Recent articles

I have gotten two opinion pieces out this week:

1) A piece in Areo on the doubletalk around diversity and affirmative action.

2) A piece in Real Clear Education on the obstacles to improving graduation rates when students are underprepared and need to work to support themselves.

Our diversity obsession in a less diverse world

Given Jacoby's observation that the world is actually becoming less diverse, why do people nonetheless fixate on diversity?  A lot of reasons.

One reason, of course, is that race and ethnicity are still correlated with socioeconomic class, and there are good reasons to want to do something about that. There's now just enough racial and ethnic diversity in the world of the upper-middle class that we can't ignore the fact that other groups exist, but not enough to declare problems solved.

Another is probably romanticism.  Other groups aren't actually that different, both because of the declining diversity of practices in this world and the ever-present universality of human nature.  Nonetheless, historically there has been enough variation in practices between groups that we find it fascinating.  Somehow this always manifests as ethnic dance troupes, probably because it's the sort of thing that can easily co-exist with Little League: People gather in gyms to engage in physical activity with adult supervision on Saturday morning. More seriously, it's very visual and exciting, and invigorating for those who do it.

A side interest of mine is language, and people understandably lament the death of languages.  I'm not interested in persuading people to hang on to dialects that will act as walls between them and neighbors, but I do hope that languages are at least documented before they die.  There's a lot of history encoded in languages, because the distribution of a language tells you something about past migrations. But my interest is in recording the past, not freezing the present into the mold of the past. Frankly, it's a GOOD thing that people in remote villages can speak the same languages as the judges and officials appointed by rulers in the capital city.

Finally, while a more uniform world means more people interacting and sharing the same experiences, we humans remain a tribal species. We instinctively look with caution upon those we see as outsiders, and now we're suddenly able to encounter them because of global trade, standardized languages, etc.  There are people who are only alive today because they successfully ascertained whether the stranger looking at them funny was a Catholic or a Protestant, a Hutu or a Tutsi, a Sunni or a Shia, a Serb or a Croat. This makes us attuned to tribal markers. Yet we have to interact in this global marketplace where cheap travel and rapid migration of workers bring us into contact with people bearing different tribal markers like skin tone, facial features, and hair. No, they aren't infallible predictors of ancestry, as there's huge diversity within groups, but still, some patterns do manifest more often than not. More importantly, whether or not we SHOULD react to those patterns, the masked gunmen at the checkpoint often DO react to those patterns, making our ability to anticipate their reactions a deep-rooted instinct.

Sure, a corporate office today doesn't usually have masked gunmen at checkpoints.  (The Security Professionals at the metal detector wear uniforms and show their faces while providing excellent customer service. :) But we're all descended from people who survived by quickly identifying and steering clear of people from other tribes when relations switched from trade to warfare, so as soon as we look at people we take note of their backgrounds.

Go ahead and deny it if you must, insist that YOU don't see these things, but everyone else does. Bigots note difference disapprovingly, warm and fuzzy people note diversity approvingly, and everyone else at least notes it as an adjective to file away in their mental lists. When I'm learning names and faces in a large group, ethnicity helps me take mental shortcuts to remember.  I'm probably not supposed to admit that, but it's just a fact. My worst nightmare would be to learn names in a room where everyone is the same race, the same gender, and same hair color.

OK, so we're noting difference. We can't avoid that.  The question, then is what to do about that.  Well, suppressing it won't work.  People will just note it even more, and treat it a a forbidden fruit. But that doesn't mean we need to fixate on it. Just as we have instincts that note difference, we also have instincts that transcend difference, and those that transcend difference are, frankly, the nobler instincts.

For instance, we react with immediate affection to the face of a baby, no matter what color that baby is.  People feel empathy for the lame and sick and elderly across color lines.  Some of that is surely because the very young and very old members of neighboring tribes never took up arms against our ancestors' tribes, but doesn't change the fact that we have these relationships and affections in common with other tribes.

Also, people experience love and sexual attraction across tribal lines.  We know that this phenomenon is widespread, even when interracial relationships aren't, because so many societies have worked so hard to enforce prohibitions on marrying across lines of color and tribe. If nobody felt an attraction across those lines, nobody else would bother to suppress it.

One of our species' greatest survival tools is trade, and that has always happened across tribal lines.  It's what people have always defaulted to as soon as fighting stopped.  We have conflicting attitudes toward outsiders, simultaneously fearing them and wanting to marry them, wanting to build a fortress to keep them away and build a trading port to gain from them. And trade simultaneously requires diversity (different economic parties having different comparative advantages), promotes it (there's always a greater variety of goods available when people can trade freely), and yet also erodes it (everyone can now enjoy the same things).

Storytelling is an instinct that crosses lines, and we are able to appreciate stories from other cultures.  The main reason Disney is making characters with a greater range of colors and ethnicities is that the basic tropes (heroes and villains, princes/princesses and paupers, etc.) transcend race and ethnicity. Little kids want movies with knights and princesses who look like them, but do the same things as every other knight or princess.

Religion is a human phenomenon that some modern thinkers would denounce, but it's an undeniably powerful and widespread phenomenon. For all the evil that has been done in the name of God, a lot of good has also been done in His name, and many religions cross lines of color.  Malcolm X softened his opinion of white people when he was in Mecca praying next to white people.  Christianity has spread around the globe, bringing out the best (and worst) in people everywhere.  I mean, Koreans are some of the most devout Protestants around, and Filipinos are as Catholic as Catholics can be, and both countries are very far (both in distance and culture) from the places where Christianity was founded and grown.

Our conflicting instincts, universal and tribal, noble and feral, are in all of us. The implicit bias trainers are right to note that we can never fully escape from our responses to difference, but that doesn't mean we need to fixate on it. I'm more likely to connect with somebody by talking about what we have in common than by achieving enlightenment about the profound importance of difference. This doesn't mean that we should never talk about difference and diversity, but I think we'll get farther with common humanity.

