The state of higher education

Do "diversity" statements violate academic freedom?

https://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2023/02/do-diversity-statements-violate-academic-freedom.html

Brian Leiter writes:

Do "diversity" statements violate academic freedom?
FIRE organized a debate between myself and Prof Brian Soucek (UC Davis) on this topic. Here is a recording, for those interested:



I found it constructive and illuminating; it made clear that a key point of difference is about whether "diversity" is an extramural or intramural purpose of higher education. I think it is clearly the former: the essential purpose of universities is the production and dissemination of knowledge (i.e., research and teaching). Universities have over time been enlisted (or enlisted themselves) in various social causes, from anti-communism to the "war effort," to diversity. These are extramural; we can debate the wisdom of universities committing themselves to these social policies, but their having done so does not give them a right to corral faculty time and effort for the same purpose.

Afterwards, FIRE sent us various questions submitted to chat, and invited us to respond. A journalism professor commented in "Chat" that she thought it was "funny" that Soucek and I were "white males." I wrote to this professor as follows: "Throwing out a random comment about how 'funny' it is that the speakers have certain demographic attributes is an insult to the speakers, who have worked hard on these topics and had substantive things to say." No other comments were this stupid, fortunately (although the journalism professor, perhaps unsurprisingly, didn't recognize how stupid the remark was).

A more interesting question asked why a university, that is (currently) allowed to consider "diversity" in recruiting students, should not also be able to take steps to insure student success. This professor (of law) directed to me UC Davis's own "diversity statement" requirements, which ask committees to consider, among other things, the applicant's "awareness of inequities and challenges faced by underrepresented minority student and faculty" and their "track record" in "reduc[ing] barriers in education or research for underrepresented minority students and faculty."

While schools can clearly require from faculty pedagogical practices that contribute to student success, do the Davis criteria really screen for those?

We can agree that faculty should be trained to adjust their teaching for “challenges” their students face, whatever they are; that’s a core pedagogical function. “Inequities” are irrelevant in that regard, so it’s unclear why they’re mentioned (unless there is an ulterior purpose at play). More generally, it's absurd to think a PhD in say chemistry or philosophy or most other subjects will have any expertise in the special learning needs of “minority” students (assuming they have them: what is the evidence?), so the question just invites bullshitting or is really being used as a screening device for something else. (Everyone knows PhD programs do a poor job training students to teach, let alone training them to teach students with “special needs,” whatever their source.)

Moreover, if the goal is student success, then why does the question ask *only* about the challenges faced by underrepresented minorities? This suggests an extramural social goal is being pursued, not a strictly pedagogical one. And why are the “inequities and challenges” facing “faculty” relevant? That “faculty” are mentioned strongly suggests this is not really about successful pedagogy.

According to UC Davis’s own data:

The enrolled student population at University of California-Davis, both undergraduate and graduate, is 25.6% Asian, 25.2% White, 21.6% Hispanic or Latino, 5.55% Two or More Races, 2.17% Black or African American, 0.328% Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islanders, and 0.164% American Indian or Alaska Native.
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Who is the underrepresented minority here? Blacks clearly, but since they comprise only 1 out of every 50 students on campus, surely it can’t be that their challenges trump the challenges facing Whites and Latino students, all of whom are also underrepresented relative to their share of California population? And surely the needs of the over-represented “Asian” students (if there are any special needs defined by Asian-ness, which is doubtful) should count if we’re screening for faculty who can contribute to student success. (Indeed, one might ask why the needs of whites and Asians shouldn't count for more, since they represent more than half the student body!) And why think the needs of the Hispanic students are the same as the needs of “Black” students (if either as a group have distinct pedagogical needs).

(This is why Bakke was so pernicious. There’s a good reason, of remediation and compensatory justice, to favor Blacks in admissions, given the world-historic injustice they suffered in this benighted country. It’s got nothing to do with diversity, as I’ve written elsewhere. But because Justice Powell endorsed the “diversity” nonsense, here we are.)

All of the preceding suggests that even the Davis diversity statement (which is fairly benign compared to many others) is really pretextual, and has nothing to do with successful teaching, and much more to do with assessing the ideological commitments of the candidate, justifying sotto voce unlawful employment practices (giving racial preferences in hiring under the guise of hiring faculty sensitive to “diversity”), and pursuit of an extramural goal of trying to make the professions graduates enter “more diverse” and more “racially equitable.” Even if one thought the latter extramural goal was a worthy one (I am not against it, but for by now familiar Marxian reasons, I really don’t think the main problem in America is lack of racial equity), it would still be an extramural goal to which it would be inappropriate to commandeer faculty time.


