Indiana’s DEI Law

by Gina Schouten on April 1, 2024

Here in the U.S., my home state of Indiana has a new state-mandated DEI initiative: The law specifies that:

“Each board of trustees [of a public college] shall establish a policy that provides that a faculty member may not be granted tenure or a promotion by the institution if, based on past performance or other determination by the board of trustees, the faculty member is:

(1) unlikely to foster a culture of free inquiry, free expression, and intellectual diversity within the institution;

(2) unlikely to expose students to scholarly works from a variety of political or ideological frameworks that may exist within and are applicable to the faculty member’s academic discipline; or

(3) likely, while performing teaching duties within the scope of the faculty member’s employment, to subject students to political or ideological views and opinions that are unrelated to the faculty member’s academic discipline or assigned course of instruction.”[i]

Coverage of the law in The Chronicle of Higher Education emphasizes the practical difficulties with implementation as well as the law’s likely unintended consequences. Meanwhile, many teachers at these institutions vehemently oppose the law on academic freedom grounds. I’m sympathetic with these criticisms. The law is ominous indeed. It seems intentionally vague, with intellectual diversity serving as a pretext for lashing out against teachers perceived to be indoctrinating students, and it affords boards ample flexibility to punish teachers whether or not they’re doing any such thing.

But I wonder if college teachers shouldn’t make a different kind of argument against this law: Why not question the law’s premise, that intellectual diversity is our critics’ cause and not our own?

After all, the law is right in an important respect: We should hold ourselves accountable for fostering “a culture of free inquiry, free expression, and intellectual diversity within the institution,” for exposing students to “a variety of political or ideological frameworks” within our disciplines, and for practicing humility about the limits of our expertise. Assume for a minute what I believe to be true: Some of the public that distrusts us, that worries that we’re idealogues indoctrinating their children, some of the people who fit that description are persuadable. In intellectual diversity, we could loudly and publicly find shared cause with those critics. We could applaud the purported end goals of this law even as we take issue with the means through which the law purports to pursue them. And we could really think about what better means of pursuing them we can devise. What are the best pedagogical practices for fostering intellectual diversity? How can we hold ourselves and each other accountable for developing and practicing those skills? What affirmative steps can we take to foster a genuinely fruitful intellectual diversity among students and teachers?

We’re having these conversations. Can we find ways to have them with our persuadable critics? It seems to me that a crucial first step is to openly agree with our critics on three things: We are not currently nailing it on intellectual diversity; we should hold ourselves responsible for doing better; and good ideas for how to do so can come from outside our institutions. We should agree with our critics on those things even as we make the case that laws like Indiana’s are not the solution—and even as we reject the casting of higher education as hostile or indifferent to intellectual diversity.

[i] The law does other things too: It institutes board-conducted, post-tenure reviews, and it requires the boards’ diversity committees to “make recommendations to promote recruitment and retention of underrepresented students,” where the word “underrepresented” replaces the word “minority” in the law as it stood prior to this change. (That latter change strikes me as a good one, and some version of post-tenure reviews seems good too, though not those conducted by boards of trustees.)

 

{ 84 comments }

1

somebody who remembers that christopher rufo runs the public college system of florida and chaya raichik runs the public education system of oklahoma 04.01.24 at 6:40 pm

“underrepresented” students are the ones who scream racial slurs for four hours a day at anyone less white than tilda swinton – when was the last time you met one on a college campus? wednesday? okay, when was the last time you met two on a college campus?

“overrepresented” students are trans; after all, trans people are such a small percentage of the population that if you multiply it out, no trans person should ever be allowed to attend a college, or be within five hundred feet of one.

there are no “persuadable critics” on these points because they have no interest in intellectual diversity, they only have an interest in crushing the enemies of white american christian nationalism, and, of course, the queers. pretending they have a genuine interest in anything short of that is a mug’s game. hard pass from me

2

Sashas 04.01.24 at 7:56 pm

@OP I’m in favor of intellectual diversity where appropriate, but my general guideline is that any framework I introduce my students to must be useful to them. If it’s correct (certainly or plausibly), that obviously counts. If it is important so that we can understand frameworks that responded to it or simply for a historical record, that would also count although I would teach it differently.

I personally teach computer science, but I would apply the thinking above to, say, how I would teach the defunct “waterfall” method of software design. I would not blink an eye if a colleague said they had cut waterfall from their course entirely. This is true despite the fact that some software development houses still use the waterfall method.

My point is that there are limits to appropriate intellectual diversity in academia, and current US Republican policy is well outside those limits.

3

Sophie Jane 04.01.24 at 8:14 pm

This law is, very obviously, a dogwhistle and not worth addressing as anything other than a dogwhistle. Why do the bigots’ work for them by maintaining the pretence that it’s anything else?

4

Jacob 04.01.24 at 8:40 pm

I don’t support the law. But it is entertaining to see people losing their minds about this who also support DEI requirements and DEI statements. (I’m not saying this is you.) Perhaps we should take the obvious lesson: have neither be required.

5

Gina Schouten 04.01.24 at 9:08 pm

Hi Sashas, I like your general guideline, although I think I have a more inclusive view about the ways some framework can be useful to students.

But my thought isn’t that we’d teach “current US Republican policy” in our classes, any more than we teach “current US Democratic policy. (Unless it’s a class about that.) By way of contrast, I do think a teacher would be doing something inimical to intellectual diversity if they taught in such a way as to predictably make salient to their students that they think all current US Republican policy is outside the space of being worth reflecting on. My own primary concern about intellectual diversity concerns how we make sure we’re teaching in such a way that students don’t worry that we (or their classmates) will regard their moral and political priors as despicable or beneath engagement.

6

Gina Schouten 04.01.24 at 9:19 pm

Hi Jacob, thanks for this. I don’t think there has to be anything contradictory about supporting DEI statements but opposing this law. And I don’t think giving up on both is an obvious or a good solution. We have good reasons for caring about various kinds of diversity. My thing is, I think defenders of higher education make a philosophical and a political mistake if we don’t push back against the premise that intellectual diversity is the kind you care about only if you’re Republican and an opponent of higher education. I think making the case against this bill ride on academic freedom (alone) risks missing a chance to push back against that premise.

7

Harry 04.01.24 at 9:59 pm

We had a kind of scuffle about this in Wisconsin recently: the Republican Party here is basically led by anti-Trumpists (who are not never-Trumpists) and who took up anti-DEI partly as a way of trying to ingratiate themselves with DeSantis when he was a possible nominee. They kind of lost interest when he crashed, and we ended up with a reasonably benign compromise (which our Regents then rejected for their own reasons, and then reversed themselves when they realised that they had kicked the brand new Chancellor of our campus and President of the system in the teeth).