Next read: On Diversity by Russell Jacoby.

My next book blogging project will be On Diversity: The Eclipse of the Individual in a Global Era by UCLA historian Russell Jacoby. I'd read a few things since the previous project, including the controversial American Dirt (enjoyed it a lot, I guess I'm evil) and Rushdie's Satanic Verses (never really grabbed me, but I was stubborn enough to finish it). Now I'm starting another 180 page popular book on the problems with diversity politics.  I guess I'm a sucker.

Only a few pages in, but I appreciate some insights.  For instance, on page 6 he notes that despite the talk of difference, people mostly want inclusion and assimilation.  Calls for diverse hiring, diverse casting in the arts, etc. are calls for inclusion in the mainstream.  He contrasts with some ethnically distinct groups who maintain pretty substantial social and even linguistic separation from the mainstream, while adhering to decidedly unique cultural and ethical perspectives:  The Amish and Hasidic Jews.  There are no activists demanding that corporations hire Amish people.  (Well, there's probably one, because in a big weird world there's always one, but there certainly aren't a lot.) They genuinely want to be different, so they don't demand to be included in the diverse rainbow of people all doing the same things in the mainstream.

None of this is to say that if it's OK to not hire Amish software engineers then it's OK to not hire whoever else. Jacoby makes that clear.  But just as we shouldn't discriminate on the basis of identity, we don't necessarily need to go around insisting on the value of diversity in order to insist on treating people ethically. A rainbow of skin hues may not actually improve the outcome of whatever group effort, but that's no reason to not give everyone a fair shake regardless of skin hue. People should be given fair treatment because they are people with basic human dignity, not because a melanin balance allegedly benefits everyone else via cultural enrichment (that will happen on its own, with or without initiatives, as evidenced by the great interplay of artistic styles in our world) or because Studies Have Shown that diverse groups allegedly boost the corporate bottom line. A person could be a mediocre worker and still deserve decent treatment and basic human dignity (while hopefully finding a better niche in the job market, eventually).

Jacoby also acknowledges how fraught it is to critique diversity politics in an era where our head of state refers to Nazis and Klansmen as "very fine people." However, he says (page 8):

My object, in any event, is not to criticize the jargon of diversity for something worse, but for something better. To understand what renders diversity ideological is to understand what devitalizes it, an endeavor to realize, not junk it.

I look forward to seeing how he does that.

Latest book: 'A Dream Deferred' by Shelby Steele

I recently read A Dream Deferred by Shelby Steele, a book which argues that post-60's liberalism has focused on social policy as a means of redemption from shame. His basic thesis is that once white Americans fully came to grips with the enormity of America's racial crimes, they sought redemption and hence lowered standards for African-Americans.  He critiques welfare and affirmative action, both of which have changed between 1998 (the publication date of his book) and 2020. Welfare is no longer the open-ended subsistence bestowed in the 1990's (Clinton and Gingrich passed welfare reform), and while diversity programs run as strong as ever, explicit quotas and set-asides are mostly gone. Implicit, hidden quotas, fudged evaluations, etc., all of these things still exist, more than ever. But good luck getting somebody to lay it out in a document that could be subpoenaed.

Steele says that this is all about white people seeking redemption from shame. He says that this is why educators lurch from one fad to another, because they desperately need to be seen doing something. It is less important that African Americans improve than that white people be seen trying. As a black conservative, he despises this, both for what it does to black people (it forces them into dependent roles so that white liberals can feel better) and for what it doesn't do (it doesn't actually raise performance).  I think he over-simplifies somewhat, but that's inevitable in a book that's 180 pages.  Either you should state your thesis in a more succinct essay, or write a tome of nuance and documentation.  He's an excellent writer, and packs in as much nuance as 180 pages will allow (his prose is magnificent, and I doubt I could ever write an essay as good as his), but it's still light on documentation.  (Then again, he came up as a literary scholar, not a social scientist.)

Lest you think he's too harsh on his own people, he has no shortage of praise for his culture. He praises areas of African-American endeavor, and argues that they have been most successful in areas (art, literature, music, entertainment, sports) where competition cannot be easily manipulated by do-gooders. Of course, reality is more complex than that, but he brings an important consideration to the table.

He keeps revisiting the point about unbearable shame, and I think that does explain the restlessness I see among educators. We have been told that we are THE solution to the unbearable shame, and when it doesn't puff us up with pride it fills us with desperation to fix something that we cannot fix on our own, neither for the benefit of the intended recipients (an underclass) nor the desperately guilty upper class. We can only do our part, but we need to be seen doing as much as possible, lest we be called to account by either the underclass (who will tell us we did too little) or the upper class (who will tell us that we failed to discharge the guilt that they transferred to us).

One thing I wonder about is why Germany doesn't display the same restlessness, despite having a terrible crime on their record.  I suspect it's 4 things:
1) I'm too far removed to see it clearly.
2) The descendants of their victims mostly live elsewhere, so they don't need to discharge their debt via domestic social policy.
3) Their crime, as terrible as it was, was one episode in a much longer history, so it doesn't stain every single thing in the way that racism stains our entire history. (Indeed, their neighbors have plenty of pogroms on their own ledgers.)
4) After WWII they immediately confronted a new problem (division between two outside powers, and the oppression of half of their people by one of those powers) so they had a different set of considerations.

Anyway, I'm off to read some books that I'm currently not motivated to blog.  Maybe that will change.

Another article elsewhere

I wrote an essay that I felt deserved better circulation than this site gets, so I posted it at Medium.com. It's about the movie The Farewell, and how a story about culture clash winds up being a story of common humanity.

A couple quick links

I agree with the woman whose profile leads in this IHE article:  Many people want to read diversity statements that address delicate social issues in exactly the right jargon.  They are ideological filters.

