Keeping Your Company Out of the Culture Wars, Keep it Free to Pursue its Business Purpose

Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff wrote an article that offers real-world advice to corporations. They are addressing businesses that want to simply do business while avoiding moral dependency of the up and coming generation that includes many childlike adults who have been coddled all the way through life, including at their elite universities. Here are the first three suggestions list in How To Keep Your Corporation Out of the Culture War: Eight steps business leaders can take to prevent ideological pressure and political conformity in the workplace.

1. Expand your definition of diversity. While racial diversity and gender expression often dominate what people mean by diversity on campus, for a company trying to serve a diverse market in a fast-changing economic environment, having diversity of opinion, diversity of experience, and diversity of social class and geographic background can be even more important. In fact, the kind of diversity most often found to confer advantages on teams is not demographic diversity but rather diversity of perspectives on topics closely related to the task at hand. This includes both functional diversity (e.g., what roles people play in the company) and political diversity (at least when trying to find truth about politically controversial topics).

2. Reconsider what colleges you hire from. While elite colleges offer the promise of bright and hard-working employees, the problems we covered in our book are generally more severe at elite private colleges. You might want to consider hiring from large state schools, and ones from regions of the country other than the West Coast or Northeast. This will increase your diversity by social class and region, and it may help your organization avoid the elite college groupthink that seems to be damaging some organizations, potentially giving your organization a competitive advantage.

You might want to go still further and consider hiring people who have not attended college at all, if you can put in place standards that still guarantee hard-working employees with relevant skills. We believe that the numbers of bright, hard-working, and talented people choosing to skip college or to learn through a less traditional alternative will increase in the coming years, while the ability of elite college graduates to work well with those who do not share their beliefs will continue to decline.

3. Orientation: Be direct with candidates and new hires. If you decide that you want your organization to be politically neutral or self-consciously politically heterogeneous it’s a good idea to say so in job postings, and to introduce that idea to employees from their very first day. For example, you could state: “Our company’s culture is oriented toward success in our mission, which is [lay out business mission here]. We therefore do not take public stands on issues that are not central to our business mission. If you're not willing to work for such a company, or with people who disagree with you on some of your deepest beliefs, this might not be the right organization for you.”

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Georgetown University’s Free Speech Problem

Modern minds, even sophisticated ones, increasingly struggle to recognize two completely orthogonal concepts: A) The content of speech (which we might disagree with or even find offensive) and B) the right to speak. That a large university purporting to uphold free and open inquiry (see comments) refuses to recognize this distinction and promptly act on it is an embarrassment.

FIRE's Headline: "Georgetown’s investigation of a single tweet taking longer than 12 round-trips to the moon." The money quote:

“It’s laughable that Georgetown Law’s administrators would need even one day to pore over a tweet,” said FIRE Executive Director Robert Shibley. “But if they’re determined to use their magnifying glasses on the tweet until they find something punishable, they’ll be investigating until their retirement.”
Here's Georgetown's policy strongly in favor of free speech.

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On the Betrayal of Women

At Common Sense, Zoe Strimpel has written an article titled "How Feminism Got Hijacked. The movement that once declared “I am woman, hear me roar” can no longer define what a woman is. What happened?"

In this article, Strimpel refers to this March 31 2022 Headline in The Washington Post:

What follows is an excerpt from Strimpel's excellent article:

Post-Feminist Feminism has morphed into a dark, strange Anti-Feminism. Anti-Feminism borrows from the language of liberation, but it’s not about liberating women. It’s about pushing women out of college sports. It’s about telling girls they aren’t lesbians or tomboys, but in fact men struggling to find themselves.

It is the madness that led a storied American newspaper to run an anti-woman (or de-woman-ed) headline—garnering roughly 1,400 comments (almost all negative) before shutting down the comments section. It is the trap that ensnared a Supreme Court nominee, who had acquitted herself with great aplomb and suddenly found herself at the end of an ideological cul de sac. To attempt an answer, any answer, to the question—Can you provide a definition for the word ‘woman’?—would be to re-center women, biological sex, the concrete, mundane experience of ordinary, boring, bourgeois and working-class and very poor women the world over. It would be to attempt to undo the hijacking of the feminist cause and to return it to the people for whom that cause was created so many decades ago.

Returning the cause to the people for whom it was created is the only way to save it, and to stop the many discriminations that girls and women still face: domestic violence; the economic and psychological penalty of having babies; the manifold hurts and crimes visited upon countless women in non-Western countries simply for being women. For now, doing anything about all of that is a fantasy. First, we have to honor the actual meaning of words, like woman. We have to insist that those meanings are important. We have to go back, again, to first principles. That is the only way forward.

I will never stop using the word "woman" to refer to the women in my life, whether they be my mom, my daughters, my sisters and my friends.  I do so proudly and publicly.  I will speak out strongly against those people who use the word "women" only in private (especially liberals who agree with me but who are too cowardly to speak out). In the meantime, we see headlines like this: "Two inmates at all-women's New Jersey jail are PREGNANT after both had sex with transgender prisoners: ACLU won battle to house 27 trans inmates there."

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