What's Coming For Academia

February 04, 2025/ Francis Menton @ What's Coming For Academia

It’s only two weeks into the new Trump administration, and we’re seeing an incredible sea change start in the federal government. In his first campaign, Trump promised to “drain the swamp,” and then when he took office he barely got started on the project during a full four year term. Maybe he was too distracted by constant investigations, lawfare, “Russia! Russia! Russia!” and the like. But this time it’s much different.

The big news of the past day or two is the beginning of purges at DOJ, the FBI, and USAID. Those thoroughly corrupt institutions are very good places to start in these early weeks. But they are barely the tip of the iceberg of corrupt institutions ripe for upending.

One place that is about to get hit by the whirlwind is academia. It is possible that the entire industry of academia will be revolutionized and transformed over the course of the next couple of years. It should be. And, if Trump follows through, as I think he will, he completely has the tools at his disposal to do the job.

With academia, multiple issues come together to put the industry in a position of high vulnerability. First, of course, is that academia is almost universally associated with the farthest of the far political left, the wokest of the woke. Academics, almost to a person, have opposed Trump in everything he has proposed and stood for and have viciously attacked him at every opportunity.

The second is that nearly all academic institutions get vast sums of money every year from the federal government. Much of that is for bona fide research, like the search for new medical cures, but large amounts of the aid (nobody knows exactly how much) go to fund every sort of left-wing course and program.

And the third issue that makes academic institutions particularly vulnerable is that almost without exception they have been systematically and pervasively engaging in illegal racial and sex discrimination for decades. Some of that discrimination has been in the area of admissions, as was exposed in the famous case of SFFA v. Harvard decided by the Supreme Court in 2023. But that was only one piece of the illegal conduct. There has been vast other illegal conduct, going under the general heading of “diversity, equity and inclusion” or DEI, at nearly every academic institution and in virtually every aspect of their operations: in addition to admissions, also in faculty and administrative hiring; in creating DEI bureaucracies and enforcement procedures; in setting up various academic programs, majors, and departments (for example, the so-called “studies” departments and majors); in funding “cultural centers”; and on and on.

And now comes President Trump with his anti-DEI Executive Orders. There were two on this subject, one on January 20, and a second on January 21. The first, which ordered an end to all DEI programs within the federal government itself, has gotten the more publicity. But the second is the one that is the more significant for academia. This is the one that deals with DEI practices in the private sector. The early sections of this EO sound relatively bland. For example, here is the text of Section 2, titled “Policy”:

It is the policy of the United States to protect the civil rights of all Americans and to promote individual initiative, excellence, and hard work.  I therefore order all executive departments and agencies (agencies) to terminate all discriminatory and illegal preferences, mandates, policies, programs, activities, guidance, regulations, enforcement actions, consent orders, and requirements.  I further order all agencies to enforce our longstanding civil-rights laws and to combat illegal private-sector DEI preferences, mandates, policies, programs, and activities.

But then as we proceed through the details, we come to some seriously explosive items. For example, here is the text of Section 3(a)(iv):

(iv)   The head of each agency shall include in every contract or grant award:

(A)  A term requiring the contractual counterparty or grant recipient to agree that its compliance in all respects with all applicable Federal anti-discrimination laws is material to the government’s payment decisions for purposes of section 3729(b)(4) of title 31, United States Code; and

(B)  A term requiring such counterparty or recipient to certify that it does not operate any programs promoting DEI that violate any applicable Federal anti-discrimination laws.

Probably, most for-profit private businesses will have little trouble dealing with these provisions. They will end whatever DEI schemes they may still have, and move on. But what about academic institutions. They get vast government grants, and thus are “contractors” subject to the Order. How exactly are they going to comply? They have DEI corruption infesting every nook and cranny of their very being.

And universities are hugely, and foolishly, dependent on federal funding. I just thought I would look up the funding status of a couple of institutions with which I am most familiar. At Yale, I find a Yale Daily News piece from January 29 headlined “Federal aid freeze threatens almost $1 billion of Yale funding.” The piece reports that Yale got $899 million in grants and contracts from the federal government in its most recent fiscal year. (Yale’s total annual budget is about $6 billion.). Over at Harvard, it’s roughly the same story: $676 million of reported federal grants in 2023 on a budget of about $6.4 billion. I suspect that the dependency on federal funding at other elite schools is comparable.

Now, to keep the money flowing, they will have to “certify” that they do not “operate any programs promoting DEI that violate any applicable Federal anti-discrimination laws.” The people receiving these certifications will not be the sort to just accept obvious lies from crooks. It will be fun to watch that play out.

And then we have Trump’s nominee for Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, Harmeet Dhillon. Dhillon, besides having served as chair of California’s Republican Party, is known in private practice for taking on civil rights cases on behalf of conservatives. For example, according to a Wikipedia bio here, she has represented the UC Berkeley College Republicans (in a case accusing UCB of preventing conservatives from speaking on campus), Google programmer James Damore (in a case claiming Damore was wrongly discharged for expressing his opinions on the capabilities of women as programmers), conservative journalist Andy Ngo (in a case arising out of Ngo’s assault on the streets of Portland, Oregon by Antifa thugs), and so forth.

You get the idea — Dhillon’s idea of civil rights law is roughly the opposite of that of the current denizens of DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, which she will shortly be heading. She will be coming into a Civil Rights Division that has just wrapped up its activities before the curtain fell on the Biden term by trying to ram through consent decrees tying up the hands of the police departments in Minneapolis and Louisville. (It looks like they have failed in those efforts, and I suspect that the cases against these police departments will shortly be withdrawn.)

I checked the status of Dhillon’s nomination, and as far as I can tell no committee hearing has yet been scheduled. Perhaps the Senate Democrats will pull out every stop to try to stall her confirmation. On the other hand, they have so far been notably less successful in stalling Trump’s nominees than they were the last time around in 2017.

I would highly expect Dhillon as a top item on her agenda to begin some high profile investigations of universities for violations of the civil rights laws, particularly in their DEI policies. In any such investigation, it will not just be ending the DEI programs that will be at issue; the defendant will also need to fight for its life to keep its federal funding flowing.

The depth of the corruption in academia today is truly profound. Perhaps, some amount of it can be reversed. Maybe even a lot of it.

Far-Left Courses Get Axed at Harvard – Will More Follow?

Is this the beginning of a shift in academia, or much ado about nothing? 

By Corey Smith | Oct 6, 2024, @ Liberty Nation News, Tags: Articles, Opinion, Politics

(Photo by: Sergi Reboredo/VW Pics/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

Just as the school year was about to get underway, Harvard University canceled more than 30 courses. History and literature were affected the most. Many were far-left classes like “Global Transgender Histories,” in which students would’ve learned about “the lives of ancient and medieval people who crossed boundaries of sex and gender” and “the historical overlaps between cross-dressing, queer sexuality, and gender non-conformity.”

Little has been said about why the last-minute cancellations happened. Some were supposedly scrapped because five lecturers were no longer available to teach them. Others moved on to other studies, departed for medical reasons, or changed jobs. Low enrollment is likely the reason for shutting down many of these courses, though it’s hard to believe not enough students wanted to study “the historical impacts of … medicalization on gender identities.”