Also, I echo this Areo article.  The public makes so many contradictory demands on k-12 that it makes no sense to speak of reforming k-12 until we figure out what we want from k-12.  As for me, I want two simple things from k-12:  I want them to send me students who can do high school algebra and write grammatically correct sentences.

Article in IHE

Yesterday I had an opinion piece published at Inside Higher Ed on the topic of diversity questions in faculty job interviews.  In short, I think that these essays are some mix of useless, counter-productive, and (as with most useless and counter-productive things) well-intentioned.

Privilege, class, and diversity

I like this essay from the Hedgehog Review.  The three final paragraphs are the best:

 The concept of diversity first germinated in the corporate world, and was quickly seized upon by academia in the 1990s. It arrived just in the nick of time. The previous two decades had seen the traditional mission of the university undermined, if not abandoned, under pressure from a highly politicized turn in the humanities that made its case in epistemic terms, essentially debunking the very idea of knowledge. The role that the upper-tier university soon discovered for itself, upon the collapse of ideals of liberal learning, was no longer that of training citizens for humane self-government, but rather that of supplying a cadre to staff the corporations, the NGOs, and the foundations. That is, the main function of elite schools is to supply the personnel required to run things in an economy that has become more managerial than entrepreneurial.

The institutional desideratum—the political antipode to hated “privilege”—is no longer equality, but diversity. This greatly eases the contradiction Furet identified, shielding the system from democratic pressure. It also protects the self-conception of our meritocrats as agents of historical progress. As was the case with the Soviet nomenklatura, and the leading Jacobins as well, it is precisely our elite that searches out instances of lingering privilege, now understood as obstacles to fulfillment of the moral imperative of diversity. Under this dispensation, the figure of the “straight white male” (abstracted from class distinctions) has been made to do a lot of symbolic work, the heavy lifting of legitimation (in his own hapless way, as sacrificial goat). We eventually reached a point where this was more weight than our electoral system could take, as the election of 2016 revealed. Whether one regards that event as a catastrophe or as a rupture that promises the possibility of glasnost, its immediate effect has been panic in every precinct where the new class accommodations have been functioning smoothly, and a doubling down on the moralizing that previously secured them against popular anger. We’ll see how that goes. 

The term shibboleth is interesting. Its definitions include “a peculiarity of pronunciation, behavior, mode of dress, etc., that distinguishes a particular class or set of persons” and “a common saying or belief with little current meaning or truth.” It is a random Hebrew word that acquired its present meaning when it was used by the Gileadites as a test to identify members of an enemy tribe, the Ephraimites, as they attempted to flee across the Jordan River. Ephraimites could not pronounce the sound sh (Judges 12:4–6). I think it is fair to say that one’s ability to pronounce the word diversity with a straight face, indeed with sincerity made scrupulously evident, serves as a shibboleth in this original sense. It answers the question of whether one wants to continue as a member in good standing of those institutions that secure one’s position in the upper middle class.

It's all about legitimizing the status quo while dismissing class.  An upper class can be diverse in terms of gender, sex, sexuality, race, ethnicity, etc., but by definition it cannot be diverse in terms of class, nor can it be equal to other classes. (And if you're confused about why I would separately list sex, sexuality, and gender in the previous sentence, that just points to another shibboleth that you can't pronounce, you heretic.)

I think it's particularly interesting how diversity is now the concept placed in tension with privilege, instead of equality.  When I was a kid, the privileged kids had affluent parents.  Now the white lower-middle class is deemed privileged, and the men of that class especially so.  That's quite a rhetorical trick.  Equality (whether economic, or of opportunity, or whatever) got pushed aside somewhere along the line, replacing solidarity with celebration of difference.  I'm not a Marxist, but on this one I see their point.  Yes, there are very valid points about the differences in the life experiences of men and women, or white people and people of color, but it's quite remarkable that the word we used to use for rich kids got co-opted to frame those very valid points.  The word may have a new denotation, but it still carries old connotations that sit uneasily with the new usage.

Also, I think there's a very important point in there about the difference between a managerial economy and an entrepreneurial one.  Founders/owners of privately-held businesses (or even businesses that have gone public but still have a very strong Founder presence) are often quite different from people who climbed corporate ladders.  They aren't always self-made people who rose from nothing (Trump built his empire on inherited wealth) but they are people who spent most of their careers making their own decisions (sometimes appropriately bold decisions, sometimes risky follies) rather than answering to a boss.

Corporate managers aren't fans of the regulatory state, but they can often make compromises (even lucrative compromises) with the regulatory state more easily than an entrepreneur can.  A corporate manager has spent his career answering to people, and following rules written by higher-ups who may be several time zones away.  This leads to a different demeanor and ideology than men who didn't have bosses.  And while privately-held companies typically face most of the same PR and HR issues as corporations of similar size, the quirks of founders play can play more of a role in how they respond to those issues (though more on that below), so they may have more room for managerial liberals (with all of their diversity talk) than a company still dominated by an entrepreneur.

One interesting exception to this dichotomy is Silicon Valley.  Large tech companies are mostly young (at least in comparison with other corporations of similar size, though Google just entered its third decade), but they are, for the most part, very socially liberal.  Mind you, I have no doubt that there are plenty of Google and Facebook managers who hate taxes and regulations, but the prevailing cultures of those places are famously liberal (at least on social issues) and unabashedly pro-diversity (unlike most of the right-wing billionaires who rose to power in the pre-internet era).  This has helped them make peace with the same cultural and regulatory issues as older corporations.

So, Trump is, on the one hand, a rich guy who has ripped off many ordinary people, and treated many workers like shit.  On the other hand, in this economy dominated by corporate managerial types (often liberal, at least in their acceptance of rules and certain PR and HR imperatives) rather than entrepreneurial types (who are often right-wing), Trump is an exception, a rich man who doesn't talk like a corporate manager.  That helps me to understand why he has appeal among some (not all) middle class white voters.  It's not the only factor, of course, but it's among them, and helps to make sense of why they see him as different from the other rich guys.

