been a student at her own school and been
found to have that bread knife she would have faced serious consequences
according to the school policy <http://www.hsd401.org/rights/rights.htm> :
1. The principal/designee shall place the student on
emergency expulsion.
2. The principal/designee shall notify the
parents/guardians and request an immediate conference.
3. The principal/designee may impose long-term
suspension of ninety days unless expulsion or a lesser number of days is
warranted.
4. The principal/designee shall notify appropriate law
enforcement personnel through the district security office.
That's just for a first offense. If it happens a
second time the student is automatically expelled.
But we were born free and presumably into a
sane society.
==============================
Subject: Return to phonics for British Schools, Global
warming thoughts, buffy willow
Dear Jerry,
Finally something that’s moving in the right direction
in the UK.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?
xml=/news/2005/06/03/nread03.xml&sSheet=
/news/2005/06/03/ixhome.html
On the topic of global warming – I hope I might be
permitted a brief anecdote. When I was a high school student our Geography
teacher was working on her PhD; her subject was the mechanism of wave
erosion of coastal planes in the wetlands area of St Lucia in Northern
Natal, South Africa. We got quite involved in helping her and were very
interested in her research. (The fact that they were co-ed field trips to
beautiful beaches may have had something to do with our enthusiasm :-) ).
Her research showed the effects of tides, wave angle
of incidence, local on-shore currents, etc etc on erosion of these beaches.
She made projections as to how such erosion might progress in these areas
over periods of 20, 50, 100, 200 years etc. Very interesting and possibly
very useful for coastal management, except that barely 3 months after her
research was finished a cyclone (hurricane of origin Indian Ocean) smashed
into the coast and completely re-formed it. These cyclones hit this area
with that degree of force approximately once every 25 years. Were her
projections invalid? – no, but their relevance was rather limited, because
unless the cyclones stopped coming the gradual erosive forces she studied
would never have a long enough period to make a major impact before the next
cyclone arrived.
I have a very strong suspicion that we face a similar
situation with global warming; the projections of current models may well be
valid, all other things being equal, but the global climate is a chaotic
system and events like major volcanic eruptions can throw so much gas and
ash into the atmosphere that I strongly suspect that our overall impact over
the long term is likely to be negligible. I remember seeing the coast after
the cyclone struck – the (quite expensive) sea walls and artificial berms
that were built to protect the wetlands simply vanished: these huge walls of
interlocking concrete jacks weighing tons disappeared never to be seen
again, though one block did turn up half a mile inland up the estuary.
Regards,
Craig Arnold
================================
Subject: Harvard's Diversity Grovel
AADAP-L, a free, moderated e-mail list with daily
postings, is a project of Americans Against Discrimination and Preferences (www.aadap.org).
You are invited to participate in the blog site, RIGHT ON RACE (www.rightonrace.org).
Express yourself there on the issues covered in the AADAP-L list, and help
build an online community dedicated to the abolition of discrimination and
preferences along the lines laid down by California's Prop. 209.
Thomas E. Wood, President and Moderator
***************************************
http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon_06_03_05hm.html
Harvard's Diversity Grovel In earmarking $50 million
for "diversity," President Summers is throwing away more than money. | 3
June 2005
Harvard University has just pledged $50 million for
faculty "diversity" efforts, penance for President Lawrence Summers's public
mention of sex differences in cognition. The university would have been
better off hiring a top-notch conjuror, since only magic could produce a
trove of previously undiscovered female and minority academic stars suitable
for tenuring.
Even Harvard's bottomless resources cannot buy a
miracle, however. So instead of a magician, the university has brought forth
the next best thing: a report on "diversity" that, like all such products,
possesses the power of shutting down every critical faculty in seemingly
intelligent people. For connoisseurs of diversity claptrap, Harvard's just
released "Report of the Task Force on Women Faculty" is a thing of beauty, a
peerless example of the destruction of higher learning by identity politics.
Because the report will undoubtedly serve as the template for future
diversity scams in colleges across the country, it's worth studying.
The occasion for the report is by now well known. At a
January 14 conference on women in science, Summers had speculated that one
possible reason for women's lack of proportional representation on elite
science faculties might be that more men than women possess the highest
levels of quantitative reasoning skills. Though research amply bears out the
unequal distribution of the most abstract mathematical abilities, Summers's
allusion to this research set off an immediate spasm of revulsion and horror
among Harvard's feminist faculty members. Their fury culminated in a March
15 faculty vote of "no-confidence" against Summers, despite his cringing
public retractions and apologies that began as soon as the controversy
erupted-all of which recalled Stalinist show trials, with their Darkness at
Noon-like recantations.
