MIT Cancel’s Geophysicist’s Prestigious Carlson Lecture Because of his View on DEI

The following Tweets tell the story of Dorian Abbot's recent cancelation:

What were the ideas of Dorian Abbot that got him canceled at MIT. They appear in Newsweek. He expressed his belief that DEI is unfair and that we ought to be hiring purely on merit. Here are some of his excerpts from his August 12, 2021 Newsweek article:

American universities are undergoing a profound transformation that threatens to derail their primary mission: the production and dissemination of knowledge. The new regime is titled "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion" or DEI, and is enforced by a large bureaucracy of administrators. Nearly every decision taken on campus, from admissions, to faculty hiring, to course content, to teaching methods, is made through the lens of DEI. This regime was imposed from the top and has never been adequately debated. In the current climate it cannot be openly debated: the emotions around DEI are so strong that self-censorship among dissenting faculty is nearly universal.

The words "diversity, equity and inclusion" sound just, and are often supported by well-intentioned people, but their effects are the opposite of noble sentiments. Most importantly, "equity" does not mean fair and equal treatment. DEI seeks to increase the representation of some groups through discrimination against members of other groups . . .

DEI undermines the public's trust in universities and their graduates. Some on campus might be surprised to learn that, according to a recent Pew poll, 74 percent of Americans think only qualifications should be taken into account in hiring and promotion, even if this results in less diversity. . . .

We propose an alternative framework called Merit, Fairness, and Equality (MFE) whereby university applicants are treated as individuals and evaluated through a rigorous and unbiased process based on their merit and qualifications alone. Crucially, this would mean an end to legacy and athletic admission advantages, which significantly favor white applicants, in addition to those based on group membership. Simultaneously, MFE would involve universities investing in education projects in neighborhoods where public education is failing to help children from those areas compete. These projects would be evidence-based and non-ideological, testing a variety of different options such as increased public school funding, charter schools and voucher programs.

I have enchanted many people who completely agree with Professor, but they are afraid to express their views because they would risk damage to their careers (the exact kind suffered by Professor Abbott). The result is that a critically important topic (whether we should be hiring solely based on merit) is not being debated. Another professor, Gordon Klein, recently expressed similar views in a lawsuit he filed against his employer, UCLA. He has alleged that he was punished for refusing to discriminate. On Sept 30, 2021, his article appeared at Common Sense with Bari Weiss. Here are a few excerpts from Why I am Suing UCLA:

My saga — which nearly led to my firing — began on the morning of June 2, 2020, when a non-black student in my class on tax principles and law emailed me to ask that I grade his black classmates with greater “leniency” than others in the class. “We are writing to express our tremendous concern about the impact that this final exam and project will have on the mental and physical health of our Black classmates,” the student wrote. (There was no project in this class, and it was unclear to me who the “we” in this case was. . . . I suspected the student simply used a form letter he found online and neglected to change the subject.) “The unjust murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, the life-threatening actions of Amy Cooper and the violent conduct of the [University of California Police Department] have led to fear and anxiety which is further compounded by the disproportionate effect of COVID-19 on the Black community. As we approach finals week, we recognize that these conditions place Black students at an unfair academic disadvantage due to traumatic circumstances out of their control.” To try to make his case, the student drew on UCLA’s “Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion” agenda, which directs professors to grant preferential “equity” to students belonging to “underrepresented groups.”

I wholeheartedly support these principles as most of us understand them. I think all human beings should be treated the same. I welcome — I celebrate — a diversity of opinions and arguments. And, to say the least, I believe in making room for anyone with the grades and gumption to study at one of the nation’s most competitive universities. But academia has so corrupted these words that they are now hollowed out corpses devoid of their original meaning. Today, “diversity” means ideological homogeneity. And “inclusion” means the exclusion of some from a taxpayer-supported university to favor others deemed more deserving of an educational springboard to prosperity.

Shocked by the student’s email, which struck me as deeply patronizing and offensive to the same black students he claimed to care so much about, I collected my thoughts and, 20 minutes later, emailed back: “Are there any students that may be of mixed parentage, such as half black half-Asian? What do you suggest I do with respect to them? A full concession or just half? Also, do you have any idea if any students are from Minneapolis? I assume that they are probably especially devastated as well. I am thinking that a white student from there might possibly be even more devastated by this, especially because some might think that they’re racist even if they are not.”