Perhaps this is another effort to scale back anything nearly related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). If so, as the school year progresses, will Americans see other colleges dropping such courses?

Harvard’s Path: Derailed or a New Trail?

A quick synopsis is in order. Elite universities nationwide have attracted much attention in the last decade. Visiting speakers, typically people with right-leaning views, have often been forced to leave mid-speech or been asked not to come, a product of being strong-armed by clamorous students protesting against speakers whose political identities they disagree with and opinions they want to silence. Demonstrations expressing outrage among college campuses have been an issue for years but have become more contentious and vitriolic since the Hamas-led attack against Israel on October 7. Things got so bad for Harvard that its former president, Claudine Gay, alongside two other Ivy League presidents, had to travel to DC last December and answer questions concerning how they handled the pro-Palestinian encampments on their respective campuses. In January, Gay, who also faced plagiarism allegations, resigned.

In June, Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) stopped “requiring a diversity, inclusion, and belonging statement as part of its faculty hiring process.” This decision came just a year after the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which resulted in colleges no longer being allowed to use race-based affirmative action programs in their admissions processes. The push to abandon the diversity statements was primarily encouraged by faculty, including the eminent psychologist and author Steven Pinker, a Harvard professor. In December last year, he wrote an op-ed, published in the Boston Globe, arguing against mandatory diversity statements, which he claimed, “[P]urge the next generation of scholars of anyone who isn’t a woke ideologue or a skilled liar. … Universities should stanch the flood of DEI officials, expose their policies to the light of day, and repeal the ones that cannot be publicly justified.”

Before Harvard dropped its diversity statement, though, many colleges had already changed or eliminated their DEI statements and offices.

Harvard Isn’t Alone

Numerous colleges have slowly stepped back from DEI efforts. One news publication, The Chronicle of Higher Education, has been tracking the “dismantling” of DEI on campuses since January 2023. So far, its documentation includes 203 colleges across 31 states.

Eliminating DEI statements from hiring and admissions seems like a theme among many colleges. Several campuses have even shut down their DEI offices, some in response to legislative action and political pressure. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill last year banning DEI offices, diversity statements, and “identity-based preferences in hiring at public colleges.” Other Red states have passed similar laws.

Another ongoing theme is the name changes. California changed its “Office of Multicultural Affairs to the Office of Belonging and Inclusion.” What’s the difference? The University of Iowa replaced the name of its DEI office with the “Division of Access, Opportunity, and Diversity” and cut “five unfilled DEI-related positions.” It also no longer requires “students, faculty, and staff to share their pronouns.” Not far away, Northern Kentucky University lost its chief diversity officer, who resigned, and it now plans to close its Office of Inclusive Excellence. The list goes on and on.

Some of these moves appear to be changes that aren’t really changes but slight alterations to disguise DEI offices and statements as something else, though the language often used is telling – and the disguises can look like mere variants of their originals.

The Chronicle’s last update to this page was September 27. There’s no mention of colleges canceling courses, though perhaps that’s outside the DEI scope. Or maybe nobody is paying attention to it. Either way, if other colleges have removed such classes, they’re doing so quietly. It’s unclear whether Harvard’s cancellations are permanent or if they will return in the spring. But according to its course list, which may or may not be current, plenty of niche classes remain for those interested in far-left topics, such

• Queer Archives
• Sin, Sex, and Race
• Queering Education
• Gender in Byzantium
• Feminism in the Age of Empire
• Street Dance Activism: Co-choreographic Praxis as Activism
• Race and Racism in the Making of the United States as a Global Power
• Queer Nation: LGBTQ+ Protest, Politics, and Policy in the United States
• Power to the People: Black Power, Radical Feminism, and Gay Liberation

Compared to other universities, Harvard was late in cutting diversity statements and likely didn’t do so because it suddenly decided not to advocate for its preferred ideological culture. It still has an Office for Gender Equity (if its website is up-to-date), so to say it’s making a strong effort to change its DEI-like ways might be an overstatement. Perhaps canceling these courses lies along the same lines: not something it wants to do but has to do. Because of its elite status and constant publicity, more bad than good nowadays, it appears to be doing whatever it can to maintain its status and initiatives to keep the machine running with as little criticism and backlash as possible – all while receiving millions in government funds.

Dig Deeper into the Themes Discussed in this Article!

Liberty Vault: Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard

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Liberty Nation does not endorse candidates, campaigns, or legislation, and this presentation is no endorsement.

 

 

Read More From Corey Smith

Ackman the Barbarian

Definition leads to clarity and clarity leads to understanding

By Rich Kozlovich

On January 7, 2024 Monica Showalter published this article, Bill Ackman goes after MIT like a bat out of hell saying:

 

Is Bill Ackman the financial world's answer to tech's Elon Musk?  Sure seems like it. After declaring war on MIT and Business Insider for exposing his wife's less-than-plagiarism-free doctoral thesis, which came as payback for his calls to end antisemitism on elite campuses, he hasn't wasted a minute of time, working to expose MIT, its professoriat or its leadership.  Yesterday, he announced this:

My wife, @NeriOxman, was just contacted by Business Insider claiming that they have identified other plagiarism in her work including 15 examples in her dissertation where she did not cite Wikipedia as a source. Business Insider told us that they are publishing their story…

Today, he dashed off a 2,500-word piece on what he thinks he's doing, focusing on the power of artificial intelligence to keep wokester academic research honest....

The article goes on saying attacking this guy is a huge error in judgement and explains why, and truthfully, after reading about this guy, and comments by readers who either know him or about him, I'm inclined to agree, however I felt some clairty was needed, and I will explain that more fully later on, saying:

Okay, he's Conan the Barbarian when he gets ticked off, I get it. But why is he ticked off?  Let's make sure this is clear as a mountain stream. He didn't give two squats about all the corruption and plagiarism going on in academia until his wife was attacked for her plagiarism, of which from all indications, she is apparently guilty.   Now, if he channels his considerable skills and wealth, all fueled by his outrage, to expose the corruption in academia, which I think is blatant and rampant, then he's to be commended.

But let's not lose sight that this is some righteous crusade for truth, justice, and the American way. It's revenge for exposing his wife's perfidy. So, I think it's appropriate to ask this. If his wife hadn't been attacked, would he be launching this crusade? And if wouldn't why not, since it seems clear to me he must have already known this corruption was pandemic in academic and scientific circles.

There are a lot of regular commenters at AT.  Almost an AT family of commenters, and overall most the commenters at AT are much brighter than those who comment elsewhere, and as expected, in families there's disagreement, and agreement. Let's take a look.

Hitchhiker: He stated this in his last piece. It is about the support for the murder of Jews that got his interest. He even explained in his first so called screed that he did the research. He used to think DEI was about promoting diversity and being nice to people. But, he dug deeper and discovered the ugly truth and that is why he is now on the warpath. Go Bill Go.

 

ron mlerin: So, he was extremely naive?

 

Hitchhiker:  In many areas, yes.