Formation of the Task Force on Women Faculty
represented an early and unsuccessful effort to appease Harvard's
sciencephobes. Though the administration announced the outcome in advance-it
wanted, at a minimum, a call for a new high-placed diversity bureaucrat and
for more affirmative-action hiring efforts-the creation of task forces,
complete with paid staff, is by now an ironclad ritual whereby colleges and
universities demonstrate their deep concern for pressing issues. And so
Harvard launched the Task Force on Women Faculty on February 3 to "affirm
[the school's] commitment to the advancement and support of women in
academic life."
Every such "diversity" initiative immediately faces
two major obstacles. First, its purpose is to recommend the identical set of
actions that the institution, whether academic or corporate, has already
been doing. Every college in the country has been frantically pursing
"diversity" in hiring and admissions for decades. The task force itself
commends the diversity policies of 17 rival colleges-the mere tip of the
iceberg-without drawing the obvious conclusion.
The second obstacle follows from the first: there is
nothing more that can be done. If untapped pools of highly qualified female
and minority candidates existed out there, schools would have snapped them
up long ago-if not your college, then its dozens of competitors, just as
desperate to placate the quota gods. (The one course of action that might,
in the case of black and Hispanic faculty recruitment, bear long-term
results is the one that elite college personnel are least likely to choose:
intensive mentoring of young students and the jettisoning of all
"progressive" pedagogy in the schools.)
Just how repetitive is Harvard's latest "diversity"
push? I asked Harvard spokesman Sarah Friedell if the university had not
already been paying considerable attention to "diversity." She happily
trumpeted the school's efforts. "I will tell you," she said, "huge attention
is paid to diversity in terms of recruiting students and faculty. It is
enormously important." A former top administrator seconded her claims. "The
annual numbers of tenure offers to women are etched into my soul," he said.
"Everyone thought about it all the time." Indeed, the task force report
itself alludes to Harvard's numerous existing efforts to recruit women
faculty, from an affirmative action slush fund to a universal drive, at each
of Harvard's faculties and schools, to "retain and promote larger numbers of
women faculty."
By now, however, crafty diversocrats have developed a
host of strategies to cover up the essential meaninglessness of their
existence. The Harvard Report of the Task Force on Women Faculty employs all
of them to perfection.
STRATEGY #1: PRACTICE COLLECTIVE AMNESIA. So your
latest diversity effort mimics everything that your institution has been
doing for years? No problem! Just play Let's Pretend: "Let's pretend that
we've never had a diversity initiative at our college and that this current
proposal to hire more women and minority faculty represents a radical new
take on college governance." Thus, President Summers greeted the report's
release with the sonorous tones that a proposal to end tenure, say, might
elicit: "Because [these recommendations] address fundamental issues about
the way we conduct our core academic business, they have the power to make
Harvard not only more welcoming and diverse, but a stronger and more
excellent university overall." You would think that an economist would know
something about diminishing returns.
The head of the Harvard Corporation, its external
oversight board, kept up his end of the charade with equal solemnity.
Announced Corning, Inc. chairman James R. Houghton: "[T]hese recommendations
will help the University take major steps toward that crucial goal [of
diversity], in ways that strengthen both our academic enterprise and our
sense of community." Of course, "these recommendations" contain not a single
novel thought or policy, but it would take a degree of courage possessed by
neither corporate nor university chieftains to point that out.
STRATEGY #2: CREATE NEW BUREAUCRACY. The only new
hires that diversity initiatives generate are in college administrations,
already overloaded with sinecures. The Harvard task force demands the
creation of a most remarkable new position, a Senior Vice Provost for
Diversity and Faculty Development. The provost's office, mind you, is very
high up in the administrative chain-directly beneath the president, in
fact-and it is responsible for all aspects of Harvard's academic life.
Within that empyrean realm, the new Senior Vice Provost for Diversity and
Faculty Development will occupy a "singular and permanent position,"
dictates the task force. The Senior VP for D will sit with the president,
the provost, and the deans of faculties on Harvard's academic advisory
group. And just in case the lesser functionaries in the provost's office
still don't appreciate the exalted status of the new Senior VP for D, the
task force provides that "she" (the report's choice of words) "be given
priority in terms of office space." So much for non-hierarchical,
anti-patriarchal collaborative sharing of collective resources. Naturally,
the Senior VP for D will "also be supported by a group of dedicated staff."
