In this excellent letter to the trustees of Scripps College, National Association of Scholars president Peter Wood explains why the school was wrong to disinvite columnist George Will as the commencement speaker for its most recent graduation ceremony. Antics like this college’s are, alas, more and more common — making Wood’s letter all the more welcome.
And speaking of Peter Wood and NAS: I’ve written frequently in the past about their efforts to expose and critique the noxious political correctness at, especially, Bowdoin College. In this work, they have a valuable ally in Center for Equal Opportunity board member Tom Klingenstein.
For example, when Bowdoin College president Barry Mills announced his resignation recently, I speculated that NAS’s scathing report on the school might have played a role. The archly-worded first sentence in this statement by Bowdoin’s board of trustees later suggested that, indeed, Mills’s resignation was not entirely voluntary, since it applauds Mills for “his willingness to do what he thinks best for our College, even if it means stepping down from a job that he does so well and truly loves.” Center for Equal Opportunity chairman Linda Chavez had a related column at about the time that Mills stepped down; you might also enjoy an earlier column she wrote about Bowdoin College. You can also read in Wood’s essay here about how independent thinking is now discouraged in this grove of academe. (Of course, Bowdoin is not alone in its p.c. affliction: You can read about how Western Washington University, to give just one recent example, suffers from it, too, here.)
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“So you want to be a diversity officer”: That’s the topic of this recent Inside Higher Ed article, and my posted suggestion is that, if we’re going to have these offices at all, the officer should have some knowledge of the civil-rights laws. That’s precisely because so much of the diversity agenda (that is, the parts that involve treating student and faculty applicants differently on the basis of race, ethnicity, and sex) is inconsistent with the text of those laws. I cite the ongoing Fisher v. University of Texas litigation and an earlier discussion I wrote about the problems with faculty discrimination in the name of diversity.
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Is there sex discrimination in every single Ph.D. field?
From last month’s Chronicle of Higher Education article headlined, “Report Examines Fields With Highest Gender Imbalances Among Ph.D.’s”: “Among the 55 STEM-related fields, men were overrepresented in 74.5 percent and women were overrepresented in 25.5 percent. Among the other 80 fields, men were overrepresented in 77.5 percent and women were overrepresented in 22.5 percent.” You do the math: Every field is “over-“ or “under-represented.”
Why can’t academics get their “representation” just right, not over or under? Of course, the real solution is to stop using the misleading terms “overrepresentation” and “underrepresentation” — as I argued some years ago here.
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Turning from academia to the Obama administration: Regarding employers’ use of, horrors, criminal background checks for prospective employees, “Do as we say and not as we do,” says the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission here. “In fact, don’t even ask what we do.”
But you can’t really blame the EEOC for being a little sensitive these days. It has suffered a series of embarrassing setbacks in court, the most recent example being in EEOC v. Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, where a federal court of appeals panel unanimously upheld the trial court’s dismissal of the commission’s Equal Pay Act lawsuit. A few excerpts:
The district court concluded that the EEOC failed to allege sufficient facts to state a plausible claim that female and male attorneys at the Port Authority performed “equal work” despite receiving unequal pay. Because the EEOC did not allege any facts supporting a comparison between the attorneys’ actual job duties, thereby precluding a reasonable inference that the attorneys performed “equal work,” we AFFIRM. . . . [D]espite a three‐year investigation conducted with the Port Authority’s cooperation, the EEOC’s complaint and incorporated interrogatory responses rely almost entirely on broad generalizations drawn from job titles and divisions, and supplemented only by the unsupported assertion that all Port Authority nonsupervisory attorneys had the same job, to support its “substantially equal” work claim. As such, the EEOC’s complaint was rightly dismissed. … Simply put, the EEOC has not alleged a single nonconclusory fact supporting its assertion that the claimants’ and comparators’ jobs required “substantially equal” skill and effort. That the EEOC’s failure to include such factual allegations followed a three‐year investigation into the Port Authority’s pay practices – an investigation conducted with the Port Authority’s cooperation – is of some note. … Here, the EEOC had ready access to Port Authority documents and employees, including to the claimants asserting EPA violations, yet the EEOC failed – in fact, repeatedly rejected the need – to allege any factual basis for inferring that the attorneys at issue performed “substantially equal” work.
You get the idea.
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President Obama’s recent speech at a Congressional Black Caucus gala is about what you would expect, victim-pander-wise. Here’s the worst paragraph:
Too many young men of color feel targeted by law enforcement, guilty of walking while black, or driving while black, judged by stereotypes that fuel fear and resentment and hopelessness. We know that, statistically, in everything from enforcing drug policy to applying the death penalty to pulling people over, there are significant racial disparities. That’s just the statistics. One recent poll showed that the majority of Americans think the criminal justice system doesn’t treat people of all races equally. Think about that. That’s not just blacks, not just Latinos or Asians or Native Americans saying things may not be unfair. That’s most Americans.
Given the context and the audience, I don’t think the president meant to leave any doubt that these “feelings” are well-founded, those “statistics” are problematic only in that the truth is even worse, and that the poll likewise reflects reality. Yes, the ranks of the police and prosecutors and judges are just filled with racists, no doubt about it.
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Speaking of pandering: In this speech to a forum for Minority- and Women-Owned Businesses (MWBEs) in Albany, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced this month that New York State would set a new goal of awarding 30 percent of state contracts to MWBEs – the “highest such goal in the nation.”
As described, the program is almost certainly illegal: There is no effort whatsoever to tie these race- and sex-based goals to remedying contract discrimination — which is what the Constitution requires if you are going to have a program like this at all — let alone any justification for the 30 percent figure. None, that is, except for the fact that Governor Cuomo wanted to brag about how much money he will throw around, and wanted to announce a higher goal, and indeed wanted to declare a goal higher than that of any other state. And then he urged other states to follow New York, which of course would also be illegal.
Here’s hoping someone sues.
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Finally, last week I participated in a Federalist Society teleforum that discussed racial preferences in government contracting, along the lines of the Andrew Cuomo matter discussed above. You can listen to the teleforum here.