I wrapped up my reply by citing Martin Luther King’s vision of a colorblind world where people are judged solely by the content of their character — making it clear that I had no intention of treating any students differently on the basis of their skin color.

By that evening, students were calling for my job. Soon after, they circulated a petition demanding I be fired; within a day or two, nearly 20,000 had signed — without knowing anything about me or taking into account, as far as I could tell, the implications of non-color-blind grading. I was attacked for being a white man and “woefully racist.” On June 5, three days after I was first emailed, I was suspended amid a growing online campaign directed at me.

Here is the federal complaint spelling out Gordon Klein's detailed allegations pertaining to the misconduct of UCLA.

We need to be able to discuss ideas freely, especially controversial ideas, especially at universities, the mission of which has long been to expose students to controversial ideas. In the current climate, however, many people are being threatened and punished for expressing or attempting to discuss important issues of the day. This trend blatantly violates the three prerequisites set forth by Jonathan Rauch (in his new book, The Constitution of Knowledge) for enabling us to determine what is true and what is not true. We are nudging month by month closer to a new national principle: Declaration of Truth by Edict.

Continue ReadingMIT Cancel’s Geophysicist’s Prestigious Carlson Lecture Because of his View on DEI

One Suggestion for Hacking a Path out of the Wokeness Thicket

I'm feeling sad today, perhaps because I read too much "news." I struggle when I try to identify any institution that is functioning well. Perhaps the court system is the best example of an (imperfect) functioning institution, although the elephant in the room is that those who don't have the money to hire good lawyers are almost always fucked over by those who have lawyers. Okay . . . but when both sides have good lawyers, the system seems to work fairly well fairly often.

Some of our newly dysfunctional institutions have been captured by Woke ideology, resulting in a thick atmosphere of fear in which smart people intentionally say untrue things so that they don't get yelled at by the mob, which can result in suspension and job loss. It's a terrible situation in many institutions, especially in news media and colleges. I base this on personal stories I've heard from several self-censoring professors who are afraid to engage in a free exchange of ideas in the classroom. I've reported many of these problems at this website over the past two years.

When I feel this sort of melancholy, I actively seek out good news, and I usually find some reason to be hopeful. Today, it comes from one of my favorite writers and thinkers, Jonathan Haidt, who participated in a discussion group at Heterodox Academy (I was one of many HxA members attending). It was a long discussion and there were many speakers. Here's an excerpt from Haidt's presentation:

It's the climate of fear. I'm actually starting a new book on this. It's called Life After Babble: How we lost the Ability to Think Well Together. The core idea is that social media, made reputational destruction democratized, incentivized and freed from accountability. And that's what happened in 2014. And that's why we've had a climate of fear since 2014. So you're right to be afraid.

But here's what I've learned in the last couple years: almost everybody is reasonable. Leaders are the ones who get shot with little darts. Whenever they you know, it's as though they're physically getting shot with darts. And so they all came very quickly. But those who hold out, those who don't cave-- if you just wait a week--it's a hurricane inside of a hall of mirrors, and it blows on to something else a week or two later. So the people who stand up to it and don't bend a knee and don't bow down, they end up looking very, very good. So what I'm trying to develop is the idea that every field needs high professional standards, and a big part of that is depoliticization is not being on a team not fighting for politics, but living up to your standard as a professor doing research. You're a scholar, and what I hope we can develop an HxA is this notion of very high professional standards. If you're a true professional, you live your standards, and then you should be unafraid. We're not there yet, but I think that's that's where I think we can get to very quickly.

Continue ReadingOne Suggestion for Hacking a Path out of the Wokeness Thicket

Jonathan Haidt: “We Were Fooled in the 1990s into Thinking that Democracy was Easy.”

What happened to progress in the US? It seemed like we had a plan and a good track record for progress back in the 1990s. A lot of things happened, of course. That is the topic of this discussion involving Jonathan Haidt and John Wood Jr and April Lawson. Here's how Haidt set the table for the longer discussion:

We can go back to some of the ideas in The Righteous Mind, because that's the summary of my own work as a social psychologist who studies morality. What I've always tried to do in my work is look at evolution. What is human nature. How did it evolve. [What is the] interplay of human nature with culture? And of course, everything can change over the course of just a few decades, too. We're very dynamic species.