 

Elizabeth Yezzi:  Gotta be honest with you Hitch. If a guy as rich and as smart as Ackman didn't know Harvard was a bastion of anti-Semitism for the past umpteen years he really shot his smart wad. He used to think DEI was about being nice to people? Seriously? Not buying it. I think he wanted to call out the anti - Semitism at first because he is Jewish and employs Jewish people AND Gay was inexcusable in her Congressional testimony and kudos to him for that. But if all these donors are doing their homework since they graduated 35 years ago, I suggest they look into the policy before they write the checks. Ignorance of the policies is no excuse.

 

Hitchhiker: I certainly won't argue about his judgment overall. I think he honestly was surprised when he began researching. Up till now, he has been too busy making money and building things. He is not stupid but, he was willfully blind. Now, he sees and that is a very good thing. He shoulda coulda seen it far earlier but, consider how many others still can't.

 

Paraphrasing Old Gyrene's comments: "I think the jury is still out on the charges against his wife. As noted above, there is nothing in the various Wiki's you can list as a 'source', since the entries are subject to constant revision/erasure." and "I think you have it exactly wrong and using the expression "his wife's perfidy" expresses your motivation quite clearly." 

 

t. c. white:  don't look a gift horse in the mouth.

 

Well, I didn't quote Wikipedia, and as of right now absolutely no one appears to be challenging the validity of her "perfidy", including her husband.  

 

As for not looking a gift horse in the mouth, I'm not, I applaud his actions, but I also think it's important to qualify his actions. First, he attacked Harvard for their antisemitic leanings over the vile attack on Israel by Hamas, and that was certainly justified, and he’s to be applauded and commended for that.

But where was he and all the other prominent, wealthy, Harvard graduated American Jews, and conservatives in general, before this? They were giving money to Harvard, all playing the game, and yet this attitude and mentality didn't exist in a vacuum! It was well known.

That attack against Harvard triggered an attack against his wife for plagiarism, which he basically defended and justified with what seemed to me to be a sort of “everyone does it” response. 

What we need is clarity. If he goes Conan the Barbarian, I will applaud him. If he’s successful in exposing a massive level of corrupt plagiarism I believe is rampant throughout academia’s ranks, I will laud him.

But clarity is crucial, and must be stated, because it won’t be long before they all drop right back into the same level of complacency and cultural acceptance that fostered this vile mentality in academia going back over 150 years, because “culture is king”.

 

The question that needs answering is this:  Will he use his wealth, intelligence, and influence to create a movement among the wealthy conservatives and Jews in America to purge academia of this vile leftist infection that's contaminating education in America, from Kindergarten through to advanced graduate work, all of which is destroying American cultural stability?   Will he take a stand for truth, justice, and the American way, or merely vent his spleen because he was personally offended and then fall right back into the cultural rot that's impacting academia and the wealthy elite? 

As the reporter in Charlie Wilson's War said:  We'll see!

 

The Nitwit Brigade On Parade

By Rich Kozlovich

 

On January 7 Monica Showalter published this good article with a bad title, Harvard professor spews contempt for Chris Rufo who brought down Claudine Gay, brings up his Harvard night school degree as proof saying:

 

Now that Claudine Gay is out as Harvard's president on evidence that she plagiarized research and failed to counter antisemitism on campus, Harvard's elites are steaming with fury. They had, after all, signed a letter urging that the university keep her and her wokester policies on board. But that wasn't the worst of it. The biggest indignity was in the knowledge of who took her down: 

 

Not a top Harvard scholar but a lowly Harvard night school student with the equivalent of a master's degree named Christopher Rufo, writing on his humble Substack. He was the one who found the plagiarism. And here's a Harvard professor who let the cat out of the bag:..............somehow, the traditional students are not just 'better,' they are also more believable......

It turns out Rufo has a degree from Harvard, a night school degree, but according to this nitwit professor, "they are not the same as what we normally think of as Harvard graduate students".  Really?   In some way this contemptible academic thinks denigrating these hard working "night students'.....a blanket condemnation mind you..... is an acceptable and intelligent tactic in defense of an incompetent, corrupt academic.  Another over educated, over pampered, over catered to, and under smart Ph.D.  How stupid can she be?  And that opens up a can of worms.   We'll come back to that.

These nitwits are consistent though.  Logical fallacies, lies of commission, lies of omission, and projection are their stock in trade.  If they decided the sun shines at night, no amout of evidence will shake that view.   

It still comes down to this, and the author brings it up: Who cares what Rufo's education was?   There's only one thing that's important is his reporting. Was it accurate?  And it was!

All that other clabber is nothing but a red herring fallacy.  It's totally immaterial to the fact that Gay's plagiarisms were very real, very extensive, and could have easily been discovered long before she was even hired at Harvard, let alone given tenure.   And the same applies to Stanford, which is further proof of the depth of corruption at these "elite" universities. 

Over the years as an exterminator I've written extensively in defense of my industry, and the use of pesticides, and I will state openly over the course of my career I've found entirely too many people with advanced degrees aren't the brightest pebbles in the brook, and government grant money has made scientific integrity an oxymoron. 

But these comments bring up a serious side bar.  What if she's right?  What if these night students really "are not the same as what we normally think of as Harvard graduate students".   Because that statement leaves one of two conclusions: She's lying, or Harvard is committing fraud. 

Because if she's not lying, that means Harvard is peddling fraudulent degrees and knowingly offering less quality education?  If that's true, then isn't that deliberate fraud, and the last time I looked, fraud is a crime?   And if that kind of thing is prevalent throughout the world of academia, perhaps a RICO investigation is in order.  

Monica ends her article with this sentence:  Any questions as to what's wrecking Harvard and why that school needs a good hosing out?

The Harvard Grift

Alan Joseph Bauer Jan 08, 2024

The one consistent theme for the left is to destroy that which previous generations have created and nurtured over generations.  One thing that the left in the US and Europe consistently does is to destroy that which was given to them by previous generations. Here are a couple of examples:........And then there is Harvard, my erstwhile alma mater. 

Over nearly 400 years, Harvard built up an international reputation as one of the finest universities in history. Inventions, Nobel Prizes, top minds—they all seemed to come out of Harvard with a regularity not seen anywhere else in the US or the world. If the US sends 32 Rhodes Scholars to Oxford each year, half would be from Harvard. The Supreme Court had half of its justices with law degrees from Harvard Law School. Eight US presidents graduated from Harvard. Harvard was like Tom Brady, with his seven Super Bowl championship rings. 

A great player might have made two Super Bowls and even won one of them—something he could tell his grandchildren. But winning seven and playing in ten is beyond the stratosphere. And thus was Harvard, in every category, from the size of its endowment to a number of breakthrough discoveries to the annual October announcements of Nobel laureates. 

There was no better institutional name than Harvard. Thousands applied each year, hoping to have their names and that of Harvard attached for eternity for job advancement and standing in the community. As I previously wrote, in my life, I have only met one person who had never heard of Harvard before.........Harvard’s custodians have destroyed the value of the Harvard name. It has become the butt of jokes and people here in Israel are embarrassed to say that they went there. As graduates, we bought into “Harvard,” and the value added it represented for our future opportunities. We will soon be holding the Harvard Corporation legally responsible for its destruction of the Harvard brand......To Read More...