Finally, let's return to this line:

It also protects the self-conception of our meritocrats as agents of historical progress. As was the case with the Soviet nomenklatura, and the leading Jacobins as well, it is precisely our elite that searches out instances of lingering privilege, now understood as obstacles to fulfillment of the moral imperative of diversity.

This helps me understand why so many academic administrators honestly see themselves as "change agents", even while repeating the same slogans and buzzwords as every other administrator out there, and diligently following in the templates taught to them at workshops.  It explains to me why academic administrators from families of administrators see themselves and their advancement as bold and progressive rather than the fulfillment of a status quo destiny laid upon them when sperm met egg.  It helps explain why I, from a family that has grown more educated with each generation, a family that still circulates stories of immigrant roots, feel old-fashioned and traditional rather than progressive in academia:  Because the born insiders are all proclaiming their progressivity, leaving tradition as the only refuge of the outsider.

My only dissent from the above-quoted observation is that I don't see this as a uniquely contemporary thing, an artifact of a new liberalism that replaces economic class solidarity with diversity.  Hofstadter noted that Dewey's disciples, all managerial types, were desperate to find a way to institutionalize anti-institutional ideology.  All of this has happened before and will happen again.

Excellent essay in Quillette

I don't have time to give an organized reflection on this essay, but I do want to link this essay in Quillette, on how diversity is an idea very strongly favored by the managerial classes.  It isn't just about regulatory compliance, or the pursuit of PR, it's a deep belief.

Higher Superstition, first two chapters

The first chapter is an introduction to the general controversy that they're addressing.  I already outlined that in the previous post.  The second chapter is mostly a historical survey of politics and ideas relevant to their concerns.  I will not recap the whole thing.  Instead, I will just highlight a few particularly interesting tidbits from these chapters:

On page 3 they clarify that the "Academic Left", as they use the term, is not merely a group of people who happen to have day jobs in academia and happen to support policies pursued by the more liberal members of the Democratic Party.  Rather it is a collection of people pursuing a particular vision of cultural transformation, the overthrow of old categories and labels.  This is certainly in keeping with the diversity vision of today's STEM reformers; one could say that the critique shifted from scientific knowledge to scientists.

On page 4 they mention scientists having encounters with "literary critics waxing sentatious over the uncertainty principle or Godel's theorem."  It's almost as though they witnessed my freshman year of college!

On page 7 they issue a too-optimistic prophecy concerning education:

"We expect little early change in the teaching and learning of science on the basis of these politicized critiques (although proposals in that direction, including some from people who should know better, pop up now with regularity)."

Indeed.  Transformation of STEM education is now front-and-center in the agenda of technocrats, and they speak endlessly of identity issues when they promote their agenda.  It's rarely as simple as "This group learns this way, that group learns that way"; they are mostly too smart to say something that explicitly bigoted and factually incorrect.  But there is much "Your students are different from you, demographics are changing, science is more diverse, we must teach differently."  Certain links are never made explicit (since stating such things explicitly would be both unpopular and factually wrong, a rare instance of a grossly false idea being unpopular).  But diversity and identity are certainly close to everyone's minds, and are invoked to push people in warmer-and-fuzzier directions.

On page 19, they make the interesting observation that the Enlightenment is the ancestor both of free market ideas and Communist ones.  Though Communism obviously failed very badly at liberating or enlightening people, it came from a rejection of traditional authority, including feudalism.  Market capitalism has similar elements in common.  I note this not to make any sort of special plea for communism, but simply to note that the Enlightenment was prodigious with offspring.

On page 20 they attribute the rise of Romanticism to, among other things, the horrific failures of the French Revolution.  Romanticism, in my primitive understanding (supplemented with what little Gross and Levitt have to say), is an idea of things beyond reason mattering in human affairs, or even superseding reason in praiseworthy ways.  Truthfully, I'm not wholly unsympathetic, having remarked many times on the impossibility of deriving "ought" from "is."  Liberal technocrats always want to elide that point.  I don't know that it's a terribly Romantic point, since it doesn't celebrate any particular alternative to empiricism, nor does it even reject reason.  One could draw some "ought" postulates from non-empirical sources but then use those postulates, in combination with empirical evidence, to reason logically, e.g. "When spending money as the fiduciary of another person's interests I ought to spend thriftily, and Acme makes the cheapest widgets, therefore I will buy Acme widgets in this role."  So one can be suspicious of those who are excessive in their pretenses to logic and empiricism (because they never make their arbitrary "ought" postulates transparent) but still support logic and empiricism.

So I guess that one of my favorite topics here is hardly "Romantic."

On page 23 they note that while many illiberal ideas sprang up under the guise of science (e.g. social Darwinism, racial ideologies), the scientific notions that have stood the tests of time and experimentation have fortuitously been mostly friendly to egalitarian and emancipatory projects.

On page 24 they note that science has remained congenial to the project of scholarship as a liberating force because science pushes back on superstition, which I take to mean religion.  However, the study of humanities, which prepares one to interrogate texts in context, seems a more powerful force for inducing skepticism of the Bible than science class.  Miracles aren't the main point of the Bible.  Moral codes binding communities and bringing meaning to life are the main point of the Bible.  The study of humanities will prompt much more searching questions about that than anything a physics professor might say.

On page 25 they say that American academic leftists rebeled against science to signal rejection of the Enlightenment and its failure to make further progress on racism, poverty, etc.  They judge that it comes from restlessness and discontent with modern society.  I find it interesting that modern academic leftists share the same restlessness, but approach it with a renewed faith in technocracy.  "Studies have shown" that we are biased, irrational, etc., so if people can be persuaded of these points and induced to accept remedies then they will become more rational and (presumably) more supportive of projects for the liberation and betterment of humanity.