What I'd like to put on the put on the table here first: let's really lower our expectations for humanity. Okay. Now, this sounds depressing. But let's be serious here. What kind of creatures, are we? We are primates who evolved to live in small groups that dominate territory, in competition with other groups were really, really good at coming together to fight those other groups. Part of our preparation for doing that, I believe, is the psychology of religion, sacredness, tribal rituals. We have all this really complicated stuff we do that binds us to each other. This is a human universal. Every group has rituals. I'm a big fan of the sociologist Emile Durkheim.

And so from that kind of perspective we ought to still be pre-civilization times with very high rates of murder. And somehow we escaped that. Somehow we've had this incredible ascent. This unbelievably rapid ascent, in which we've gotten wealthier, smarter, healthier. We've made extraordinary progress on women's rights, animal rights, gay rights, the concern about the environment. So let's start by appreciating our lowly origins as really violent tribal creatures, and the way that we've rocketed up from

Okay, now, in the last 10 or so, years, 10 to 20 years, we've had a little bit of a come-down. I really want to put this not just in an evolutionary perspective, but in a recent historical perspective, because this, I think, is the key to understanding what is happening to us now. It is that we were fooled in the 1990s into thinking that democracy was easy. The founding fathers were under no such illusion. They knew that democracy is prone to faction. That's what Madison wrote about, especially in Federalist 10. They knew that democracy is generally self-destructed, so they gave us all kinds of safeguards, They tried to create a system that would not be so prone, a system in which these tribal, irrational emotional creatures might actually live together. And it worked. It worked pretty well. And it worked badly at times.

But by the 1990s, we had the the mistaken view, that if we just wait for Iran, and Russia and North Korea to develop market economies, they'll get prosperous, their people will demand rights. And this was true for China too. That people will demand rights. Liberal democracies will break out everywhere. Liberal democracies are the endpoint, the end of history.

And so that's the way those of us who live through--I'm older than you guys--but the late 20th century was an incredibly dangerous and an exciting time in which there was a victor and it was liberal democracy. Okay, but like in a lot of movies where it seems like there's an early denouement and everything's great? Well, we still have a lot of stuff to go and in the 21st century, things have really come down from there. So that's the backstory.

Continue ReadingJonathan Haidt: “We Were Fooled in the 1990s into Thinking that Democracy was Easy.”

SCOTUS: The Function of Free Speech is to Invite Dispute and Stir People to Anger

The next time someone tells you that you need to be silenced because your speech is offending them, mention this quote from the U.S. Supreme Court opinion of Terminiello v. Chicago (1949), reversing a disturbing-the-peace conviction of a hate-monger. Justice Douglas wrote the opinion, which included these gems:

The vitality of civil and political institutions in our society depends on free discussion. As Chief Justice Hughes wrote in De Jonge v. Oregon, 299 U.S. 353, 365, 260, it is only through free debate and free exchange of ideas that government remains responsive to the will of the people and peaceful change is effected. The right to speak freely and to promote diversity of ideas and programs is therefore one of the chief distinctions that sets us apart from totalitarian regimes.

Accordingly a function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve its high purpose when it induces a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger. Speech is often provocative and challenging. It may strike at prejudices and preconceptions and have profound unsettling effects as it presses for acceptance of an idea. That is why freedom of speech, though not absolute, Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, supra, 315 U.S. at pages 571-572, 62 S.Ct. at page 769, is nevertheless protected against censorship or punishment, unless shown likely to produce a clear and present danger of a serious substantive evil that rises far above public inconvenience, annoyance, or unrest. See Bridges v. California, 314 U.S. 252, 262, 193, 159 A.L.R. 1346; Craig v. Harney, 331 U.S. 367, 373, 1253. There is no room under our Constitution for a more restrictive view. For the alternative would lead to standardization of ideas either by legislatures, courts, or dominant political or community groups.

Continue ReadingSCOTUS: The Function of Free Speech is to Invite Dispute and Stir People to Anger