Dishonest Diversity

Irshad Manji (in a discussion with Tara Henley):

Dishonest diversity right now is the mainstream version of diversity. It slices and dices individuals into categories and then leaves them there. Now, I acknowledge in my book that labels can be starting points for further discovery, but they should never be finish lines, because labels can lie. They flatten each of us to one dimension, and vaporize all the rest that makes us, as I put it in the book, plurals.

By that I mean that all of us — the so-called white straight guy, as much as the queer Muslim — all of us are so much more than meets the eye.

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It’s Time to Abolish, Redefine and Rebuild University DEI Departments.

The people of the United States need to have a robust and wide-open conversation on this proposal. I don't know that a meaningful conversation would be possible, however, given that so many people now support censorship, cancellation, ad hominem attacks, words-are-harmful, Manicheanism and the idea that we should divide all people into two--count'm, two--"colors." I think Chris Rufo is correct in his prediction that a large majority of Americans would support his proposal.

In the meantime, the annual DEI budget for the University of Michigan is $18M.

The university’s vice provost for equity and inclusion, Tabbye Chavous Sellers, is the highest-paid DEI staffer. Sellers, the wife of former DEI provost Robert Sellers, makes $380,000. Seventeen DEI staffers make more than $200,000 in total compensation, according to the data. Ninety-five staffers make more than $100,000 in total compensation.

That annual expenditure would be enough money to pay the instate tuition for 1,075 students.

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Ibram Kendi’s Confession

I sometimes think back to 2021, when Ibram Kendi unwittingly self-destructed. The episode was described by Professor of Political Science and author Wilfred Reilly at FAIR:

On October 29, the newly minted MacArthur “genius” posted the results of a widely discussed survey project on Twitter, saying simply: “More than a third of white students lied (about their race) on their college applications.” Kendi went on to claim that about half of the students who chose dishonesty falsely identified themselves as Native American—presumably to benefit from affirmative action programs—and that “more than three-fourths” of all students who lied about their racial background were accepted to colleges they applied to. As any academic should, Kendi duly linked his source, which I also provide here.

The backlash to Kendi’s comments was immediate, and, frankly, rather predictable. As Oliver Traldi details for Quillette, and as Jerry Coyne does for the popular blog Why Evolution Is True, conservative and heterodox intellectuals pointed out that Kendi’s claim about white students seeking to benefit from affirmative action logically debunks the main thesis of his scholarly work. Founder and former editor of The Intercept Glenn Greenwald not only questioned the objective accuracy of Kendi’s data, but also noted that his argument “negates every core contention about American society on which his career is based.” Journalist Alex Griswold described Kendi as having “blown up his life’s work,” noting that Kendi would “have to delete” his tweet, which, in fact, he did.

Reilly is the author of an excellent book of topics we should be discussing regarding social justice: Taboo: 10 Facts You Can't Talk About (2020).

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America’s Make-Believe Racial Categories

I just finished reading "The Lunacy of U.S. Racial Categories," by Rich Lowry of the National Review.

I completely agree with Lowry, having just heard David Bernstein discuss his new book on Coleman Hughes' podcast: Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America. I'm currently reading Bernstein's book and I've already read Bernstein's amicus brief filed in the Harvard affirmative action case, in which he makes a mockery of America's "racial" categories. Here's an excerpt from NR article:

It’s not just that colleges and universities discriminate on the basis of race, ethnicity, and national origin. They do it badly. This is one of the themes that emerged in the oral arguments at the Supreme Court in the Harvard and University of North Carolina affirmative-action cases last week.

The racial categories that the schools use are completely bonkers, an arbitrary mess mostly left over from the work of federal bureaucrats in the 1970s that can’t withstand the slightest scrutiny.

The administrators who rely on these categories are beholden to senseless and unscientific distinctions — they aren’t even competent or rational racialists. . ..

As the Bernstein brief notes, the Hispanic category “includes people whose ancestors’ first language was not Spanish and who may have never spoken Spanish. This includes immigrants from Spain and their descendants whose ancestral language is Basque or Catalan. It also includes indigenous immigrants from Latin America whose first language is not Spanish, whose surnames are not Spanish, and whose ethnic and cultural backgrounds are not Spanish.

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The University Bias Against Working Class Students

At Heterodox Academy, Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of education and history at the University of Pennsylvania, argues that universities "need to pay attention to differences of class as well as of race, ethnicity, and gender."  He was recently interviewed on this point at Heterodox Out Loud.. He also wrote on this topic at the HxA blog. Here is an excerpt:

That’s not the kind of tale my student has heard very often in his classes, which focus heavily upon the inequities and bigotries of America. But there’s one bigotry they almost never address: the one against people like him. Immigrant and working-class students who rise up the economic ladder run counter to the dominant narrative about America at elite institutions like my own. So we tend to omit their stories, even as we admit more students who have lived them.

The irony here should be obvious. Our campaigns to diversify the student body aim to make the country more just, fair, and equitable. We want to help students from less advantaged backgrounds participate more fully in the bounty of America. But after they get to America, we tell them that the whole game is an elaborate hoax and that people with “privilege” always win it.

Let’s be clear: America is a radically unequal nation. As a wide swath of research confirms, it has become harder for poor and working-class people to own homes, access higher education, and increase their real wages. But it is not impossible. Suggesting otherwise denies the “lived experience” of our working-class and first-generation students, to quote a favorite academic buzz phrase. It makes them think that they don’t belong here, even though they do.

But don’t expect to hear much about that at your next faculty seminar about diversity, inclusion, and equity. There’s lots of talk about making less advantaged students feel at home, of course. Yet most of it focuses on material issues — like food insecurity and the cost of books — or on raising awareness about microaggressions and other slights racial and ethnic minorities suffer.

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