It’s really unhealthy for our teaching that the faculty are so politically and religiously undiverse. It’s probably much more unhealthy for our teaching that our faculty don’t learn how to teach, aren’t given much incentive to improve and lack an infrastructure for improving. I worry much less about indoctrination (there’s not much evidence that many professors want to indoctrinate, and even less that they succeed) than about alienation; it’s just so a shitty experience to be in a class in which your professor, who doesn’t know any Christians, says all Christians are racist or selfish, or if you are the only kid in the class wearing a hijab and your professor explains that the only reason Muslim women wear hijabs is sexism, or if your professor repeatedly makes jokes about political figures you or your family vote for assuming that the whole class shares his political views. Or your professor, who seemed to recognize you were smart and engaged student suddenly stops talking to you the day you first turn up in ROTC uniform. And, of course, the liberal student who has never had a political discussion with anyone who disagrees with her (if she’s reading she knows who she is! — well, all these students will recognize themselves) she came to college is unlikely to have such a discussion in classrooms like that. And a few experiences like that just shuts those students down even in other classes. It always takes a while for conservative students to trust that I really mean it that I want the full range of reasonable views to be present in our classroom discussions; and I’m disappointed how many students whose contributions are deeply appreciated by their classmates have some crappy experience that they’ll tell me in private.

The idea that a public university shouldn’t be intellectually and politically diverse is pretty odd. So. Yes we should reject the premise, quite loudly. And mean it.

8

Harry 04.01.24 at 10:01 pm

Also. An appeal to academic freedom is like an appeal to freedom of speech. It might be a good reason that others shouldn’t force you to behave differently. It is never a justification for behaving the way you are behaving.

9

LFC 04.02.24 at 12:10 am

I don’t know whether the atmosphere now reportedly prevailing at elite U.S. universities, both private and public, is representative of what’s going on in universities generally. With that caveat, I have a somewhat personal comment. Also, please don’t take this as an everything-was-better-in-the-old-days comment, because everything was not better in the old days, and only a jerk would think that.

In the late 1970s I was an undergraduate at the institution where Gina Schouten is now a professor. My political views were well to the left of center, as were those of many (though not all) of the students I knew (and no doubt many of the professors and other instructors were somewhere to the left of center as well, though I think a fair number of them either hovered around the center or didn’t care about politics). However, I never had the sense that there was a prevailing orthodoxy capital O, and it would never have crossed my mind to exercise self-censorship in a class discussion. (And as best I could tell, it never crossed anyone else’s mind either, although I’m sure that’s an overstatement and I can’t put myself in anyone else’s head.) I remember spending a certain amount of time — especially, though not only, outside of class — in intellectual and political arguments. It was viewed as normal, and part of what you were in college to do.

By contrast, a letter published in the March-April 2024 issue of Harvard Magazine opens by noting: “Last year, in a survey completed by 98 percent of Harvard seniors, only 37 percent reported that they were comfortable discussing controversial subjects in class.” This suggests that to the extent there is an intellectual diversity problem, at least at this particular institution, it’s coming more from the bottom up than the top down, i.e., that the problem is not “indoctrination,” which I strongly suspect is largely a figment of the Right’s imagination, but one of a culture of self-censorship, for lack of a better phrase.

Assuming this is at least part of the problem, I don’t know what the solutions are, but I think the OP, in the second-to-last paragraph, is asking some of the right questions.

10

J-D 04.02.24 at 12:16 am

Each board of trustees [of a public college] shall establish a policy that provides that a faculty member may not be granted tenure or a promotion by the institution if, based on past performance or other determination by the board of trustees, the faculty member is:

(1) unlikely to foster a culture of free inquiry, free expression, and intellectual diversity within the institution

If you ask me, any conservative is unlikely to foster a culture of free inquiry, free expression and intellectual diversity. Conservatives have never done this before, so why should they start now?

But no matter how strong a case is made in favour of that proposition in the abstract, everybody knows that nobody is going to be denied tenure or promotion under this legislation, or any policy made under this legislation, for being a conservative, no matter how good a reason that would actually be.

We should hold ourselves accountable for fostering “a culture of free inquiry, free expression, and intellectual diversity within the institution,” …

But no matter what words they use, the people who wrote this law want to obstruct you from doing so.

In intellectual diversity, we could loudly and publicly find shared cause with those critics.

You will no more find common cause with them by using the same words than Jacobites and Hanoverians could find common cause by declaring their loyalty to ‘the rightful King’.

… if we don’t push back against the premise that intellectual diversity is the kind you care about only if you’re Republican and an opponent of higher education.

Well, yes: conservatives lie, and in particular they’re lying like rugs when they pose as supporters of intellectual diversity, when they’re no such thing, and saying so is, I suppose, a kind of pushback.

11

Sashas 04.02.24 at 1:58 am

@Gina Schouten (5)

You may well have a broader view than I do of what is worth introducing students to. :-) My reactions are also definitely affected by Wisconsin’s latest flavor of this nonsense, which is a deal reached by our Board of Regents and members of the state legislature this past December and which includes the following gem:

“UW-Madison will seek philanthropic support to create an endowed chair to focus on conservative political thought, classical economic theory, or classical liberalism, depending on the donor’s interest, conducting a national search to fill the position.”

So you can I hope see why my comment about current US Republican policy didn’t feel like that much of a leap for me.

Also, given what current US Republican policy is, I don’t actually have a problem with students knowing I think its planks are evil. My students already know I’m trans and that I think I have a right to exist. I’ve talked to them about COVID policy. I don’t bring fascism up in class more because I don’t think it would be helpful for me to do so than because I think it would be ethically wrong to do so. I don’t connect the dots for them to Republican policy planks, but again this is because I think it would be ineffective for me to do so, not because I think it would be wrong to do so.

I respect your intent. Students (ordinarily) should not need to worry that we or their classmates will regard their moral or political priors as despicable or beneath engagement.

But please consider that we have some students who hold stances that ARE despicable. If convincing someone through patience and compassion is not available (which IMO can be the case for stances someone did not think their way into in the first place), I hope you will consider peer (and superior) pressure to be a valid break-glass-in-case-of-emergency option.

12

Alex SL 04.02.24 at 2:37 am

As with the previous post on academic freedom here, the problem is that what counts as ‘reasonable range of views’ and thus acceptable is dependent on the cultural context. There is no absolute freedom, and there can’t be. Part of it is that one of the views that people may bring into the university is “blasphemous statements shouldn’t be allowed”, leading to some interesting circularity as two view have to be tolerated at the same time despite logically only one of them being able to be enacted without contradiction. The generally preferred solution among liberal academics is to enforce the view that all opinions that aren’t calling for violence can be expressed publicly, and in practice that leads to the exclusion of the view “blasphemous statements shouldn’t be allowed”, as those holding that view either need to pretend they aren’t offended by blasphemy or see themselves out, leaving academia to those who aren’t. There is no squaring this circle without special pleading. Similar choices have to be made about identity, as in practice allowing certain non-violent opinions to be expressed still means to allow bullying.

For this particular case of “DEI” rules (note that this abbreviation is not necessarily intelligible to all readers outside of the USA), two additional problems arise. First, as pointed out by others, the lack of good faith on the part of those who formulated it. As an analogy, there is no problem in principle with a law against speeding. But there is a problem with such a law if you already know that the people who passed it and the people who enforce it want to target only Asian drivers while letting white drivers go 180 km/h in a school zone. And you know that already because the proponents of the law freely admit in to their followers that that is the purpose of the law, gleefully celebrating how they will be able to make life miserable for Chinese immigrants, who they hate. There is no way that a conservative academic who discriminates against, say, gay students would be sanctioned by the proponents of these rules, because it is clear that these people only want a stick to beat liberal academics with.