The Ivy League: A Modern Panglossian Ethic

December 26, 2023 By Mike McDaniel

Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss was the eternal, unhinged, optimist, living in the best of all possible worlds. One might think Jon Haidt also a bit Panglossian: 

The good news is that the academy’s free fall is now over. American higher ed hit rock bottom on December 5, 2023 in that Congressional hearing room. Anyone who wants universities to bounce back and regain the trust of the American people must understand this new morality and ensure that it never holds sway on campus again.

“The academy’s free fall is now over?” Because several university presidents said the quiet part out loud and exposed their academic posteriors before Congress? Oh dear.

The academy--administrators, the DEI Stasi and faculty--are with few exceptions, woke addicts.  “Rock bottom” for them is far deeper and rockier than rock bottom for sane Americans.  Like addicts, many prefer to die rather than painfully claw their way back up to sanity and real reality. Others simply expire as their self-delusion consumes them.........To Read More.....

Claudine Gay Update -- Now It's Allegations Of Data Falsification

December 24, 2023 Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian

It was less than three weeks ago, December 5, when the name of Claudine Gay, President of Harvard University, suddenly burst into the news. That was the day that she, along with the Presidents of Penn and MIT, testified before Congress — and could not give a clear answer as to whether it was against the policy at their schools to call for the genocide of Jews. All three women attempted to use the occasion to paint themselves as defenders of free speech, particularly important in such extreme cases.

Manhattan Contrarian readers already knew that Ms. Gay was the opposite of a defender of free speech. In a post on December 16, 2022 with the title “Goodnight, Poor Harvard!” — written on the occasion of the announcement that Ms. Gay would become the next President of Harvard — I reviewed her record on the subject. My conclusion, based on multiple examples mostly from the work of independent journalist Christopher Brunet, was that Ms. Gay was “the enforcer-in-chief of wokist orthodoxy at Harvard.”

In the few short weeks since December 5, the news as to Ms. Gay has gotten worse and worse, seemingly by the day. First, some big donors ramped up threats to pull their funding. Then came a handful of allegations of plagiarism found in a few among Ms. Gay’s small number of academic papers. On December 12 the New York Times reported that the Harvard Corporation had appointed a special committee to investigate the allegations of plagiarism, and that the committee had cleared Ms. Gay. 

Then it emerged that a source had given the allegations of plagiarism to the New York Post back in October, and the Post had sent them to Harvard for confirmation — only to get in return a threatening letter from the Clare Locke law firm (the same firm that had recovered over $700 million from Fox in the Dominion Voting case) asserting that the accusations of plagiarism were “demonstrably false.” 

Then (December 19 in the Washington Free Beacon) there emerged a new dossier now with some 40 instances of alleged plagiarism — almost four for each of Ms. Gay’s eleven academic articles — many of the new allegations much more serious than the ones that the special committee had just deemed minor.

So by December 19 the Clare Locke letter and the attempt of the special committee to whitewash Ms. Gay’s plagiarism had blown up in the face of the Harvard Corporation. On December 22 the New York Post ran a big story demonstrating that the special committee had cleared Ms. Gay before investigating her work. Could it get any worse for Ms. Gay?

Yes. Here’s the latest from Christopher Brunet in a post at something called The Dossier yesterday: Claudine Gay has been asked for, but has refused to provide, the data that underlie a 2001 article she published in the American Political Science Review (“The Effect of Black Congressional Representation on Political Participation”). 

The 2001 APSR article was a critical piece in Ms. Gay receiving tenure from Stanford. In 2002, two researchers who had looked at the APSR paper — Michael Herron of Dartmouth and Kenneth Schotts of Stanford — thought the result anomalous and sought the underlying data from Gay. Herron and Schotts reported the results of that effort in a working paper they presented at the 2002 conference of the Society for Political Methodology. Brunet has obtained a copy of the Herron/Schotts working paper, and links to it at his piece. Here is the key quote from the Herron/Schotts working paper:

We were, however, unable to scrutinize Gay’s results because she would not release her dataset to us (personal communication with Claudine Gay, 2002).

Consider Gay’s (2001) EI–R analysis of the precinct-level socioeconomic covariates that affect black and white turnout. […] For Gay’s Michigan and Pennsylvania EI–R analyses to be logically consistent, it must be true that knowledge of a precinct’s percent black (Xi) tells us nothing about the precinct’s per capita income (an element of Gay’s Zi). 

This is untenable in light of contemporary American social realities: if a precinct has a large African-American population, then all things equal this precinct will have a relatively low per capita income. Nonetheless, without assuming that a precinct’s per capita income is not a function of its racial composition, and without making a host of similarly implausible assumptions for the other right hand side variables in her second stage regressions, Gay’s use of EI–R is logically inconsistent.

Yes, it’s technical mumbo-jumbo, but the gist is that the Gay paper’s methodology appears on its face to be “logically inconsistent,” so the authors asked for the underlying data, and they were refused. As far as I am concerned, failure by a researcher to share the underlying data as to published work is prima facie evidence that the data have been falsified. The ability to disprove that inference is completely in the hands of the researcher, here Ms. Gay, and there is no reason to refuse disclosure other than known problems in the data. Readers here know that the phenomenon of refusal to disclose underlying data is endemic in narrative-supporting politicized “science,” most famously in the Hockey Stick graph of Mann, et al., that is the primary basis of the global warming scare.

Is there any other reason to think that something suspicious is going on here? Well, the Herron/Schotts paper from which the above quote comes appears nowhere on the internet (except as Brunet has now posted it), and there is evidence to suggest that the paper was intentionally disappeared. Brunet:

The program for every PolMeth conference from 1984-2021 is available for download on the PolMeth website, except for 2002, indicating the missing year of 2002 was deliberately removed from this span, seemingly to protect Gay. This is especially true because there was no internet in e.g. 1984, so there is clearly a repository of old programs somewhere that was uploaded to the website at one point, from which 2002 is conspicuously missing. Perhaps 2002 was the sole year lost in the shuffle during this span.

Was the reason for disappearance of the Herron/Schotts paper to protect Gay, as Brunet hypothesizes? You be the judge. Anyway, it is completely in Ms. Gay’s hands to disprove any inference of data manipulation by disclosing her data. I’m somehow guessing that that’s not going to happen.

As they used to say about Donald Trump, “the walls are closing in” on Claudine Gay.

"Free Speech" At Harvard, Penn, MIT And Other Elite Universities

Francis Menton  December 11, 2023 @ Manhattan Contrarian 

Six days ago, on December 5, the Presidents of three elite universities — Harvard, Penn and MIT — appeared at a Congressional hearing to testify about their responses to pro-Hamas and anti-semitic demonstrations and advocacy on their campuses. In the most widely-viewed exchange at the hearing, Rep. Elise Stefanik asked each of the Presidents whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” violated their codes of conduct. The three answered by emphasizing the importance of freedom of speech on their campuses, and by saying that they could not give a definitive answer as to whether calling for genocide of Jews violated their codes of conduct, because the answer was “context-dependent.”