Or at least that seems to be the theory.

Finally, on page 33, we get to something that has most definitely carried forward:  The idea that the oppressed have unique epistemological standing, access to more knowledge than the advantaged.  However, whereas that was used to argue for rejecting the science espoused by the dominant power structures back in the "Science Wars", nowadays we have people seeking to do social science about microaggressions, biases clouding the minds of the privileged, etc.  Whether or not one has a favorable judgment of the soundness of such research, it is indisputably an attempt to use social science to prove the epistemological limitations of the privileged and epistemological standing of the under-privileged.  There is no romanticism here, it is thoroughly technocratic and accepting of science.  The scientific validity of these research programs can only be evaluated through empirical work, but from a cultural perspective it is clear that it is not an anti-science program.

Awesome quote from The American Conservative

Not much time, but I must share this quote from an article in The American Conservative:

Administrators aren’t particularly loyal to the core higher-ed mission of discovering and disseminating knowledge. Many are failed academics whose only talents are regurgitating on cue vacuous corporate jargon—“innovating in strategic processes,” “developing new thought leadership platforms,” and so on—and attending conferences with each other. And in student grievance, they have found an endlessly renewable energy supply.
....
This is an unlikely alliance between corporate middle-management and self-styled student radicals, adolescent zealotry getting pimped by bureaucrats. And it’s playing out all over higher ed. Over the last two years, usually in response to some rash of undergrad intolerance, colleges and universities have hired about 75 new “diversity” administrators.

Indeed. The fact that identity politics is so compatible with administrative interests should be setting off warning lights in the minds of liberals, but elite liberals have no concept of how co-opted they already are.

Inclusivity and the legitimacy of class privilege

I've said before that the way academics talk about inclusion feels like a desperate bid for legitimacy.  The Chronicle has a review of a book about the switch to co-education in the Ivy League, and while I don't have time to summarize the entire review (and even if I had the time I wouldn't summarize it; I'd rather read the whole book than summarize a review) I think this line is worth quoting:

Skillful presidents and wardens, she argues, managed to convince skeptical alumni that their all-male alma maters must admit women or forfeit their elite status. Coeducation was necessary to shore up class privilege.

This is consistent with things I've noted in other contexts.  Interestingly, it's not just the elites that see diversity as the guarantor of legitimacy; people in non-elite educational institutions talk about their diversity as a way of deflecting questions about whether they are providing a meaningful educational experience for their students.  Personally, I think that the disadvantaged need their education to be even better, but what do I know?

To be clear, I think that going coed has been a hugely positive thing for higher education, and diversity and inclusion (when honestly pursued, rather than pursued cosmetically for the purpose of feeling good about one's own benevolence) are great things.  However, I think it's also clear that these things get viewed through the lens of preserving one's own status rather than sincere care for others.

One more thing from the Deresiewicz essay

I forgot to quote this part:

I had a third student, a junior, who wrote about a friend whom she had known since the beginning of college and who, she’d just discovered, went to church every Sunday. My student hadn’t even been aware that her friend was religious. When she asked her why she had concealed this essential fact about herself, her friend replied, “Because I don’t feel comfortable being out as a religious person here.”
...
When my student wrote about her churchgoing friend, she said that she couldn’t understand why anyone would feel uncomfortable being out as a religious person at a place as diverse as Scripps.

There's a belief that tolerance is about bringing together people whose identities are different, not people whose beliefs (or lack thereof) and practices are different.  There's an idea that diversity of the first sort--a diversity achieved through presence, not practice--not only confers moral legitimacy but also automatically exudes a sense of comfort.

I remember encountering bits of this in college in the 90's.  It was different from intellectual relativism, postmodernism, etc.  Those ideas involved hard reading and mental challenges that went deeper than smiling and saying "Thank you for sharing that."  It was not as developed as what's going on now, but the stirrings were there.  Contra Deresiewicz, it didn't come from Foucault or the humanities faculty, it came from Student Affairs.  It is the process of academia replacing academics with administration.  Academic work should exhaust the mind when it's done right, not make everyone feel happy-shiny and smug.

Make a whole new religion, a falling star that you cannot live without

William Deresiewicz just published a nice essay on political correctness. It is longer than it needed to be, but it still has plenty of good stuff.  I don't have time to frame a single, cohere response, so I'll just address it in bits and pieces.

Selective private colleges have become religious schools. The religion in question is not Methodism or Catholicism but an extreme version of the belief system of the liberal elite: the liberal professional, managerial, and creative classes, which provide a large majority of students enrolled at such places and an even larger majority of faculty and administrators who work at them. To attend those institutions is to be socialized, and not infrequently, indoctrinated into that religion.

...

What does it mean to say that these institutions are religious schools? First, that they possess a dogma, unwritten but understood by all: a set of “correct” opinions and beliefs, or at best, a narrow range within which disagreement is permitted. There is a right way to think and a right way to talk, and also a right set of things to think and talk about. Secularism is taken for granted. Environmentalism is a sacred cause. Issues of identity—principally the holy trinity of race, gender, and sexuality—occupy the center of concern.

This seems accurate, though I think it's important to emphasize (as he does later) that this is to a large extent an elite phenomenon.  The viewpoints he describes go beyond the most elite institutions, but the rigidity of the code, and particularly its power over the wider student body, is not as bad everywhere as it is in the places that he's talking about.

As to this:

The presiding presence is Michel Foucault, with his theories of power, discourse, and the social construction of the self, who plays the same role on the left as Marx once did. The fundamental questions that a college education ought to raise—questions of individual and collective virtue, of what it means to be a good person and a good community—are understood to have been settled. The assumption, on elite college campuses, is that we are already in full possession of the moral truth. This is a religious attitude. It is certainly not a scholarly or intellectual attitude.