Second, as the OP already pointed out, the vagueness. What is even meant with diverse viewpoints? It may currently seem silly to allow the view that the Spanish language doesn’t exist and is a conspiracy created to destroy the USA as equally valid with the view that the Spanish language does exist and evolved out of ancient Latin. But Spanish language denialism would not in the slightest be sillier than climate change denialism, respiratory mask denialism, vaccine efficacy denialism, creationism, or the claim that the US civil war wasn’t about slavery. They are all equally crazy nonsense and all equally easily disproved empirically. At any moment the conservative movement of the USA could add Spanish language denialism to its shibboleths, instantly transforming it from a silly hypothetical to a “political controversy” where “diverse views have to be respected” if one doesn’t want to be perceived as intolerant.

Again, what is considered reasonable is dependent on the cultural context. And that is a big problem if one side of the political spectrum constantly changes that context in their favour by picking demonstrable falsehoods and turning them into items of faith, partly to create more cult membership markers, partly to demonstrate its ability to bully the other side. Of course it is not a good tactic to argue against a law that pretends to be in favour of tolerance. But at some point one would have to point out that the other side isn’t operating in good faith and that in terms of practical goals, everything it does has the singular purpose of destroying tolerance and academic freedom.

13

Harry 04.02.24 at 2:49 am

“Also, please don’t take this as an everything-was-better-in-the-old-days comment…”

I went to college in the early 80s in the UK, where things were very different from how they are here now. My friends were politically all over the place, and so were their friends. I know plenty of students of whom that isn’t close to true. But maybe that was true then and I didn’t know it!

The UW system did a similar but much more detailed survey recently, with a much lower response rate, and my impression from that, and from talking to numerous students, left and right, is very much in line with what LFC says: there’s a really big problem of self-censorship, and it isn’t just conservative students, but students across the political spectrum, and they are more afraid of each other than of their professors. This is in line with my diagnosis that there’s a big problem of teacher skill (but, of course, everything is evidence for what I believe is true!!). In the prevailing environment it takes work and skill for a teacher to create an environment sufficiently trusting that people can say what they are thinking and hear what others are saying, interpret one another charitably, and know that they will be interpreted charitably.

I looked around at one point, and couldn’t find any surveys about this sort of stuff from more than 5 years ago, so, again, for all I know it was ever thus! (If so, that completely defies my experience and the testimony of everyone I know who has been teaching for a long time, but it would be nice to have survey data).

J-D: so you do agree with the value the conservatives (and Gina) are endorsing, you just don’t believe that conservatives actually believe in it? (And, I presume you are only accusing conservative politicians and thought leaders of bad faith, not all people with conservative political views).

14

J-D 04.02.24 at 4:17 am

J-D: so you do agree with the value the conservatives (and Gina) are endorsing, you just don’t believe that conservatives actually believe in it?

They’re not endorsing the same value, they’re endorsing different values and using the same name for them.

God bless the King! I mean, the Faith’s Defender;
God bless (no harm in blessing) the Pretender,
But which Pretender is, and which is King,
God bless us all! That’s quite another thing.

(John Byrom, apparently, although the citations I can find online are not uniform.)

Last year, in a survey completed by 98 percent of Harvard seniors, only 37 percent reported that they were comfortable discussing controversial subjects in class.

What that doesn’t tell you is which are the subjects they thought were controversial. If people harbour a desire to discuss the subject of whether people like me should be dispossessed, beaten, mutilated, and driven from the country, I want them to feel uncomfortable about doing so in class. They should.

15

Peter Dorman 04.02.24 at 4:53 am

I won’t comment on Indiana because I don’t know anything about it, and a lot depends on just how you would want to deal with right wing politicians, tactically.

That said, my experience is that, on the left, a big shift happened when the “cultural turn” took over a lot of departments and classrooms. Old time lefties, like me, were happy with intellectual diversity because we believed that the injustices of the world were mostly due to economic and social structures, and there would be a lot of cultural/intellectual twisting and turning on the way to dealing with them. (And maybe our analysis of it was not quite right, and folks who disagreed with us would be helpful in pointing it out.)

Then along came the cultural turn. The sins of the world were traceable to people having bad thought structures. The goal of education became deconstructing those evil ways of thinking and replacing them with good ways. Not surprisingly, there was less room for intellectual diversity.

Now, I don’t think for a moment that any faction of the left has a monopoly on intolerance. Maybe there’s less visible right wing intolerance in academia because much of it is too dumb to get through the gates. But we should own the part of the problem that’s ours.

16

Alan White 04.02.24 at 5:55 am

I had a near 40 year academic career, getting even one national accolade along the way as a Carnegie state professor of the year, and my classroom approach was definitely confrontational, and in the Socratic sense that crap thinking needed to be confronted in order to get to anything approaching the truth. Anything that bars that is inimical to academic freedom. The University of Wisconsin’s 1894 Regents’ commitment to “the continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found” which is emblazoned on plaques found on every campus (that is, those not yet closed by ongoing political machinations) is just as a reliable guide to higher educational policy now as then. Yeah I know–it’s not a guide to how these DEI attacks can be managed–but it is a warning to remember that getting to the truth is the goal of education, and to be wary of anything that reeks of mere partisanship.

17

LFC 04.02.24 at 6:01 am

Harry @13
Appreciate the comment, esp as you are in contact with students all the time and thus much closer to the situation than I am. I just want to clarify my opening remark: what I meant was banal, i.e. that some things were better in “the old days” but other things were not (e.g., campuses are much more welcoming places now for members of sexual and racial minorities, which is good, but this development has been accompanied by other things that are less good, e.g. the problems being discussed in this thread).

18

Matt 04.02.24 at 6:25 am

and in practice that leads to the exclusion of the view “blasphemous statements shouldn’t be allowed”, as those holding that view either need to pretend they aren’t offended by blasphemy or see themselves out, leaving academia to those who aren’t.

Some of this can be dealt with by making a distinction between diversity withing and between institutions. I’m pretty happy to say that state-run schools should reject the idea that “blasphemous statements shouldn’t be allowed”, not least as a corollary to religious freedom, but also because state-run schools should have stronger academic freedom principles. But, that doesn’t meant hat people who think balsphemy should be prohibited must leave academia – rather, they can start schools where that’s a policy, and try to attract students and faculty. There are a number of universities in the US where, while the rules are not put quite in terms of “blasphamy”, departing from orthodoxy in some ways isn’t allowed and following these rules is a condition of employment. BYU is perhaps the best known (because of its successful sports programs, perhaps) but there are several other universities where such rules apply.

At least to a degree, paying attention to the diversity within/diversity between distinction helps with some other issues, too. I think it would be foolish, at the very best, to say that each economics department should hire an Austrian economist (or a Marxian economist) but also think it’s fine, even good, that, say, George Mason has a lot of (is perhaps dominated by) Austrian economists, and that UMass Amherst was, at least at one time, heavily weighted towards economists who took Marx much more seriously (I’m not sure if they called themselves Marxists or not) than mainstream economics does. Of course, getting state legislatures, let alone average people, to understand this is not especially easy.