Posted by Brian Leiter on February 13, 2023 at 06:37 AM​

 

terrific article, too long to excerpt. Really about much more than just English majors and the humanities, more an assessment of higher education in general


The End of the English Major
Enrollment in the humanities is in free fall at colleges around the country. What happened?

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/03/06/the-end-of-the-english-major

 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/colleg...nts-administration-60881077?mod=hp_opin_pos_1

College Should Be More Like Prison
The inmates I teach are serious, disciplined, hard-working students, eager to engage with ideas.
By Brooke Allen
March 5, 2023 at 11:56 am ET
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Many of us who care deeply about education in the humanities can only feel despair at the state of our institutions of “higher” learning. Enrollment in these subjects is plummeting, and students who take literature and history classes often come in with rudimentary ideas about the disciplines. Interviewed in a recent New Yorker article, Prof. James Shapiro of Columbia said teaching “Middlemarch” to today’s college students is like landing a 747 on a rural airstrip. Technology such as messaging apps, digital crib sheets and ChatGPT, which will write essays on demand, has created a culture of casual cheating.

Never have I been more grateful to teach where I do: at a men’s maximum-security prison. My students there, enrolled in a for-credit college program, provide a sharp contrast with contemporary undergraduates. These men are highly motivated and hard-working. They tend to read each assignment two or three times before coming to class and take notes as well. Some of them have been incarcerated for 20 or 30 years and have been reading books all that time. They would hold their own in any graduate seminar. That they have had rough experiences out in the real world means they are less liable to fall prey to facile ideologies. A large proportion of them are black and Latino, and while they may not like David Hume’s or Thomas Jefferson’s ideas on race, they want to read those authors anyway. They want, in short, to be a part of the centuries-long conversation that makes up our civilization. The classes are often the most interesting part of these men’s prison lives. In some cases, they are the only interesting part.

Best of all from my selfish point of view as an educator, these students have no access to cellphones or the internet. Cyber-cheating, even assuming they wanted to indulge in it, is impossible. But more important, they have retained their attention spans, while those of modern college students have been destroyed by their dependence on smartphones. My friends who teach at Harvard tell me administrators have advised them to change topics or activities several times in each class meeting because the students simply can’t focus for that long.

My students at the prison sit through a 2½-hour class without any loss of focus. They don’t yawn or take bathroom breaks. I have taught classes on the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, Romanticism, George Orwell, South Asian fiction. We’ve done seminars on Adam Smith and Alexis de Tocqueville. Together we have read Montaigne, Rousseau, Keats, Erasmus, Locke, Montesquieu, Wollstonecraft, Byron, Goethe, Petrarch, Rabelais, Saadat Hasan Manto, Rohinton Mistry. The students write essays in longhand; during the pandemic I taught a correspondence class via snail mail. Some of them do read “Middlemarch,” and their teacher finds the experience far more gratifying than trying to land a 747 on a rural airstrip. We encourage them to treat different societies in history as experiments in time travel, where they try to understand the mores of particular eras as though from the inside. They are very open to that approach, unlike university students, who tend see the past only as one long undifferentiated era of grievous unenlightenment: not just one damn thing after another, but one damn oppressive thing after another.

Like students at elite institutions, most of my incarcerated scholars are politically liberal. Unlike them, many are religious, and that proves surprisingly enriching in studying these authors, who would have been amazed to know they would one day be read by classrooms full of atheists. One of my more devout students, a Protestant who converted to Islam, was so distressed by Voltaire’s disrespect for established creeds that he had to be comforted by other class members. They informed him that he was exactly the sort of person Voltaire was aiming his polemic at, and therefore he could understand the force of it in a way his irreligious peers couldn’t.

My hours at the prison are rich in such moments. In many ways, it is the Platonic ideal of teaching, what teaching once was. No faculty meetings, no soul-deadening committee work, no bloated and overbearing administration. No electronics, no students whining about grades. Quite a few of our students are serving life sentences and will never be able to make use of their hard-won college credits. No student debt, no ideological intolerance, no religious tests—whoops, I mean mandatory “diversity” statements. And in our courteous, laughter-filled classroom there is none of the “toxic environment” that my friends in the academy complain about, and that I experienced during my own college teaching career.

If prison inmates, many of whom have committed violent crimes, can pay close attention for a couple of hours, put aside their political and personal differences, support one another’s academic efforts, write eloquent essays without the aid of technology and get through a school year without cheating, is it too much to ask university students to do the same? Or ask professors to try to create an atmosphere where these habits can prevail? Perhaps prison education can serve as a model of how to return to true learning and intellectual exchange.