Now the new Senior VP faces in microcosm the same
problem confronting the task force: there is nothing for her to do. And
that's after the task force has grabbed for her a portfolio beyond its
original charter. Summers's charge to the task force was to "promote gender
diversity." But without even acknowledging the change, the task force has
expanded the Senior VP for D's diversity mandate to include "other
underrepresented racial/ethnic groups" (as if women are an "underrepresented
ethnic/ethnic group"). Of course, some of the alleged "solutions" to the
professorial gender gap-changed family leave and stronger sexual harassment
polices-are irrelevant to half of the members of "underrepresented
racial/ethnic groups," but diversity boondoggles never let facts stand in
their way.
Bulking up the Senior VP for D's job description still
cannot conceal that the job is contentless, however. The SVP is nothing but
a bean-counter and quota-enforcer; a computer could-and already does-tally
the number of female and minority professors more easily and much less
expensively. The idea that there is some intellectual or academic content to
bean counting is ridiculous. That's where Strategy Three comes in.
STRATEGY #3: SUBDIVIDE ONE BIG ZERO INTO MANY LITTLE
ZEROS. So what if a diversity bureaucrat's job is a cipher? You can make
that cipher look impressive by breaking it up into equally vacuous component
parts. The task force creates 24 "specific responsibilities" for the Senior
VP for D, proving that there are at least 24 ways to say "count the beans."
Those 24 "specific responsibilities" unfold in an outline of baroque
complexity, with major headings spawning sub-categories and
sub-sub-categories. The placement of any "specific responsibility" in this
dizzying scheme is completely arbitrary. Why, for example, is "overseeing
design and implementation of diversity programs for deans, department chairs
and search committees" included under the sub-head "promoting diversity and
gender and racial /ethnic equity in hiring," rather than under "improving
the climate for women and underrepresented racial/ethnic groups"?
Conversely, why is "monitoring, evaluating and building on existing polices
and practices in cooperation with the deans to promote diversity and gender
and racial/ethnic equity, both centrally and at the school level" organized
under "improving the climate for women and underrepresented racial/ethnic
groups" rather than under "promoting diversity and gender and racial/ethnic
equity"? No answer exists.
The task force is just warming up to its obfuscating
role, however. Though the above "specific responsibilities" are merely
mind-numbing rephrasings of the core bean-counting activity, the task force
manages to squeeze an additional three sub-sub-categories out of bean
counting-which it calls "metrics." The Senior VP for D will "develop metrics
for measuring the University's' progress in achieving diversity and gender
and ethnic/ethnic equity," "track progress in increasing diversity and
representation by compiling metrics," and "make metrics available to the
Harvard community and to the public." Translation: count the number of women
and minority professors.
STRATEGY #4: RENAME EVERYTHING THAT YOUR UNIVERSITY
HAS BEEN DOING REGARDING "DIVERSITY." Diversocrats possess a primitive
belief in the totemic power of words. If you can rename something, you have
changed its essence. Harvard has already been obsessively compiling data on
gender and race: the task force easily obtained faculty data from 1990 to
2005 by rank and gender-and within gender, by race. But the task force
renames those data "metrics" and-poof!-it has proposed something new.
Collect diversity data? That's what Harvard did before May 16, 2005, when
the task force released its report. After May 16, 2005, it will embark into
the uncharted territory of compiling "metrics," proving that now it's really
doing something about "diversity."
In the era before the coming of the Senior VP for D,
Harvard had an "Outreach Fund" for sweetening job offers and other perks for
women and minorities. In the post-Senior VP for D era, Harvard will have a
"Faculty Development and Diversity Fund" and a "Special Assistance Fund."
(The task force here combined Strategy #4: Renaming, and Strategy #3:
Subdivide.) The "Faculty Development and Diversity Fund" and the "Special
Assistance Fund" are identical to the "Outreach Fund," simply renamed and
split into two. No one will ever notice that continuity, the diversocrats
assume, because the names are different.
The task force gives two reasons for renaming the
"Outreach Fund." Both demonstrate the catastrophic decline in intellectual
skills in the academy. The task force claims that the term "'outreach fund'
connotes civic or cultural improvement, but these funds are intended to
identify and recruit top-flight faculty." Huh? No one, hearing "outreach
fund," would think "civic or cultural improvement." In fact, "outreach fund"
suggests pretty much what the task force claims it doesn't signify: the
intent "to identify and recruit" some group-in this case, women and minority
faculty. Reading skills in the age of deconstruction and its many
theoretical offshoots have apparently followed required Shakespeare courses
into oblivion.
The second reason for renaming the Outreach Fund is an
even stronger indication of Harvard's intellectual nosedive. In an unusual
collision with the truth, the task force acknowledges that "there was a
sense that candidates hired with support of the [existing] funds are somehow
less qualified." Someone slipped up big-time here, because admitting the
poisonous stigma that affirmative action efforts impose on their
"beneficiaries" is something that diversocrats must never ever do. But the
task force's encounter with reality is brief. It appears fully satisfied
with the idea that renaming the Outreach Fund will eliminate the stigma of
race and gender preferences.