19

engela 04.02.24 at 10:39 am

Ok, I’ll bite: what does “diversity” mean?

The post echoes the language of the Indiana law in calling for “variety”. Cambridge Dictionary says it’s about the number of different types of things:

the fact of many different types of things or people being included in something; a range of different things or people

This seems to imply that a student population with 99% WASPs and 1% containing a multitude of minority ethnicities would be more “diverse” than one with 40% minority population with a slightly smaller number of distinct ethnicities. Likewise gender “diversity” on boardrooms works be satisfied if there was one woman (or non-binary person) on every board. I don’t think that’s what people mean.

I think in practice they’re using (or abusing) the word to mean something more like representation: a population whose proportions approximate wider society’s.

Moving to the “intellectual” sense, the literal meaning of diversity would entail that if a university had Trotskyists, Maoists, Critical Theorists and Neo-Marxists on the faculty it would be “diverse” but I don’t think what critics mean.

The representational use of diversity applied to intellectual matters seems inimical to free inquiry and forces universities to conform to the prejudices of wider society when they should be doing the opposite, especially in a country like US.

20

Trader Joe 04.02.24 at 11:30 am

To be a bit realistic about it – probably a full 75% or even more of what is taught on college campuses really has no political or diversity aspect to it whatsoever. The only place where these restraints plausibly apply to what is actually being taught would be in certain areas within the so called Liberal Arts part of the curriculum.

Where it DOES arise is with respect to a professors own commentary about matters which are usually not part of the curriculum (Harry @7 provides multiple good examples). These are the sort of abuses that we like to imagine can be or could be curbed with laws such as these.

Of that – I’m highly doubtful. A person who will make a crack about wearing a hijab or slander a transperson or any of the common-enough affronts isn’t going to be curbed by a DEI law and the fact is there are already various tools available with which to confront such persons to the extent the student chooses to utilize them (which, sadly they rarely do).

Its nice to imagine Universities as a place where free inquiry and free expression hold supreme but this has been eroded on the campus in exactly the same ways it has been eroded in the public square. Everyone seems to feel they have the right to their opinions and don’t seem to feel they should face any consequences whatsoever for having them – that’s never what free speech and intellectual inquiry have been about.

21

engels 04.02.24 at 12:03 pm

Just to clarify: I agree with LFC et al that there is a problem now (in US), I just don’t think “intellectual diversity” is the right way to conceptualise it. Also agree with LFC that it comes from outside: universities are being made to conform with the values of consumer capitalism and the practices of the corporate world, of whose human value-chain they are now a primary, relatively low-profit stage.

If people harbour a desire to discuss the subject of whether people like me should be dispossessed… I want them to feel uncomfortable

Are you a landlord by any chance?

22

Harry 04.02.24 at 12:59 pm

LFC — yes I understood you to be saying that the past might possibly have better in one way, even if all things considered worse (and I’m reasonably confident it was better in that way, without much evidence).

J-D: “If people harbour a desire to discuss the subject of whether people like me should be dispossessed, beaten, mutilated, and driven from the country, I want them to feel uncomfortable about doing so in class. They should”

But if you spend time at Harvard, or at Madison, or at Milwaukee, and actually talk to students, you find that they have no desire to discuss that, or say any such thing. They are anxious about expressing a pacifist view in a discussion of WWII, or asking about conservative literature of dissent in a class on literature of dissent, or asking at what point that fetus has the kind of moral standing that make it wrong to kill it, in a class about the morality of abortion, or suggesting that there might be serious and sincere religious reasons for wearing a hijab in a class on Iran, or asking questions about just about anything controversial when they themselves know that they don’t have a secure knowledge base, for fear of being judged as having some offensive view (that they don’t have, because they don’t really have a view, because they are self-aware enough to know they are ignorant). That’s what is actually going on. And its a problem.

Though instructors talking for 50 or 75 minutes straight, telling students everything that was in the reading (so the students don’t do it) and having students shopping for shoes because there’s no electronics policy and the lecturing is so inefficient that you can get everything that’s in it by listening casually is a much bigger problem. You don’t need to talk to students to know this, just wander the halls, and look in from the back of lecture rooms.

23

engels 04.02.24 at 1:07 pm

“Diversity between institutions” (Matt) is an almost diametrically opposed agenda to “diversity within institutions” (which Indiana and Gina seem to advocate) it seems to me. I think this points to a rather general contradiction within “diversity” advocacy: if you want the restaurant scene in Madrid to resemble lower Manhattan then the distinctiveness of dining in Madrid vs Manhattan will inevitably attenuate.

24

dporpentine 04.02.24 at 1:18 pm

In intellectual diversity, we could loudly and publicly find shared cause with those critics. We could applaud the purported end goals of this law even as we take issue with the means through which the law purports to pursue them.

Conceding the premise of bad faith claims doesn’t have a great history of practical success.

It’s also pretty condescending at a human level. You know what the people who wrote this law want and pretending not to–pretending to see past them, to the glories on the horizon that are richer and more rewarding than they appear to recognize–is somewhere between disrespectful and self-aggrandizing.

25

Anna M 04.02.24 at 1:21 pm

From Indiana’s House Bill 1040

Provides that a school corporation or qualified school may not provide instruction that socialism, Marxism, totalitarianism, or similar political systems are compatible with the principles of freedom upon which the United States was founded

May I be permitted to express just a quantum of skepticism that a political system that sought to prevent such ideas being discussed is genuinely concerned about ensuring a diversity of views? I might take the calls from conservatives for intellectual diversity a little more seriously if they seemed to demonstrate a genuine commitment to the principle – yet, much like many previous controversies (free speech, abortion, civil rights, etc. etc. etc.), the people with such deep-rooted and sincere convictions mysteriously find themselves busy when conservatives are the violators (often with far more institutional power behind them). Of course, not being in academia myself, perhaps I am being unfair – maybe there are indeed swathes of conservatives outraged that there isn’t more communist discourse in their business studies electives, revolted by Turning Point USA’s Professor Watchlist, or even tearing their hair out that Leadership Institute is only dedicated to ensuring a conservative group on every campus as opposed to mandating a diverse set of views. Perhaps those within the US academic system might enlighten me?

However, setting aside the politics of it all, what about seeking intellectual diversity purely because it is a good thing in and of itself?

Well, a lot depends on what is being promulgated and how, no? If your position is anything other than absolute free-speech (e.g. anyone should be able to demand their opinions be heard – regardless of how harmful, demonstrably false, or irrelevant they may be – regardless of the time, place, circumstances, and whether or not anyone wants to hear them), then you already agree that there should be boundaries – you are just arguing about where they should be. Harry wrote “I want the full range of reasonable views to be present in our classroom discussions”, which is certainly a sentiment that can be applauded – but then this immediately opens the question as to what counts as reasonable (and who makes that determination).

