DesertFox
06-04-2005, 09:12 PM
Long but worth reading
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.
More (http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon_06_03_05hm.html)
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.
More (http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon_06_03_05hm.html)