The first sentence seems wildly inaccurate.  I can't speak to humanities, but I haven't heard anyone mention Foucault (outside of a few libertarian friends with decidedly non-leftist views on power) since the 1990's.  Frankly, if today's campus identity liberalism were rooted in Foucault it would be a step up--at least Foucault is a hard read!  The writings that matter in identity liberalism on today's campuses seem to be shallow think-pieces at the level of Slate and Huffpo, emotional personal accounts, and egregiously misapplied/misinformed social science, not French intellectuals.  Indeed, the last sentence notes the unscholarly attitude of identity liberalism, further casting doubt on the assertion that it's rooted in thinkers like Foucault.  They don't want thick treatises, they want 3 Quick Tips For Implementing Best Practices!

Also, French postmodernists would have cast a disparaging eye on claims to objective truth, whereas today's identity liberalism holds that privilege blinds one to truth and oppression opens one to it.  There is an objective moral code, an idea of settled questions, as Deresiewicz notes.  French postmodernists would laugh at the idea of settled truths, let alone settled moral truths.

But of course, Scripps and its ilk are only diverse in terms of identity. In terms of ideology, they are all but homogeneous. You don’t have “different voices” on campus, as these institutions like to boast; you have different bodies, speaking with the same voice.

...

 Elite private colleges are ideologically homogenous because they are socially homogeneous, or close to it. Their student populations largely come from the liberal upper and upper-middle classes, multiracial but predominantly white, with an admixture of students from poor communities of color—two demographics with broadly similar political beliefs, as evidenced by the fact that they together constitute a large proportion of the Democratic Party base. As for faculty and managerial staff, they are even more homogenous than their students, both in their social origins and in their present milieu, which tends to be composed exclusively of other liberal professionals—if not, indeed, of other liberal academics. Unlike the campus protesters of the 1960s, today’s student activists are not expressing countercultural views. They are expressing the exact views of the culture in which they find themselves (a reason that administrators prove so ready to accede to their demands). If you want to find the counterculture on today’s elite college campuses, you need to look for the conservative students.

This I agree with 100%.

And this:

There is one category that the religion of the liberal elite does not recognize—that its purpose, one might almost conclude, is to conceal: class. Class at fancy colleges, as throughout American society, has been the unspeakable word, the great forbidden truth. And the exclusion of class on selective college campuses enables the exclusion of a class. It has long struck me in leftist or PC rhetoric how often “white” is conflated with “wealthy,” as if all white people were wealthy and all wealthy people were white. In fact, more than 40 percent of poor Americans are white. Roughly 60 percent of working-class Americans are white. Almost two-thirds of white Americans are poor or working-class. Altogether, lower-income whites make up about 40 percent of the country, yet they are almost entirely absent on elite college campuses, where they amount, at most, to a few percent and constitute, by a wide margin, the single most underrepresented group. 

We don’t acknowledge class, so there are few affirmative-action programs based on class. Not coincidentally, lower-income whites belong disproportionately to precisely those groups whom it is acceptable and even desirable, in the religion of the colleges, to demonize: conservatives, Christians, people from red states. Selective private colleges are produced by the liberal elite and reproduce it in turn. If it took an electoral catastrophe to remind this elite of the existence (and ultimately, one hopes, the humanity) of the white working class, the fact should come as no surprise. They’ve never met them, so they neither know nor care about them. In the psychic economy of the liberal elite, the white working class plays the role of the repressed. The recent presidential campaign may be understood as the return of that repressed—and the repressed, when it returns, is always monstrous. 

The exclusion of class also enables the concealment of the role that elite colleges play in perpetuating class, which they do through a system that pretends to accomplish the opposite, our so-called meritocracy. Students have as much merit, in general, as their parents can purchase (which, for example, is the reason SAT scores correlate closely with family income). The college admissions process is, as Mitchell L. Stevens writes in Creating a Class, a way of “laundering privilege.”

Here's the most important part:

The culture of political correctness, the religion of the fancy private colleges, provides the affluent white and Asian students who make up the preponderant majority of their student bodies, and the affluent white and Asian professionals who make up the preponderant majority of their tenured faculty and managerial staffs, with the ideological resources to alibi or erase their privilege. It enables them to tell themselves that they are children of the light—part of the solution to our social ills, not an integral component of the problem. It may speak about dismantling the elite, but its real purpose is to flatter it. [Emphasis added]

Exactly.  That's why people eat that shit up like pita chips and humus from Trader Joe's.

Later in the essay, Deresiewicz acknowledges the role that class plays, and the difference between elite private and non-elite public institutions:

But public schools are very different places from private ones. Their student bodies, for the most part, are far more diverse, economically and in every other way, which means these institutions do not have to deal with a large bolus of affluent, sheltered white and Asian kids who don’t know how to talk to black and brown people and need to be “educated” into “awareness” by the presence of African-American and Latino students (who are, in turn, expected to “represent” their communities). When different kinds of people grow up together, rather than being introduced to one another under artificial conditions in young adulthood, they learn to talk and play and study together honestly and unselfconsciously—which means, for adolescents, often frankly and roughly—without feeling that they have to tiptoe around sensitivities that are frequently created by the situation itself.

I'm at a non-elite public institution, and while few of the faculty were first-generation students, some definitely came from more privileged backgrounds than others.  The politics correlate pretty well with the level of parental privilege.

Post title explained:

Re-examine privilege: Not the concept, the word. And its usage.

The concept of "privilege", the idea that some people don't have to deal with shit that other people have to deal with, is an important one with great relevance to many aspects of life.  As I have said before, if I were pulled over by the cops I'd rather be a poor white person than a rich black person.  I think we can pretty much take it as a given that--all else being equal--in America it's better to be white than non-white.