Are students self-censoring? I’ve no doubt they are (indeed, pretty much anyone who isn’t going about their day constantly vocalising their stream-of-consciousness must be to at least some extent). But that doesn’t tell me whether or not their self-censorship is based on an accurate assessment of the potential repercussions (need I point out that the actual rate of crime and the reported fear of crime do not necessarily correlate?). It doesn’t tell me whether this is because universities are unable to promulgate an intellectually diverse culture, or if it is just that people who are spending non-trivial amounts of money would prefer if their time isn’t taken up with listening to “I’m not against X, it is just that [insert tired argument heard one billion times before]”. It certainly doesn’t tell me if this is because radical left wing people are indeed fostering an intolerant culture against conservatives, or if it is just that declaring you hold ideals which are detrimental to others has the unfortunate side-effect that people will tend to treat you as if you hold ideals which are detrimental to others. And it really doesn’t tell me to what degree the problem, if indeed problem there is, is actually prevalent. Oddly enough, such concerns don’t seem to plague conservative establishments (c.f. The University of Austin, Prager University, etc.), but of course one cannot expect reciprocation in such matters.

[As a side note, interestingly – despite apparently being part of the evil woke mob who are oh so intolerant – I have never argued that conservatives should, purely on the basis of being conservatives, be unable to marry, adopt children, access healthcare, express affection to their partner in public, be unable to become an educator, forbidden from joining the military, be unable to use public bathrooms, be unable to protest, demonstrate, lobby, or argue in ways that I would not apply equally to all other people – and yet, these are all things which I, and/or friends and family, have been prevented from (both de facto and often de jure) under policies advocated for and supported by conservatives during my lifetime.]

It is certainly true that I don’t think it should be the case that a conservative could be castigated by their professor for their political views in an unprovoked showing of contempt (or a Christian for their religious beliefs, or a member of the ROTC for their military allegiances, etc.). But dare I suggest that it should equally not be the case that a professor publicly declares their belief that black people are intellectually inferior, or that trans people are delusional, or that a woman is kind of like a Ford pickup truck: built to take a pounding. To me this has little to do with ensuring an intellectually diverse environment, and more to do with the minimal professional competence one should expect from anyone in a position of authority. This is not to say that abuses do not happen, but that it seems to be less because there is “the wrong atmosphere” and more because universities have a hierarchical structure which frequently tolerates abuse so long as the abusers have sufficient clout. Given that, sans interference (which would be somewhat less than ideal given that it would likely be undertaken by political partisans, as in the case outlined by the OP), any enforcement or regulation will likely fall to this hierarchy itself, may I express just a little cynicism as to how likely it is to be applied equally?

But what of the students themselves? It is tempting to point out that the supreme court is poised to overturn abortion rights (despite the majority of Americans believing it should be a decision between doctor and patient), and suggest that if conservatives are concerned that they might be snubbed in the lunch-queue while left-wingers are concerned they could lose bodily autonomy on pain of imprisonment or even death, there might perhaps be a little bit of disparity in power and outcome here, and that hauling oneself over the coals for not sufficiently protecting the feelings of people who typically dominate the social, cultural, political, and economic landscapes might be just a little bit of an odd priority. However, far be it from me to suggest that university professors might wish to prioritise consideration as to exactly how they are going to support their non-conservative students.

Instead, let me express my view that I’m not entirely sure how, outside the classroom, one is going to ensure intellectual diversity without pretty draconian enforcement. At which point, one again encounters the thorny issues of how to balance an intellectually diverse environment with people expressing their freedom of association. I must confess that I am unwilling to spend time in the company of people who express the belief that people like me should be treated as subhuman (even if they are doing so politely, and are “kindly” making an exception for me as “one of the good ones”). Presumably such horrific behaviour is precisely the problem, and should have seen me expelled, tarred, feathered, and possibly summarily executed.

But what of the scenario which seems to be presented here – that there is a thoughtful conservative, who doesn’t support extreme positions (such as the majority of the Republican political platform), but does wish to express their entirely reasonable yet somehow still unpopular views without having to worry about social isolation? Certainly, by all means, people should do their best to ensure such a hypothetical student may thrive in the university environment. But if the university is committed to ensuring that there are safe spaces for conservatives, perhaps conservatives could reciprocate – or is that too much to ask?

26

Gina Schouten 04.02.24 at 4:34 pm

Dporpentine, the audience is not the people who wrote the bill, the audience is the people who affirm the aims that are invoked by the people who wrote the bill. We don’t have to reject all aims that have been invoked disingenuously to avoid being “somewhere between disrespectful and self-aggrandizing” (?), surely.

27

Gina Schouten 04.02.24 at 4:48 pm

LFC,

Thanks for writing this: “Last year, in a survey completed by 98 percent of Harvard seniors, only 37 percent reported that they were comfortable discussing controversial subjects in class.” This suggests that to the extent there is an intellectual diversity problem, at least at this particular institution, it’s coming more from the bottom up than the top down, i.e., that the problem is not “indoctrination,” which I strongly suspect is largely a figment of the Right’s imagination, but one of a culture of self-censorship, for lack of a better phrase.

And thanks for directing attention to the questions from the post. This survey has been on my mind a lot, including as I wrote the post. To me, the pedagogical problem of self-censorship and the political problem of conservatives mistrusting higher education are importantly connected.

When I was thinking about going/preparing to go to college, lots of really well meaning friends and family warned me that expressing conservative views (which they thought I shared, and which I did share to some degree then) wouldn’t win me any friends at college. (That was in 2002.) I think they also worried (though this part they didn’t say) that I’d come to reject all conservative views, not just in the sense of finding them flawed but of finding them abhorrent–and with the views, so too anyone who held them. I think about that a lot, and about how frightening and sad it must have felt.

I also find, anecdotally, that the students I know who self-censor are disproportionately first generation and disproportionately working class.

These experiences make me think that the solution to the pedagogical problem has both pedagogical and political aspects. We have do things better in the classroom. We also have to do more to try to win the trust of the persuadable audience for this bill, or at least persuade them that we think their trust matters. We can’t do what we need to do in the classroom if conservatives and their college-aged kids don’t trust us not to assume they’re ignorant or degenerate.

So, LFC, just a quibble: I agree that the problem is not indoctrination, but I’d say it’s still a top-down problem in the sense that we bear responsibility for it.

28

LFC 04.02.24 at 7:19 pm

@Gina Schouten
Point taken, and thanks for the reply.

29

MPAVictoria 04.02.24 at 7:49 pm

“When I was thinking about going/preparing to go to college, lots of really well meaning friends and family warned me that expressing conservative views (which they thought I shared, and which I did share to some degree then) wouldn’t win me any friends at college.”

Exactly what views are we talking about here?

30

engels 04.02.24 at 8:06 pm

The elephant in the room in this discussion would appear to be the eminent university presidents who recently got fired for permitting legitimate on-campus protest against the ongoing genocide the US has been complicit in for the last six months. Perhaps that’s what Indiana’s “free inquiry” Republicans are concerned about?

31

Alex SL 04.02.24 at 8:39 pm

J-D @14 makes excellent sense.

Regarding the question of what diversity is, one of the oddest takes I have ever seen is how the term is used in official language here in Australia. In surveys I am asked if I am “culturally diverse”. What they mean with this is if my first language is anything other than English, and if I am descended from anybody but British immigrants. The answer to that is yes, but all my ancestors for hundreds of years were Germans, so I am anything but “diverse”, and I always flinch when selecting that response. The way they use that term is just bizarre.