Over the intervening days, the responses of the three Presidents have generated widespread backlash, including harsh criticism from even some mainstream press sources, and even pushback from some major donors. The Presidents’ responses appeared to be, and were, tone deaf and highly legalistic. But were they wrong?

This may surprise you, but I’m going to stand up for the three Presidents on this particular point. If you have been a reader here for any substantial period, you know that I am close to what may be called a “free speech absolutist.” I think that people ought to be able to say even the most hateful and despicable things, short of immediate threats of violence. By saying such things they discredit themselves, and for the government (or a university or corporation) to claim the power to shut them up is an even worse problem than allowing the speech.

The problem with the statements of the three Presidents is not their position as to upholding freedom of speech for the pro-Hamas and anti-semitic speakers. The problem is that the Presidents don’t apply the same true free speech principles at all when it comes to political opinions with which they disagree, or that are out of line with current woke orthodoxy. Their claim to be real defenders of freedom of speech is completely bogus, and everybody knows it. In fact, they are active speech suppressors on dozens of important topics. Their claim to have suddenly discovered the importance of freedom of speech in the context of supporters of people who behead babies makes them look completely ridiculous and morally reprehensible, which they are.

To the great credit of our Supreme Court, it has drawn the line as to speech that can be regulated by the government at a point that gives near complete license to speakers, even hateful ones. Note that a private university does not need to follow the freedom of speech principles that apply to the government. Thus, for example, a private university can be explicitly anti-semitic if it wants to be — at the risk of losing most of its students and financial support. But if a university proclaims that it supports the principles of robust freedom of speech in accordance with the First Amendment, the public should rightfully expect that it follows principles at least close to, if not the same, as those that the Supreme Court has articulated as restricting the government.

For a concise statement of what those principles of robust freedom of speech are, I recommend this L.A. Times op-ed from yesterday by Eugene Volokh and Will Creeley. For those who don’t recognize his name, Eugene Volokh is a Professor at UCLA Law School and a bona fide top authority on Supreme Court First Amendment law. For a number of years I served on the Executive Committee of the Freedom of Speech Section of the Federalist Society, and Eugene was the Chairman. I was somewhat of an interloper on that Committee, but Eugene is the true expert.

Here are some key excerpts from the Volokh/Creeley piece (I recommend the whole thing if you want a deeper understanding of First Amendment law on this subject):

[I]f freedom of expression is to survive on American campuses — and for our nation’s vitality, it must — Magill’s original answer was right. Context does matter. The categorical exceptions to the 1st Amendment are few, narrow and carefully defined by precedent. And while Penn is a private university not bound by the 1st Amendment, its policies commit the school to 1st Amendment standards. . . .

Under the 1st Amendment, speech intended to and likely to cause imminent illegal conduct is unprotected “incitement.” Discriminatory harassment targeting particular students isn’t protected. True threats — serious expressions of an intent to engage in illegal violence against a particular person or group of people — aren’t protected. Promising to “bring an assault rifle to campus and shoot all you pig jews,” as a Cornell student allegedly did in October, is a punishable true threat. Whether other statements are constitutionally protected does turn on context. . . .

The 1st Amendment doesn’t have an “advocacy of genocide” exception, nor do the promises of student free speech that many private universities properly make. And for good reason: Students must be free to debate what is proper to do in war, and what wars are just. . . .

So do Harvard, Penn or MIT allow the same robust freedom of speech for facts and opinions contrary to woke orthodoxy that they allow to the pro-Hamas and anti-semitic protesters? Not even close — it’s the difference between night and day. I’ll give a few examples for your consideration.

Here is my December 16, 2022 blog post, title “Goodnight, Poor Harvard,” written on the announcement that Claudine Gay would become the next President of the institution. The post covered some of Gay’s actions during the time prior to becoming President-designate, when she had most recently been Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. My conclusion was “The picture emerges of Gay as the enforcer-in-chief of wokist orthodoxy at Harvard.” Examples of Gay’s actions as Dean of FAS:

• Gay was the person directly responsible for derailing the career of Harvard’s hottest young black professor, economist Roland Fryer. Go to my December 2022 piece for details, but here is the summary. Fryer had committed the mortal sin of publishing research (in 2016) which found “no racial differences” in police use of force in places where he collected data. The next year (2017) a personal assistant lodged a complaint with Harvard about alleged improper sexual conduct by Fryer, which however involved no allegations of requests for sex or of unwanted touching, but rather basically a small number of off-color jokes. An investigation by a Harvard committee (Office for Dispute Resolution) found most of the charges baseless, and for the remaining handful recommended some “sensitivity training.” Then Gay intervened, and sought the revocation of Fryer’s tenure — basically, that he be fired. Ultimately, that sanction was not supported by Harvard’s then President, but Fryer got a two year suspension without pay and his research lab was closed. For some reason that I cannot understand, Fryer appears to still be at Harvard.

• Then there’s the case of Ryan Enos. Enos, a professor of political science, came up with some research (also published in 2016) supportive of the woke narrative, namely that demolition of public housing in Chicago demonstrated a “racial threat” theory of political behavior. Again, go to my December 2022 piece for details. In 2018 an anonymous whistleblower emerged who accused Enos of altering data to make the research come out as he wanted. The report was leaked in 2022. At that point it emerged that the complaint had been referred to something at Harvard called the Committee on Professional Conduct but, at the instance of Gay, the CPC had issued a letter declining to investigate on the ground that the complaint was not within its “purview.” But the CPC’s own website states as part of its portfolio that it handles “allegations of research misconduct involving FAS investigators.”

At Gay’s Harvard, if your speech supports the conservative position, the thinnest allegation against you can destroy your career. If you support the woke narrative, even the most explosive allegations against you can be buried.

Here are a couple more examples from Harvard from the Washington Examiner, December 7:

• Last year, . . . a Title IX training at Harvard reportedly instructed students that refusing to use an individual's preferred pronouns could violate the school's code of student conduct and result in discipline.

• In 2021, Harvard professor Carole Hooven faced intense backlash from a university diversity, equity, and inclusion official for stating that biology determines whether a person is male or female. The on-campus reaction to Hooven's scientific statements was so severe that she was forced to take a leave of absence from the university.

And from the same piece in the Examiner, here’s a good one from the University of Pennsylvania:

• In 2022, members of the women's swim team at the University of Pennsylvania were told not to speak to media outlets about Lia Thomas, a biological male who identifies as female and was competing as a woman, eventually winning a national championship that year.

Many more such examples can easily be found. Try to speak out against Covid vaccines or climate change orthodoxy on an Ivy League campus, and see what happens to you. Meanwhile, don’t expect any sanctions to be imposed on pro-Hamas or anti-semitic protesters. The supposed defense of robust free speech by these university Presidents is completely phony.

I’m hoping that some conservative students at these campuses will seize the moment. Now is the time to invite Heather Mac Donald or Charles Murray to campus!

UPDATE, December 12: It has come to my attention that there is a petition on this subject, dated December 10, addressed to Harvard’s Board, that has thus far been signed by more than 750 Harvard faculty members. Here is the full text:

We, the undersigned faculty, urge you in the strongest possible terms to defend the independence of the university and to resist political pressures that are at odds with Harvard’s commitment to academic freedom, including calls for the removal of President Claudine Gay. The critical work of defending a culture of free inquiry in our diverse community cannot proceed if we let its shape be dictated by outside forces.