Ms. Allen reviews books and film for the Hudson Review, the New Criterion and other publications.​

 

on the surface of things this doesn't look great



here is a statement from FIRE:

https://www.thefire.org/research-learn/fire-letter-stanford-university-march-10-2023

 

probably the most thorough discussion of what transpired that I've seen

Yale Law Is No Longer #1—For Free-Speech Debacles
Congratulations, Stanford Law, you're the new poster child for intolerance.

https://davidlat.substack.com/p/yale-law-is-no-longer-1for-free-speech

 

Stanford's president has issued an apology to Judge Duncan, co-signed by the law school dean:

https://eppc.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/letter-from-Stanford.pdf

It's pretty clear that this paragraph refers to the DEI dean who lectured Duncan in the video: "In addition, staff members who should have enforced university policies failed to do so, and instead intervened in inappropriate ways that are not aligned with the university’s commitment to free speech."

 

alright, I'll nibble. what's the good reason?

 

Turley comments

“No Squeeze” at Stanford: President and Law Dean Issue Apology that Omits One Critical Thing…

https://jonathanturley.org/2023/03/...o-judge-duncan-that-omits-one-critical-thing/

 

https://dersh.substack.com/p/should...-student?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Should the Names of Stanford Student Disrupters Be Published?
Alan Dershowitz
14 min ago

Once again, a conservative speaker had been shouted down by censorial law students who didn't want him to speak. This time it was Stanford, last time it was Yale. Then it was Georgetown.

If the Stanford Dean of diversity, equity and inclusion gets her way, this censorship of conservative speakers will spread to other campuses. Among the worst offenders in this all-too-common censorship fest was Dean Tirien Steinbach. In what appears to be a written statement prepared in advance, she effectively silenced the speaker, federal Judge Kyle Duncan, by monopolizing his space. She sought to justify not inviting speakers who might offend the sensibilities of students who she claims to be responsible for "protecting" and providing "safe spaces" against uncomfortable ideas.

After paying lip service to free speech, she suggested reconsidering Stanford's speech policy, repeatedly asked whether "the squeeze is worth the juice". She questioned whether Judge Duncan, whose opinions and views cause "hurt" to students, should have been invited to speak. Her bottom-line message was that offending some students is worse than allowing others to hear from a controversial speaker. This from a high-ranking administrator who was purporting to speak on behalf of the university.

The real victims of this censorship were the students who were denied the opportunity to hear Judge Duncan's full presentation.

An angry Judge Duncan responded, "Don't feel sorry for me. I'm a life-tenured judge. What outrages me is that these kids are being treated like dogshit by fellow students and administrators."

As the late Justice Thurgood Marshall once observed, "The freedom to speak and the freedom to hear are inseparable; They are two sides of the same coin."

To her credit, the dean of the law school, Jenny Martinez, condemned the disrupters, writing, "However well-intentioned, attempts at managing the room in this instance went awry... The way this event unfolded was not aligned with out institutional commitment to freedom of speech." She gave no indication of whether anyone would be disciplined.

To be sure, protesting, picketing and even brief heckling of speakers is also protected free speech, but shouting speakers down with the intent to silence them is not. It is explicitly prohibited by Stanford's rules. Yet that's exactly what occurred without apparent consequences to the disrupters.

The disrupters also attempted to shame the sponsors of the speech by disclosing their names and subjecting them to harassment. This suggests a possible response to the disrupters. Following the Yale disruptions, some judges have announced that they will no longer hire law clerks from Yale. Similar announcements regarding Stanford are likely. In my view, that amounts to collective punishment of the innocent along with guilty. Many law students from these schools do not agree with disrupting speakers, and they should not be denied clerkships. Instead, the names of the disrupters might be published and made available to potential employers, so they can decide whether they want to hire graduates with such intolerance for diversity of viewpoints.

I made a similar suggestion about publishing the names of Berkeley law students who voted to ban all Zionists — that is, believers in Israel's right to exist — from speaking at 14 law school clubs, including feminist, Black and gay organizations.

As one who well remembers McCarthyite "blacklists," I'm uncomfortable about publishing the names of student censors. But if they are proud of their very public efforts to silence speakers with whom they disagree, they should be proud to have their names published so that potential employers can have relevant information before they make hiring decisions. That would be far better than judges and other employers refusing to hire ANY students from the offending schools.

Law schools are supposed to teach advocacy skills and a commitment to the rule of law. They should have and enforce vigorous free speech policies. They should not have deans, like Steinbach, who are part of the problem, rather than part of the solution.

Stanford should apologize to Judge Duncan for the dean's actions and inactions. He observed that in his view, "This was a set up. She was working with the students." Stanford should discipline any students who violated its speech policies. Most importantly, it should foster values of diversity of viewpoints, rather than merely diversity of race and ethnicity. Perhaps the law school should appoint a new dean of "diversity of opinions, tolerance for other views and free speech".
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