Matt,

I am deeply skeptical of religious communities or social classes sequestering themselves away from everybody else in special private schools. Mixing everybody up and getting to know each other seems more likely to build a functional society.

32

Harry 04.02.24 at 10:42 pm

“But that doesn’t tell me whether or not their self-censorship is based on an accurate assessment of the potential repercussions (need I point out that the actual rate of crime and the reported fear of crime do not necessarily correlate?).”

I think it’s probably right that a lot of self-censorship is in circumstances in which there wouldn’t be repercussions. Although in my experience students are VERY practiced in figuring out what professors want them to write in essays, and have very accurate judgments about what they’ll be penalized for, the repercussions they worry about most are social sanctions from classmates, and of course they’re not as good at that. And some self-censorship is really about fearing that they will inadvertently hurt someone’s feelings by saying something that will be misinterpreted (an admirable motivation).

That’s why I constantly emphasize teacher skill. Its part of my job to induce students to bring to the table the full range of reasonable considerations (which include many viewpoints that I think of as conservative), and to do that, in this environment, takes a lot of skill. To the extent that I fail, I have not succeeded in doing my job well. The proportion of college teachers who lack necessary teaching skills is MUCH larger than (although it includes) the (small) proportion who want to indoctrinate and the larger (but still small) proportion who carelessly shut their students down.

33

LFC 04.02.24 at 11:18 pm

engels @29 wrote:

The elephant in the room in this discussion would appear to be the eminent university presidents who recently got fired for permitting legitimate on-campus protest against the ongoing genocide the US has been complicit in for the last six months. Perhaps that’s what Indiana’s “free inquiry” Republicans are concerned about?

No university presidents were fired for the reason engels cites. Magill was fired in effect for accepting Elise Stefanik’s absurd gotcha premise that a chant such as “globalize the intifada” is tantamount to a call for genocide. During the questioning, C. Gay also accepted that premise, which led (as in Magill’s case) to a not-very-good answer, but what got Gay fired were the cumulative plagiarism allegations. And the third university president (MIT’s president) who testified that day was not fired.

34

engels 04.02.24 at 11:21 pm

Isn’t part of the reason for the liberal bias of academia that more/better universities tend to be in blue states and policies like this (and Republican policies generally) tend to increase that imbalance? Cultural capital flight. It seems an odd thing for a right-wing party not to understand. Otoh if they really supported free inquiry in a genuine and non-punitive way it might have the opposite effect, given disenchantment with “cancel culture” etc among some moderate liberals (am not holding my breath).

35

J-D 04.02.24 at 11:45 pm

But if you spend time at Harvard, or at Madison, or at Milwaukee, and actually talk to students, you find that they have no desire to discuss that, or say any such thing.

I have not had the opportunity to spend time talking to students at Harvard, or Madison, or Milwaukee, and I never will, and in this I must be typical of people reading Crooked Timber and, equally relevantly, typical of the people who see a report of the survey of Harvard seniors which was being cited. (Also, is it unreasonable of me to suspect that if there are students at Harvard who do want to discuss the kind of thing I mentioned in my previous comment, they won’t be telling you (Harry)?)

They are anxious about … asking at what point that fetus has the kind of moral standing that make it wrong to kill it, …

If people are hesitant about releasing that form of words into a classroom full of people they don’t know, that’s a good thing. They should be so hesitant, for reasons I can dilate on if desired.

… a culture of self-censorship, for lack of a better phrase. … the pedagogical problem of self-censorship …

Nearly everybody does self-censor, and everybody should self-censor. Disinhibition is pathological.

I also find, anecdotally, that the students I know who self-censor are disproportionately first generation and disproportionately working class.

Maybe this is not an indicator that they should self-censor less but rather an indicator that the rich and privileged should self-censor more?

And some self-censorship is really about fearing that they will inadvertently hurt someone’s feelings by saying something that will be misinterpreted (an admirable motivation).

Just so.

… the political problem of conservatives mistrusting higher education …

Conservatives mistrust higher education not because of something wrong with higher education but because of something wrong with conservatives.

36

John Q 04.03.24 at 2:25 am

“Diversity” in this context can be translated as corresponding to a representative sample of political views in Indiana”. It’s unlikely, for example, that a physicist would get far by complaining that the Purdue physics department was dominated by string theorists who refused to hire anyone associated with Lee Smolin. By contrast, it’s easy to imagine a climate science denier succeeding with a similar complaint against the atmospheric science group.

There are some obvious problems here, which I’ll come back to if I get time.

37

LFC 04.03.24 at 2:28 am

J-D @35

blockquoteNearly everybody does self-censor, and everybody should self-censor. Disinhibition is pathological.

Are you serious? Are you really incapable of distinguishing between (1) someone who walks down Main Street shouting at the top of their lungs or, more realistically perhaps, someone who meets another person for the first time at a party and says immediately “I hate what you’re wearing,” and (2) a student who has an opinion that bears on a topic of classroom discussion and decides not to voice it because she’s afraid someone might react strongly to it?

Your example of a student who wants to discuss whether “people like me [J-D]” (whatever that means here) “should be dispossessed, beaten, mutilated, and driven from the country” is bizarre, to put it mildly. Would a class discussion ever revolve around the proposition: So-and-so should be mutilated, or drawn-and-quartered, because [fill in the blank]?

Consider this thread, J-D. Is anyone here self-censoring, in the relevant sense of the phrase? Almost certainly not. You’re saying whatever you want, within the bounds of the blog’s comment policy, and so is everyone else. And yet for some reason you seem eager to defend the proposition that students engaged in a liberal-arts education — where part of the point is to expose them to different views and increase their ability to see things from different perspectives and also hone their ability to defend their own views and (importantly) reflect on them — should not feel perfectly free to say, within the basic limits of decorum, whatever they want.

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John Q 04.03.24 at 4:09 am

A problem if voters in Indiana want university faculty who “look like them” ideologically. Trump got 57 % of the Indiana vote in 2020. I doubt that there is any academic discipline where even 10% of potential new hires (late Millennial Phd grads) were Trump voters. Any real attempt at politically representative diversity would require pretty heavy affirmative action for rightwingers. And with a couple of dozen US states fishing in the same pool, they’ll be dredging the bottom pretty fast.

39

Harry 04.03.24 at 4:18 am

J-D — you seem to think that our universities are riddled with kids who are closet genocidal fascists. There’s even less evidence for that than for the thought that they are riddled with kids who are in the grip of Marxism. It’s absolutely right that, with all due respect to them, posh people don’t like to be contradicted, and there’s some of that at the Ivies plus (and in some Law Schools, like Stanford), but really not much even at Madison. And anyway, part of our job (as teachers of philosophy, sociology, political science, maybe not chemistry or physics) is to teach them how to listen to and take seriously people who contradict them.

“If people are hesitant about releasing that form of words into a classroom full of people they don’t know, that’s a good thing. They should be so hesitant, for reasons I can dilate on if desired.”