I love the central phrase “Harvard’s commitment to academic freedom,” an obvious term of art that all insiders would have to understand to refer to the disparate treatments of pro-Israel versus pro-Hamas members of the community, as well as of Fryer and Enos, and of conservative versus liberal speech generally. Looking at the list of signers, right at the top at number 3 (and therefore likely one of the organizers of the effort) is none other than Ryan Enos! This is how deep the rot at Harvard has gone.

Harvard’s Claudine Gay Survives Ousting Efforts

But her troubles may just be starting.  

by Leesa K. Donner | Dec 12, 2023  @ Liberty Nation News

After a damning performance before the House in early December, the fate of Harvard’s contentious President Claudine Gay has apparently been settled. Calls for Gay to be fired sprung up following her testimony on campus antisemitism amid the outbreak of hostilities in the Middle East. According to The Crimson newspaper, the Harvard Corporation made the decision not to ask for her resignation or let her go at the conclusion of yesterday’s (Dec. 11) emergency meeting. “Gay will remain in office with the support of the Harvard Corporation — the University’s highest governing body,” The Crimson reported early this morning.

Gay served a mere six months as Harvard’s president before she testified in front of the House Education Committee last week along with MIT’s President Sally Kornbluth and University of Pennsylvania President M. Elizabeth Magill, who has since resigned – though she will remain a tenured faculty member. When pressed about their response to recent pro-Palestinian protests on campus, all three women appeared to wither under the questioning of Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY).

A Harvard graduate, Stefanik repeatedly asked Gay if calling for Jewish genocide violated the university’s code of conduct. What should have been a straightforward answer turned into a hesitant, vacillating retort that was harshly criticized. Following her fumble at the House hearing, Gay endeavored to walk back her comments with a mea culpa in the college newspaper. “I’m sorry,“ she told The Crimson, then doubled down with, “When words amplify distress and pain, I don’t know how you could feel anything but regret.” She also acknowledged that the apology probably wasn’t enough.

Claudine Gay (Photo by Erin Clark/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

As the firestorm continued, people began to take sides, but the Harvard faithful appeared to line up behind their beleaguered president. On Sunday, Dec. 10, an estimated 650 faculty members signed a petition asking the Harvard governing board to “resist political pressures that are at odds with Harvard’s commitment to academic freedom,” according to The New York Times. The next day, The Crimson ran an article saying, “The Harvard Alumni Association Executive Committee expressed its unanimous support for Harvard President Claudine Gay and asked the University’s governing boards to publicly back Gay in a letter sent Monday.”

More Questions on Claudine Gay

Just as it seemed the sky was about to clear for Gay, a report by Christopher F. Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and Christopher Brunet of The American Conservative published an article questioning her academic credentials. Their claim – which included examples – is that the Harvard president committed the cardinal sin of authors and plagiarized parts of her Ph.D. dissertation. The article said they “obtained exclusive documentation” of plagiarism and carried the following two citations. First is the source material from a paper by Lawrence Bobo and Franklin Gilliam:

“Using 1987 national sample survey data … the results show that blacks in high-black-empowerment areas — as indicated by control of the mayor’s office — are more active than either blacks living in low-empowerment areas or their white counterparts of comparable socioeconomic status. Furthermore, the results show that empowerment influences black participation by contributing to a more trusting and efficacious orientation to politics and by greatly increasing black attentiveness to political affairs.”

From Gay’s dissertation:

“Using 1987 survey data, Bobo and Gilliam found that African-Americans in ‘high black-empowerment’ areas — as indicated by control of the mayor’s office — are more active than either African-Americans in low empowerment areas or their white counterparts of comparable socioeconomic status. Empowerment, they conclude, influences black participation by contributing to a more trusting and efficacious orientation towards politics and by greatly increasing black attentiveness to political affairs.”

As the reader can see, Gay changed a few words, but Harvard has a strict policy regarding such things. A section of its rubric on the theft of another’s writing is called mosaic plagiarism: “If you copy bits and pieces from a source (or several sources), changing a few words here and there without either adequately paraphrasing or quoting directly, the result is mosaic plagiarism.” If looked at through this lens, it does appear that Gay has violated the policy, taking another’s work for her own.

Rufo and Brunet outlined another example, this one from author Carol Swain, and it appeared particularly compromising:

Swain: “Since the 1950s the reelection rate for House members has rarely dipped below 90 percent …”

Gay: “Since the 1950s, the reelection rate for incumbent House members has rarely dipped below 90% …” (Note: there are no quotation marks in Gay’s writing.)

For an academic or any author really, this is a serious issue that cannot simply be swept under the rug. Still, the accusations were met with swift denials by Gay’s academic adviser, who told The Daily Beast the idea that the Harvard president plagiarized was “absurd.” In an interview with The Beast on Dec. 11, Prof. Gary King said, “There’s not a conceivable case that this is plagiarism.” For its part, The Beast labeled Rufo a “conservative activist who almost single-handedly turned critical race theory into a national flashpoint.” However, the article made no attempt to clear up the questions raised by Rufo and Brunet. Distraction and personal attacks are two of the left’s most common weapons to wield when there is a disagreement; however, they are unlikely to be very effective, considering the evidence and reasonable questions Gay’s critics raise.

With Pennsylvania’s Magill busted back to the ranks, Gay hanging on by a thread, and MIT’s Sally Kornbluth’s fate still in the wind, one wonders just how much more care and attention the nation’s educational institutions will offer in protecting their student bodies from calls for genocide. For President Gay, though, as allegations of plagiarism only just begin to heat up, it may not be long before she is once again forced to defend herself.

Tags: Articles, Opinion, Politics

 

Read More From Leesa K. Donner

The Ladies Auxiliary of the Knights of Marcuse

By Christopher Chantrill  December 11, 2023

I really felt sorry for the three diverse presidents of the Ivy League, when jumped-up congress-critter Elise Stefanik (R-NY) humiliated them before the whole world for simply doing their jobs and reciting Sacred Narrative from the Book of Woke about antisemitism on campus. Did you know that, according to La Wik:

[Elise Stefanik's] parents own Premium Plywood Products, a wholesale plywood distributor based in Guilderland Center.

By what right -- what right! -- does the jumped-up daughter of jumped-up white immigrants from the Czech Republic and Italy get to humiliate the Grand Mistresses of the Order of the Knights of Marcuse? Did I get that right? Are the leaders of the Woke Order of the Knights of Marcuse Grand Priests or Grand Masters?.......Editor's Note:  This is a sarcasm article, and for those who don't know who Herbert Marcuse was.  He and the other misfits of the Frankfurt School of far left socialists fled Germany, a far left socialist domain, also antisemitic, and were installed in America's universities and contaminated those institutions with their filth.  RK

Elise Stefanik: smiting the unworthy  - December 11, 2023 By J.R. Dunn - It can’t be denied that it has been a real pleasure to see the lady college presidents brought low over the past few days. The condescending, arrogant smugness that they displayed before the House Education and Workforce committee is standard behavior for the elites so eager to rule us for our own good. We see it from the congressional Democrats, from the DoJ and the rest of the bureaucracy, from the WEF, from Blackrock and Vanguard execs… and, needless to say, from academia.