The task force could have mentioned one more
unintended consequence to affirmative action slush funds: peer resentment. A
top Harvard science professor says that the preferences given to women and
minority scientists in lab-space allocation and other perks do not always
make for happy collegial relations. But any resentment that might emerge
will just be more fuel for the diversity machine. Pursuant to the task force
recommendations, Harvard is busily planning "climate surveys" of faculty to
see whether women and minority professors feel "personally safe, listened
to, valued." Ordinarily, one could attribute the suggestion that there might
be even a single professor in the warm, fuzzy cocoon of Harvard who does not
feel "personally safe" to "diversity's" solipsistic bathos. But just maybe,
if your white male colleagues are grumbling behind your back about your
unusual access to the Quadrupole Ion Trap Mass Spectrometer, your new
computers, and your troop of lab assistants, you can begin to make out a
case, however far-fetched, of not feeling "personally safe."
STRATEGY #5: DUCK THE INCONVENIENT QUESTIONS. For all
its verbosity, the task force report never explains its central conceit:
"equity in hiring." The Senior VP for D's central task is to promote
"diversity and gender and racial/ethnic equity in hiring." Leaving aside the
question of the difference between "diversity" and "gender and racial/ethnic
equity," the report leaves wholly opaque just what "equity in hiring" means.
Does "equity" refer to process or outcomes, to concerted outreach efforts
during a hiring search or to numbers of women and minorities actually hired?
(Of course, no affirmative action effort has ever limited itself to
"outreach," though affirmative action proponents continue to mask their
quota-ising efforts in those terms.) If equity refers to outcomes, what
proportion of gender- and race-based hires counts as "equity"? Should the
representation of women and minorities on the faculty match their proportion
in the population at large, or will some lesser percentage satisfy the
"equity" mandate? The report shies away from these questions. Spokesman
Sarah Friedell didn't know the answers either, though she hazarded a guess
that "equity" referred to the actual numbers hired, rather than to a widely
cast search net. She is certainly correct.
And what does $50 million buy you? This astounding
sum, offered by Lawrence Summers as a down payment on his absolution for
mentioning the science of sex differences, comes without any explanation as
to how he arrived at it or what it will purchase. One would hope that the
Senior VP for D, whatever her exalted position and her bevy of dedicated
helpers in the provost's office, doesn't come near to costing that amount.
Given that Harvard and its competitors across the country have already
beaten the bushes for years for "diversity" candidates, even $500 million
would seem unlikely to produce any major change in Harvard's "diversity"
profile.
But the $50 million will escalate the bidding wars for
the finite number of plausibly qualified women and minority professors. In
the near future, Harvard's millions will guarantee that it can rout all
competitors for female nuclear physicists, but its competitors will
undoubtedly up their own antes to stay in the game. There must be better
ways to spend the millions of dollars that schools will dedicate to poaching
"diversity" trophies from rival institutions-buying books for libraries, for
example, or grooming scholars in neglected fields such as the American
founding, or producing operas on campus, or capping tuition hikes.
The task force report assumes that the answer to the
question: "And why exactly are we doing this?" is so obvious that the
question doesn't need asking. But it is not obvious why it matters whether a
woman or an Asian man teaches a graduate student in statistical mechanics.
The "role model" argument insults women; it presumes that they can only be
followers, not pioneers. The value to male grad students of a deliberately
engineered "diverse" faculty is equally obscure. Two possible, but specious,
reasons suggest themselves.
Perhaps diversocrats like Summers believe that there
is a female or black way of doing statistical mechanics that would be
ignored, to the detriment of us all, without a consciously created "diverse"
faculty. Feminist theorists have ventured such arguments. If Summers
subscribes to them, he should say so. Or perhaps the quota-mongers believe
that male graduate students are so sexist that without seeing female
scientists with their own eyes, they will doubt the possibility of their
existence. No one has provided any evidence of such entrenched bias,
however, and in any case, manipulating hiring policies in science
departments is an extremely inefficient way to gender-train wayward males.