I can’t tell whether you have a problem with the idea that at some point the fetus might have the kind of moral status that makes it wrong to kill it, or just more generally you think that people should be inhibited from raising any kind of reasonable but controversial moral question. Either way, the thing is: we can’t do our job if someone isn’t willing to ask that question (or other reasonable but controversial moral questions) and unless a good number of people in the room can be made to feel at ease discussing it thoughtfully and with confidence that when they say something wrong, or even that someone else mishears as wrong, they won’t be taken to task. They need to know that others will not be hypervigilant. It takes a lot of skill to create the right kind of environment. And in our particular polarized circumstances it takes even more (less here than at the Ivies, I think, so it’s a good thing that Gina is more skilled than I am, which I assure you she is).

40

Harry 04.03.24 at 4:28 am

If we fired or refused to hire anyone who was:

1) unlikely to foster a culture of free inquiry, free expression, and intellectual diversity within the institution;

(2) unlikely to expose students to scholarly works from a variety of political or ideological frameworks that may exist within and are applicable to the faculty member’s academic discipline; or

(3) likely, while performing teaching duties within the scope of the faculty member’s employment, to subject students to political or ideological views and opinions that are unrelated to the faculty member’s academic discipline or assigned course of instruction.

we’d fire quite a lot of people and not hire a good number of others. And it would be disastrous for many institutions, which are just not set up to fire people even for much worse things. But: many (very many) of our faculty do all the converse of all those things, without being Trump voters, Republicans, or even conservatives. JQ’s right that if we tried to get a faculty political attitude composition resembling that of our state we’d be in a pickle very quickly. But that is not at all what is being asked of us: those the converse of those three items are just what any good teacher does (and note that (2) is phrased exactly so that climate change denial needn’t — indeed shouldn’t — be taught in climate science classes (or anywhere on campus for that matter). And whereas the state shouldn’t be firing us for not living up to those standards, we should be holding ourselves to them. And when we don’t, we should expect people to lose respect for and trust in us.

41

John Q 04.03.24 at 5:27 am

Harry, if the statements set out in the legislation were part of a guide to universities to promote free expression, they would be unobjectionable. But this seems to me like giving a charitable reading to people who say things like “All lives matter” and “It’s OK to be white”. Read in isolation, they are unobjectionable, but we all know what they actually mean.

In this case, we don’t even need to read between the lines. As noted by Anna m @25 The legislation specifically excludes teaching favorable to “socialism, Marxism, totalitarianism, or similar political systems” Similar bans have applied “critical race theory” and so on

42

Matt 04.03.24 at 6:52 am

I am deeply skeptical of religious communities or social classes sequestering themselves away from everybody else in special private schools. Mixing everybody up and getting to know each other seems more likely to build a functional society.

I think that “sequestering themselves away from everyboad else in special private schools is, at least in many cases, putting the case too strongly, verging on a straw-man. Take again BYU – it’s a school I’d never go to, and would not consider applying for a job at, because the rules for working there are such that I’d find them intolerable, and I’d recommend against most students going there. But – the vast majority of Mormons who go to university do not go to school there, but attend normal universities with normal rules. The same applies to other schools with serious “religious missions” in the US (and probably other countries, too, though I know less about them.) So, “sequestering themselves away” seems too strong.

I think it would clearly be illiberal for states to prohibit schools like BYU, or ones where, say, showing pictures of Muhammad was banned, assuming the schools were private. We can (and should) debate how far the state should allow individuals to spend state funds to support such institutions (through subsidized loans or grants to students, or funding for research), but banning them would be unacceptable, I think.

What about the idea that, even if they are not banned, it would be better if there were no such schools because no one wanted them? I have some sympathy with that idea, because I think all religions are false, and it’s (usually) better if people don’t believe false beliefs. (I also think many religions are harmful, but leave that aside here.) But I also think there’s no way, in a free society, that people will converge on the same set of moral or religious beliefs, so we’ll always have to accept some diversity here. We should not allow parents to keep their kids completely isolated from the rest of society (even if this means that certain ways of living will have a hard time continuing) because it is unfair to the children, but beyond that, I’d again claim that diversity between institutions is as important, in many areas, as within them, and is often both desirable on its own, a better way to serve what’s valuable in diversity, and necessary for a free society.
(I should add that this is only relevant to certain parts of the larger discussion above. The rule as written seems confused and dangerous, even if there are some roughly reasonable aspects.)

43

Anna M 04.03.24 at 9:53 am

Thanks to Harry for the response and to Gina for the clarifying remarks.

From what you’ve both said, I think there are two separate points to consider:

1) From a political/strategic perspective, does it make sense for US academics to publicly state there are problems within academia, but they have a firm commitment to improving genuine intellectual diversity in order to convince people who are otherwise skeptical?

2) Separate from any political considerations, how can US academics ensure that universities are in environment in which “reasonable people” can thoughtfully discuss topics, no matter how controversial, within sensible boundaries in a manner that allows for respectful disagreement without fear of repercussion.

Point 1 is not particularly relevant to what universities actually do, but boils down to whether or not US academics expressing sentiments like “actually there is a problem with intellectual diversity on campus, but we are committed to improving this” (or similar) be a good idea?

To me, no. Firstly, anyone operating in good faith but already skeptical about universities is unlikely to be convinced by what you say (if there is a genuine commitment, this will be shown by deeds – in which case words are irrelevant), and secondly all you are doing is offering nice soundbites for right-wing political agitators to take out of context.

I would hope that US academics are aware that, like it or not, they are part of the culture war. As such, it doesn’t matter if you are offering a thoughtful comment, it doesn’t matter how much good faith you are offering it in, and it really doesn’t matter what the reality is – everything you say and do is subject to being taking out of context and presented in the worst possible light by bad faith actors who want a monopoly on what is said and thought, and will happily seize any excuse to make that happen (see Christopher Rufo, Project Veritas, etc. etc. etc.).

As such, were it me, I would proceed with considerable caution – I don’t think academics, by and large, are used to playing these sorts of games, and I think trying to do so will be a losing proposition.

Point 2 relates to the actuality – ignoring the politics of it all, how can genuine intellectual diversity be ensured (regardless of what we are saying)?

I don’t think it can (at least, not completely). This is because I don’t think you are really fighting against university culture, but rather the conditioning of society as a whole.

While I am not familiar with the US education system, presuming it is like most others, in general (and this is admittedly a generalisation ignoring efforts of individual teachers, etc.) schools typically instill obedience over disruption, giving “correct answers” over argument and debate, and basically “conforming” over “standing out”. There are a number of reasons for this (class size making individual mentoring difficult-to-impossible, tensions over what schools are supposed to be for, that it is easier to mark people to a grade based on “right or wrong” rather than nuanced examination of reasoning, that many people prefer a system in which there are clear right-or-wrong answers, and so on), but importantly pressure exists to conform to the system or face penalisation (and frequently students are told these penalties can and will affect their future). Similarly, much of workplace culture is the same – with relatively low levels of worker protection it is risky to continually contradict your boss, or be seen as disruptive, or to continually argue and debate rather than just do what is expected of you.

Thus, it seems to me, you are in a position where you are trying to convince students that within this brief period (and, generally speaking, within this period only) all the values that have been instilled are reversed, and that being “disruptive” and “not giving the correct answer” are good things. Oh, and also, as a student you are getting into debt to attend this place, if you get it wrong you could be penalised (with anything from poor grades to expulsion), and all this will determine your future (what job you can get, how rapidly you will progress in your career, whether or not you will be able to get healthcare, etc. etc.).