We saw this clearly at the hearing. The lady presidents had their noses so high in the air that they couldn’t see the elephant trap that Elise Stefanik so adroitly prepared for them. Sally Kornbluth and Claudine Gay’s robotic delivery and raised-eyebrow disdain were bad enough, but the champ here was the smirking Liz Magill of UPenn, who fairly oozed smug superiority as she set out to put this uppity backwoods congresswoman in her place (“Stefanik? Realllly? What kind of a name is that, anyway?”) Magill fell hard, resigning on Saturday night, the most opportune point of the news cycle, and taking the university trustees board chairman with her. Elise S. can stencil two victories on the side of her fighter jet, with more to come.......

Harvard’s bureaucracy has exploded, which explains so much

October 28, 2023 By Andrea Widburg

Harvard was founded in 1636 to educate clergymen for the burgeoning Puritan population. Over the centuries, its antiquity gave it status, especially given that some of its graduates had a profound impact on America. In the old days, most of that impact was good. The same cannot be said for too many of its recent graduates, who are mush-brained leftists who support mass murderers. A College Fix analysis of what’s going on at Harvard may help explain its decline: It’s a bureaucrats’ paradise.

Years ago—and I can’t find the reference now—I read that, while the faculty-student ratio at most American colleges had remained stagnant since the 1960s, the number of administrators compared to students had grown by almost 400%. In other words, all the free and subsidized government money that was causing tuition to skyrocket wasn’t being used to improve the classroom experience and increase the number of students with access to that experience. Instead, it was going to improve the bureaucracy.

Nothing more clearly exemplifies that reality than this data from Harvard:....To Read More....

The Supreme Court Confronts the Left’s Victimhood Consensus

November 6, 2022 By Harry G. Hutchison

Although the Civil Rights Act of 1964 reasserted the principle that no one should be discriminated against based on race, it has been clear that racial identity proponents led by our cultural elites have succeeded in dividing America into racial categories while allocating jobs and even elections based on race.  Two recent Supreme Court cases challenge this move.  The Court heard arguments regarding two critical cases brought by the Students for Fair Admissions Inc. (“SFFA.)” SFFA is “dedicated to defending the right to racial equality in college admissions.”   These related cases -- SFFA v. Harvard and SFFA v. the University of North Carolina -- are primarily driven by SFFA’s members, including Asian American students who were denied admission to Harvard and the University of North Carolina............To Read More....

 

Some Thoughts On Affirmative Action

November 02, 2022/ Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian

The Supreme Court arguments in the Harvard and University of North Carolina affirmative action cases took place on Monday. I listened to some substantial portion, although it was not possible for me to listen to the whole thing (some 5 hours in total). From what I heard, I agree with most commenters that affirmative action in the form currently practiced throughout academia is not likely to survive.

Affirmative action is one of those issues on which the opinions of our intellectual elites diverge almost completely from the opinions of normal people. In a piece on Tuesday (November 1) discussing the likely outcome of the Harvard/UNC case, the New York Times took note of the broad public opposition to affirmative action in college admissions, even extending to heavily Democratic constituencies:

[A] majority of Americans oppose the policy. Nearly three-quarters of U.S. adults said in March that race or ethnicity should not be a factor in college admissions, a Pew Research Center survey found. . . . Even in liberal states, most voters do not support affirmative action. In 2020, about 57 percent of Californians rejected an amendment to the state’s Constitution that would have let government and public institutions, including public universities, adopt affirmative-action policies.

According to the cited Pew survey, even majorities of blacks and Hispanics oppose affirmative action in college admissions:

A majority of Black, Hispanic and Asian respondents opposed the consideration of race or ethnicity.

Meanwhile, among the great and the good, affirmative action is one of the two principal pillars of today’s secular religion (the other being climate alarmism). Check out the list of amici curiae here at the Supreme Court docket supporting the Harvard/UNC position. It includes essentially all of elite academia and plenty of other high-browed institutions and individuals in the category of those that presume to instruct the little people on correct morality. Some readers may also remember my post back in November 2017 that covered the official declaration of fealty by Yale University to the catechism of “diversity, equity and inclusion.”

The principal claim of the plaintiffs in the cases at the Supreme Court appears to be that affirmative action as practiced operates to the disadvantage mostly of Asian American students. They definitely have evidence to back up their claim, in the form of statistical analyses showing that Asian American students must achieve much higher grades and test scores than members of other racial groups to have a comparable chance of admission to the defendant institutions. Plaintiffs must establish harm to themselves in order to have what is called “standing” to sue, and I have no doubt that this harm qualifies. 

On the other hand, this claimed harm is not the most important reason that affirmative action is a bad idea. If a highly qualified applicant to Harvard or UNC gets rejected in favor of a less-qualified applicant, it is very likely that the highly qualified candidate will be accepted into one or more schools with very nearly equivalent educational quality. Yes, it might have been nice to go to Harvard (the physical facility of the campus is remarkable), but the long-term damage to the person’s life and career are probably not substantial. In fact, the rejected applicant might even avoid some leftist indoctrination, which intellectual elites fall for in disproportionate numbers.

The more important reason that affirmative action is a bad idea is the effect on the supposed beneficiaries. This is something that I have had the occasion to observe personally.

As I have mentioned on this blog several times, I was involved for many years in the recruiting efforts of my law firm, including efforts to recruit more candidates from minority groups. One experience stands out in my memory, and I don’t believe that I have ever previously written about it here. It occurred in about 1981 or 1982, when I was asked to join a group of lawyers from our firm on a recruiting trip to Columbia Law School, which is in Northern Manhattan. About five of us went, to interview in excess of 100 students, about 25 interviews each for the day.

I was an associate at the time. The designated head of our group for the day was a relatively new woman partner who incidentally was active in Democratic Party politics and some years later became an important player in Bill Clinton’s campaigns for President. When we arrived, the Columbia recruiting office gave us the pile of 100+ resumes of the students that we would be interviewing. These resumes included transcripts of the students’ grades. Columbia had divided the resumes into five “schedules” for the five interviewers, but we were allowed to re-allocate the resumes among our team if we wanted. Our team leader then expressed the view that it might be best to have one of us interview all the black candidates, the reason given being that that would enable them to be compared among themselves, and we could select the best candidates to invite back to the firm. She asked me if I would take that job, and I said sure. So she went through the resumes and identified all the ones of black candidates, of which there were seven if I recall correctly, and she handed them to me.

So on that day I interviewed seven black candidates, as well as about 18 of other ethnicities (mostly but not entirely white). I saw the grades of all of them. This was a very eye-opening experience. The eighteen non-black candidates had grades in varying ranges. Some had mostly As, with perhaps a few Bs. Others had more Bs than As, although every one had at least one A-. Some had almost entirely Bs. Only a few had a C in any course, and none more than one or at most two. None had a D.