Many educated people use the word "privilege" to describe this relative advantage.  I've said before that I'm not much interested in telling sociologists what sort of jargon they should use when sociologizing.  If "privilege" is the technical term, so be it.  But this word has escaped beyond the confines of sociology and ethnic studies, and into the wider world of the scribbling classes, of think-pieces and op-eds and essays written and read by many educated and managerial professionals.  It's in the zeitgeist.  I doubt that your average swing voter in rural Ohio read the full catalog of privilege think-pieces at Slate, Huffpo, and Medium, but I suspect that many have been made at least somewhat aware that there's a cottage industry of educated desk-workers who think that lower-middle-class white men doing manual labor are "privileged" by dint of their gender and color.

That is so stupid that it verges on being a hanging offense.  In colloquial usage, "privileged" is a word for kids whose parents have money and/or connections.  The white kid whose father lost his job at the steel mill and now works at Wal-Mart is NOT privileged in the conventional usage of the term.  Yes, yes, that kid is privileged in the sense of sociological jargon, but who the fuck gave you the idea that ordinary conversation should be conducted in sociological jargon?  What made you think that the jargon of a social science field would work constructively in the wider political arena?

If the chattering classes describe enough lower-middle-class whites with a word for rich kids, eventually word is going to get out and there will be a backlash.  I believe that the timing of that backlash can be pinpointed to November 8, 2016.

And my complaint here is about more than just connotations and jargon.  Describing the same concept with some word less hackle-raising than "privileged" would be an improvement, but not by much.  Why are liberals spending so much time talking about the advantages of the lower-middle class?  On what planet does that make sense?  It makes sense for conservatives to say "See, the lower-middle class doesn't have it so bad" when arguing against redistribution, but on what planet does it make sense for liberals to talk about the advantages of the lower-middle class?

Finally, even if liberals stopped using the word privilege, and stopped dissecting the alleged advantages of lower-middle-class white people, there's an additional problem with all of the discussion about lower-middle-class Trump voters:  The fact that everyone trying to understand "what went wrong" is mostly talking about lower-middle-class Trump voters.  The lower-middle-class wasn't the only group that voted for Trump--in fact, Trump's strongest support was in the upper-middle class (although I suspect that numbers would look very different if I could find exit polls disaggregated by race and income).  Nonetheless, regardless of how things would look on a finer-grained scale, the undeniable fact is that Trump got support from many different sectors of American society, yet almost all of the post-election analysis has been focused on either blaming or excusing the lower-middle class.  The clear message is that the lower-middle class is some mixture of culpable for what went wrong and pitiable victims who made excusable errors.  Not much dignity in that picture.  People higher on the socioeconomic ladder are spared the indignity of post-election dissection.

I never thought I'd say this, but I kind of want the Marxists back.  I mean, say what you want about the tenets of revolutionary socialism, dude; at least they don't describe unemployed factory workers as "privileged."  In light of everything that's happening right now, I'd give anything for academics to abandon their tedious dissection of intersections of race, gender, sexuality, disability, etc., and go back to tedious dissections of class.  A left that cares about class can build solidarity between lower-middle-class whites and the rest of their coalition; a left that cares about identity will splinter.  (I should emphasize that I'm not much of a leftist, but I'm even less of a Trumpista.)

There's a lot of blame to go around here, but certainly much of it belongs in academia. We need to ask ourselves what our implicit assumptions are when socioeconomic diversity gets far less attention than race, gender, etc.

Bias, Madison, and Human Perfectability

Today's blog post by Dean Dad is a good one:  He responds to a recent article in the Chronicle, by a hiring consultant talking about the importance of raising awareness of our implicit biases.  Dean Dad makes the point that this smacks of trying to re-educate people and cleanse their thoughts.  There's plenty of bad history behind such efforts, and it is ironically at odds with the idea of diversity:  The goal is less to get everyone on the same page and more to bring together a bunch of different perspectives and let people check and balance each other.  (Hence James Madison.)  I like the way of looking at it.  If our implicit biases are deep-seated, persistent, and always acting then the very utility of awareness is questionable.  OTOH, bringing together different people with different viewpoints and giving them equal voting power in a consensus-oriented process might actually mitigate some of the effects of our biases.

It's also worth noting that the author of that piece in the Chronicle would be delighted if you wished to hire her firm to help you run a search process that will minimize the effects of bias...

Legitimacy, authority, and diversity

One theme of this blog is pondering why educational elites are disproportionately interested in dimensions of diversity that don't relate to social or economic class.  Certainly there are sound moral reasons for attaching high significance to ethnic diversity (frankly, if I were pulled over by the police I'd sooner be a poor white man than a black man of any class, even a politician).  Then again, there are also valid moral reasons for treating class more seriously than it's currently treated in many academic environments.  Ultimately, it's a value judgment, and the question is why people judge it the way they do.  (I should be clear that treating it as a value judgment rather than a matter of objective fact is not to trivialize it.  Some of the most important issues in human society are value judgments, and the fact that values are ultimately just, like, your opinion, man, does not make the stakes any lower or the moral significance any lesser.)

America's educational institutions are institutions dependent on the patronage of the state and the upper classes (via donations), and a large part of their task is to train people for public service, whether we're talking about people studying criminal justice before going on to law enforcement careers, ROTC students, or Ivy League schools training future Cabinet Secretaries and Supreme Court Justices.  The United States government has many sins to answer for, but in two crucial political conflicts the US government came down on the better of the two sides.  Both of those conflicts involved race, and both involved existential questions for the government's power:  The Civil War and the Civil Rights Era.

In the Civil War the authority of the federal government was challenged in the starkest terms possible, and the root of the controversy was slavery.  Say what you will about state power, or economics, or whatever else, but the state prerogatives in play concerned slavery, and the economic issues concerned the needs of a slave-dependent economy.  The federal government was on the better side there.  There's much to be said about the federal government's failures regarding the rights of African-Americans after Reconstruction, but it is ingrained into the institutional and cultural memory that the starkest challenge to our political institutions concerned race.