Hiring quotas (Harvard will call them "goals") might
also plausibly have a justification if widespread discrimination prevented
qualified women from getting hired, just as construction unions kept out
blacks in the 1960s. By imposing such "goals" on itself (enforced by the
Senior VP for D's "metrics"), Harvard is implicitly labeling itself a
discriminator of this magnitude. And indeed, in a February 17, 2005, letter
to the faculty, Summers took the sexist guilt of his university (and the
world) onto his shoulders. "My January remarks," he wrote, "substantially
understated . . . discrimination [against women], including . . . patterns
of thought to which all of us are unconsciously subject." The paradox of an
institution simultaneously dedicating $50 million to bringing in more women
faculty while declaring itself resistant to women seems entirely lost on the
task force. It would be interesting to know which science departments in
particular Summers thinks suffer from unconscious bias-presumably, any
department without parity of male to female professors.
And that leads to the final inconvenient question:
Just how much are you willing to lower your standards to achieve
"diversity?" If more women and minority faculty could be had who met
Harvard's standards for Caucasian and Asian males, the university would have
hired them years ago. The only way it will achieve increased female and race
"diversity" in the foreseeable future is to set a lower standard for female
and minority hires. And this President Summers seems prepared to do.
In one of his many groveling apologies for the
"wounds" he had inflicted on delicate faculty sensibilities, he parrots the
most left-wing, radical tenet of feminist constructivist ideology: that
traditional standards of merit are merely white male ploys to silence female
and minority "voices." The "underlying . . . fact" of universities, he told
the faculty at a February 15 meeting, is that they were "originally designed
by men and for men." In Summers's view, the male origin of universities
undermines any claim they might make to using objective tests of merit.
"That reality [of a male founding]," he said, "shapes everything from . . .
assumptions about effectiveness in teaching and mentoring, to concepts of
excellence." In other words, there is a male "concept of excellence" in
genome research, say, that may not be the same as a female or black "concept
of excellence" in genome research.
The deconstruction of objective standards into race
and gender politics is common throughout the humanities. If Summers acts on
his embrace of deconstructive relativism-he called on February 15 for
"rethinking our assumptions in [such] areas [as 'excellence']"-standards in
science will be the next to go. Any department that claims that it cannot
find qualified candidates to meet the Senior VP for D's "metrics" could face
the charge that it is using white male "concepts of excellence." Thank you
very much, but I think I'll stick with those "concepts" in the interest of
ensuring that my medicine works and the airplane I'm using stays in the air.
Henceforth, Harvard history will divide into the
pre-task-force and post-task-force era. In the post-TFE, Summers's feeble
efforts to enforce academic standards against the diversity machine will
seem quaint. The Cornel West flap, for example, will appear both predictive
and unrepeatable. In October 2001, Summers had a private chat with
Afro-American studies professor West, a vain intellectual name-dropper who
purports to unite Marxism and American pragmatism in a profound explication
of race relations. The result is instead a turgid stew of nearly meaningless
post-modern riffing. West's historical wisdom emerges nicely in his
observation that "Marxist thought becomes even more relevant after the
collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe than it was
before."
Such fashionable ignorance Lawrence Summers was ready
to tolerate, but what reportedly caught his attention in 2001 (the exact
content of his conversation with West remains confidential) were West's
predilection for handing out grades of A, his lack of scholarly output and
release of a rap album instead, and his absences from campus on such
missions as advising Al Sharpton on a presidential run. Summers's reputed
admonitions to West (who bears Harvard's most august title of University
Professor) were entirely consistent with his then-campaign to promote
"excellence in serious scholarship and in commitment to teaching" (Summers
had not yet "problematized" the concept of excellence, as the
deconstructionists would say). West predictably turned Summers's requests
into a case of racial "disrespect."
In January 2002, amid a firestorm of criticism,
Summers issued an apology and reaffirmed his commitment to "diversity." (No
one realized at the time how prophetic Summers's collapse would be.)
Summers's retraction of his alleged request that West produce something more
serious than a rap album was entirely in keeping with the diversity critique
of white male "concepts of excellence." Race advocates have long argued that
the demand for published books and articles discriminates against minority
tenure candidates. But Summers's apology came too late. West huffily
decamped to Princeton, calling Summers "the Ariel Sharon of American higher
education" and "a bully, in a very delicate and dangerous situation."
West has of course seized the opportunity to dig in
the boot a little deeper, following Summers's current self-abasement. "I was
praying for the brother, hoping he would change," West oozed. "It's clear he
hasn't changed." Unfortunately, he probably has. Now, instead of making even
a temporary stand for excellence and then retreating ignominiously, Summers
will not bother to take a stand at all. Message to diversocrats across the
country: Your power is indomitable; use it.
The aristocratic ease with which Harvard has just
dumped $50 million down a bureaucratic sinkhole tells you all you need to
know about why attending Harvard for eight months costs more than most
families earn in a year. Eventually, students and parents may start asking
why anyone would want to.
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