And then there were the seven black students. Their transcripts consisted of almost entirely Cs and Ds. Some had mostly Cs, and a couple had a least a B or two. But several had almost entirely Ds. The grades of every black student were worse than those of any non-black student, and by a wide margin.

Holy sh-t! Before this, I had had no idea that this was going on.

I quickly realized that these people were being humiliated at Columbia Law School. The school had intentionally set them up for humiliation in order to create a campus aesthetic that somehow made the people running the place feel morally superior. But at least to this point the humiliation had been relatively private — nobody knew about the grades other than the faculty members who gave them out and the students themselves. But now these students were being forced to go public with the humiliation. In the law firm environment, they would have to perform publicly, and sink or swim.

That was the only time that I had occasion to see all the resumes of the black candidates from a law school. I should mention that over the years we did see many black candidates with decent and even good resumes, and in those cases we generally put on big recruiting pushes to try to get those candidates to come to our firm. More often than not we failed, because the competition for the few good candidates was always intense. There are hundreds of major law firms in this country.

Obviously I came away from this experience understanding that affirmative action, at least as practiced at this and other schools, was no favor to the supposed beneficiaries. These were nice young kids, and they could have done well in a different environment. They had been lured here with the promise that the parchment from Columbia Law School would transform their lives. But it would not.

David Lat is the long-time proprietor of Above the Law, who now has a new Substack called Original Jurisdiction. He has a piece from yesterday echoing some of my sentiments, titled “Affirmative Action Is Going Down—And It’s A Good Thing Too.” Lat is an Asian American (I think Filipino). He tells this anecdote about a relative applying a kid to one of the elite New York City private schools:

[I]n preparing to send their oldest son through the gauntlet of Manhattan private-school admissions (for which I had to write a recommendation letter for a four-year-old!), my Asian-American cousin and her white husband talked to an “admissions consultant.” The consultant told them that elite preschools value “diversity.” My cousin excitedly told the consultant that she’s from the Philippines, her husband’s from Australia, and their son at his tender age had already lived in multiple countries and been exposed to many different cultures and languages. “I’m sorry,” the smiling consultant said to them about their white-looking son, “but that’s not what these schools are looking for. Your child does not offer visual diversity.”

Lat notes that Harvard and UNC (and for that matter the rest of academia) are no different:

So in the end, what Harvard and UNC are arguing is that visual diversity is a compelling state interest. Having classrooms and admissions brochures that look like Benetton ads can justify resorting to racial classifications that we have justifiably banned in pretty much every other area of American life. The idea would be laughable if it weren’t so wrong.

It’s all about keeping up appearances for the institutions, no matter how fake the appearances may be. They don’t care who gets thrown under the bus along the way, least of all the black students.

I’ve been looking for years to try to find data on the career success or average incomes of black graduates of elite institutions. If anybody knows where to find some, let me know. But I strongly suspect that nobody gathers this information because they don’t want to know what it would show.

 

Harvard Progressives Covering Up For Their Systemic Racist Friends

May 14, 2022 Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian

It has been obvious for quite a while that pandemic-induced school closings and extended remote learning were going to have substantial negative effects on development among K-12 students. Equally obvious has been that Democrat-controlled jurisdictions — which include essentially all of the major cities with high concentrations of poor and minority students in the education system — have indulged in the longest school closures and the most remote learning. Clearly, this would lead to major negative results for the poor and minority students in these jurisdictions, particularly as compared to the students in places where schools mostly remained open for in-person learning.

A big new Report out from the Center for Educational and Policy Research at Harvard (and other institutes with similarly long names) now confirms the facts that we all knew were coming. The Report is titled “The Consequences of Remote and Hybrid Instruction During the Pandemic,” and has a date of May 2022. The lead author is Dan Goldhaber. This is a very large and well-funded study. It relies on data collected from some 2.1 million students in 10,000 schools in 49 states.

Two things about the Report stand out: (1) The large extent of the negative effects of school closures and remote learning, particularly in what the authors call “high poverty” districts, which effects are at the highest end of what anyone might have expected, and (2) The extreme lengths to which the Report goes to avoid pointing the finger of blame where it needs to be pointed, which is toward the politicians and bureaucrats — essentially all Democrats — responsible for the excessive closures in the high-poverty districts, and on the teachers unions that control the schools and back the politicians in those jurisdictions.

The May 5 issue of the Harvard Gazette contains an interview with Thomas Kane, Professor of Education and Economics at Harvard and second author of the Report, that gives an idea of the extent of the damage inflicted on poor and minority students by the school closures and remote learning. Excerpts:

The striking and important finding was that remote instruction had much more negative impacts in high-poverty schools. High-poverty schools were more likely to go remote and their students lost more when they did so. Both mattered, but the latter effect mattered more. To give you a sense of the magnitude: In high-poverty schools that were remote for more than half of 2021, the loss was about half of a school year’s worth of typical achievement growth. . . .  

Over the last 30 years, there has been like a gradual closing in both the Black-white and Hispanic-white achievement gaps. . . . Our results imply that when those [NAEP] results come out later this year (likely in October, before the midterm election) there will be a decline nationally, especially in states where schools remained remote, and gaps will widen sharply for the first time in a generation.

The Report itself is much more filled with dense technical jargon, but the gist can be gotten from a few sentences:

High poverty schools were more likely to go remote and the consequences for student achievement were more negative when they did so. . . . As noted earlier, there was essentially no widening in math achievement gaps in districts that were fully in-person (.002 standard deviations). In the fifth row, we report the effect of greater incidence of remote/hybrid instruction in high-poverty schools, which was about one third of the total difference (.051/.168). The remaining half of the gap (.085/.168) was due to the differing impact of hybrid/remote instruction on high-poverty schools.

So what are these “high poverty” schools that had long closures and extensive remote learning and left their already struggling students farther behind than ever? You would think that the Report would call them out by name, but instead it doesn’t name a single one of the worst offenders. Nor is the fact ever mentioned that essentially all of these places are in 100% Democrat control, or that they essentially all have powerful teachers unions that led the demands for the long closures and the remote learning. It’s like these things are taboos that must not be mentioned in polite company.

Instead, if a reader is curious as to whether political differences between jurisdictions might have influenced these results, he is left to read between the lines to search for hidden clues. One of the closest things in the Report to real information is the following chart giving average lengths of closures/remote learning by state and, within states, broken down to low, middle and high poverty:

They never mention which states are governed by members of which party, but if we apply our own external knowledge we can see that 10 of the 12 states (including DC) with the highest levels of remote learning had Democratic governors (mayor in the case of DC; Arizona and Maryland are the exceptions), while 11 of the 13 states with the lowest levels of remote learning had Republican governors (Louisiana and Maine are the exceptions). Nothing in the text of the Report, or in the Gazette’s interview with Professor Kane, specifically calls out any of the major Democrat-controlled cities — like Chicago, Baltimore, Philadelphia or Los Angeles — with the longest closures and the worst results for the minority students.

In a time where progressives seem to be focused on racially-based guilt for societal failure to achieve equal results in education, you would think that the unveiling of the data in this Report would be an occasion for accountability for the parties responsible for the disastrous school closures. Instead, what we have is Harvard covering up for its systemically racist friends.