The next starkest internal challenge to the authority of our political institutions concerned the ending of de jure segregation (not to be confused with de facto segregation).  Southern states tried to openly defy the feds, resulting in National Guard troops being deployed to desegregate schools, and numerous federal court cases and Department of Justice civil rights actions starting in the 50's and continuing to the present.

Race in America is thus an issue where the existential imperatives of public institutions are intimately entwined with moral imperatives. Seen in that light, it makes sense that institutions that exist to serve (in part) the workforce needs of public institution would prize racial and ethnic diversity over class diversity.  We thus have a mix of sound moral concerns (like I said, a case can be made that race is rightly more important), institutional imperatives (at its core, the state will preserve its own authority), and somewhat hypocritical class sympathies.  Like any cultural fact on the ground, it is neither wholly pure nor wholly tainted.  It is tied into the good and bad of human history.

I said a few weeks ago that in the era of Donaldik Fydorvich Trump academia will no doubt damp down some of its internal political tensions in order to unite against a common outside threat.  While I hope that some sort of sincere effort to improve the lot of the working class in the Rust Belt and small towns might emerge from the post-election soul-searching, this is me recognizing that there are deeper historical reasons for our focus on race, and in the era of an unabashed bigot in the White House it is appropriate for reasons of past, present, and value judgments that racial and ethnic diversity not exist our moral calculus.

Freddie on the movies

Freddie deBoer points out that the Star Trek reboots are more about action than anything else.

Is there any punching or shooting in Star Trek 4? Any at all? But it made $130 million in 1986. I fundamentally believe that it’s  still possible for that sort of thing to happen again. But there’s no studios willing to risk it. So we get two characters in bad alien makeup doing half-assed movie karate in the climax of a Star Trek movie. 

We’re getting more and more diverse, in these blockbusters. Sulu’s got a new husband in one of the rare non-punching, non-shooting scenes; the lady Ghostbusters have a pointless and wearying scene where they shoot a lot; soon you’ll be able to see the Black Panther punch. And while I think the current liberal obsession with superficial diversity above structural equality is weird, I recognize that there’s progress in greater representation. But if there’s diversity in the faces but not in the stories, if we start to better include women and people of color in movies but give them nothing else to do but punch and shoot, that’s barely progress at all.

Regarding the last sentence, I don't subscribe to any sort of essentialist view that women, people of color, the LGBTQIA+ community, etc. would inherently prefer to make movies with fewer explosions and more plot, character development, etc.  People of all backgrounds are perfectly capable of making cheesy and unoriginal movies.  I think the bigger point is that if we limit the range of stories that get told then it doesn't help much to diversify the stories; the world is still culturally bereft.

And, to be clear, I like action movies.  I really like action movies.  But that doesn't mean I want action movies to be the only sort out there.

The future of admissions

A recent poll shows that the public strongly opposes affirmative action in college admissions. Of course, most people who work in colleges support some form of affirmative action, and for justifiable reasons.  Therefore, as I have discussed before, if we cannot take disadvantaged status into account  and simply give people an opportunity on the basis of their disadvantaged status, we will have to continue to insist that disadvantage doesn't actually lead to under-preparation or under-performance, and hence we will have to pretend that measures of performance and/or preparation don't really matter.

I wish we could just give a leg up to the disadvantaged instead of pretending that measures of book smarts mean nothing.

"Ought" can stand irrespective of "Is"

One will often hear it asserted that diversity improves team performance and even corporate performance.  Surely there are situations where this is true--an ad campaign designed by a team of white guys from the Midwest would probably not do terribly well in New York or Los Angeles--but it is often presented as a universal truism.  Well, a recent meta-analysis argues that diversity probably does not, as a general rule, improve team performance, though it may very well be advantageous for certain types of tasks.

Some readers* may feel threatened by this finding, or may be tempted to argue with it, but there is no moral content to that finding. The statement "People ought to be inclusive in their recruitment and hiring practices" can be defended on simple moral grounds, irrespective of the truth value of the statement "A diverse team is more productive than a homogeneous team." An "Ought" statement cannot be derived from an "Is" statement.  I am quite comfortable believing that fairness and inclusion are morally defensible irrespective of whether they are, According To A Recent Study, profitable.  Morality isn't always profitable, and doesn't need to be profitable.  If it were profitable we wouldn't call it "morality", we'd call it "self-interest."  A stable society will certainly try to align morality and self-interest as much as possible, but they needn't be 100% in alignment.

The fact that this type of social science might discomfit people is part of the modern zeitgeist.  On the right, "morality" seems to be about judging other people's sex lives; in all other aspects of life the right believes that the only morality that matters is the morality (such as it is) of the market.  Consequently, the right needs to be sold on the market value of diversity.  On the left, I think that the belief in some concept of inclusion and diversity is sincere, but they aren't really comfortable with moral language.  The Boomers rebelled against the morality of their elders, the educated members of Generation X (my generation) were taught to embrace subjectivity, and the Millenials seem to be afraid of having their values challenged, so everyone is ill-equipped to deal with "is/ought" distinctions from a left-leaning perspective.  The Boomers would feel stodgy saying "ought", we Xers would feel anti-intellectual saying "ought", and the Millenials would be fine with "ought" but would need to see a trauma counselor if somebody disagreed with them.  So we're all more comfortable if social science simply tells us that our value preferences are also perfectly congruent with everyone's self-interest, because then there's no need to debate "ought" statements.

If, however, we recognize that there's no "is" statement that can refute or prove an "ought" statement, and if we are comfortable with the divide between morality and self-interest, then a meta-analysis questioning the direct material benefits of diversity needn't threaten our value system.  But this would require us to have confidence in our value system, rather than to be timid about it.

EDIT:  I just realized that a few months ago I had blogged about a related point made by de Tocqueville.  All of this has happened before and will happen again.

*Here I generously assume that I have readers.