It is, I would think, fairly self-evident why students might be reluctant to take a gamble here, and why those who are even more tied to the concept of class mobility (such as working-class people) would be even more cautious.

Thus, if you want to change this behaviour you have to change the system which incentivises it – and that means a far greater change than doing anything at university level. I think you would have to change the focus of non-higher education, how work within the US functions, and arguably the very foundations of the US being predicated on capitalist hierarchies. In a genuinely equal society, where there are no pressures to conform, where work is a fulfilling activity rather than a means to survive, and where all of society is intellectually diverse, then maybe you have a chance of achieving this.

This is not to say that efforts are meaningless or futile – people change and grow, and I’m sure that at an individual level promoting these concepts does make a difference to your students. But I think that students will not come in with the “intellectually diverse” principles until the system changes to promote it.

44

engels 04.03.24 at 1:19 pm

A strange thing about diversity: the more you have, the less you have. Bring people together and sometimes they settle differences, form families, share recipes. This is a good thing but it makes the idea that diversity is intrinsically valuable problematic (at least for progressives, who support such mixing). This is especially true of intellectual diversity. A documented consequence of sending conservative people to university is they become less conservative. This isn’t the fault of universities but of conservatism being in many ways an ideology based on isolation and ignorance.

45

steven t johnson 04.03.24 at 3:58 pm

Anthropologically speaking, egalitarian societies tend to strongly reject argumentative people as conceited, even domineering. And epistemological skepticism is reactionary. It is hard to find arguments against the Dude’s “That’s like your opinion man.” If culture determines, then the conservatives must teach culture and if they’re not, then they’re being excluded. So mandating their inclusion seems logical.

As it happens, my personal feeling is that diversity of opinion about the value of groups of people is wholly unjustified, that no proposition based on correct facts and sound arguments has ever demonstrated that this or that group is superior/inferior (that’s “season to taste” apparently.) In that sense I’m not even clear on the value of diversity. Plus I’m not even sure DEI programs aren’t more about PR, rather like ESG, anyhow.

46

steven t johnson 04.03.24 at 7:09 pm

engels@44 And a documented result of sending rural people to cities is, they become less conservative. But does sending city people to the suburbs make them more conservative? Does moving to Texas and Florida and Idaho and Utah and Alaska signify any real change in politics or just reveal them?

47

Stephen 04.03.24 at 8:43 pm

steven t johnson @45: “my personal feeling is that … no proposition based on correct facts and sound arguments has ever demonstrated that this or that group is superior/inferior.”

I can’t help feeling I must have misunderstood you here. Do you not feel that supporters of Donald Trump are in an important way inferior? Aztecs, Confederate supporters of slavery, Pol Pot’s followers?. Or do you mean racial group, but that hardly seems relevant to the argument.

I would agree that some of the DEI carryon is mostly about PR, but I think by no means all.

48

M Caswell 04.03.24 at 9:11 pm

I think most people would rather not have an ideologue for a teacher, no matter the ideology.

49

Alex SL 04.03.24 at 9:26 pm

John Q @38,

That is one point, but also, if voters want university faculty to look like them ideologically, that is a voter problem, not a diversity in academia problem. It would be useful to make it clearer to such voters that (1) every profession attracts a certain kind of person and (2) every profession shapes the world view of (many of) its members through their experiences in it, with academia being merely one example. The idea that investment bankers, retail cashiers, or truck drivers should be a perfect mirror of the ideological, gender, and ethnic composition of the population at large would be equally silly.

Matt @42,

That is how I understood the argument I was responding to. Best I can tell, from the perspective of the customers, there are three reasons for going to a private school: buying your child a better education that poor people are excluded from; buying your child a status marker or a social network that poor people are excluded from; and sequestering your children away from the immoral world so that they do not get exposed to unbelievers, pagans, and heretics, which might lead to them realising that those are also merely normal, nice people like us.

The first two are inequality and also mean that those in power have no incentive to adequately fund the public education system, because they themselves will be well-off enough to send their own children to private school. The third is amazing if you want to breed sectarian divisions in your society, potentially one day leading to the kind of violence where people set fire to each other’s temples.

That is why if I were randomly made emperor of the world, I would immediately outlaw all private education. I never claimed to be liberal, of course.

50

engels 04.03.24 at 9:32 pm

I’m not even sure DEI programs aren’t more about PR

My preferred phrase is Potemkin meritocracy.

51

John Q 04.03.24 at 9:56 pm

Alex @49 100% agree. I omitted the irony alerts

52

engels 04.03.24 at 10:07 pm

The idea that investment bankers, retail cashiers, or truck drivers should be a perfect mirror of the… gender, and ethnic composition of the population at large would be equally silly.

This is the goal of many (liberal) advocates of diversity, as I understand it.

53

J-D 04.03.24 at 10:33 pm

Consider this thread, J-D. Is anyone here self-censoring, in the relevant sense of the phrase?

Well, what sense of the phrase do you think is relevant? If I have the impulse to write something in a comment and then decide not to write it, in what sense is that not self-censorship?

Harry, if the statements set out in the legislation were part of a guide to universities to promote free expression, they would be unobjectionable. But this seems to me like giving a charitable reading to people who say things like “All lives matter” and “It’s OK to be white”. Read in isolation, they are unobjectionable, but we all know what they actually mean.

Exactly! Context matters! And so–

I can’t tell whether you have a problem with the idea that at some point the fetus might have the kind of moral status that makes it wrong to kill it

–in context (the context being the current state of public affairs in the US), I think we should all understand what it means when somebody raises a question like that for discussion. Of course the words are not ‘I want to discuss whether we should terrorise people’, but that’s the effect. Why else would somebody want to discuss it? Of course, somebody who was actually pregnant and experiencing conflicting emotions about it might want to discuss their personal decision, but (again, context matters) not in any classroom I ever heard of. It is important that they should be able to find a suitable situation to discuss it, but a sociopolitical environment in which the wording Harry provided is commonly discussed in classrooms will not make that easier for them but rather the reverse.

54

anon/portly 04.04.24 at 6:20 am

22 …or asking at what point that fetus has the kind of moral standing that make it wrong to kill it, in a class about the morality of abortion…

53 -in context (the context being the current state of public affairs in the US), I think we should all understand what it means when somebody raises a question like that for discussion.

It means that they’re in a class about the morality of abortion?

55

MisterMr 04.04.24 at 10:44 am

@J-D 53
Of course the words are not ‘I want to discuss whether we should terrorise people’, but that’s the effect.

Do you mean that people who are anti-abortion want to terrorise people and thus are evil?
But this is true for any restrictive law. For example, people who are for gun control want to impose sanctions on gun owners, and those sanctions are supposed to terrorise gun owners into giving away their guns.
All forms of laws are to some degree restrictive, and enforce this restrictivity through potential violence.

It seems to me that you are so much anti-anti-abortion that you can’t accept the idea that someone could “reasonably” be anti abortion.

“Reasonably” is the key word here and the one that is difficult to discuss.

56

Tm 04.04.24 at 11:35 am

Will economists be denied tenure if they refuse to include Marxist perspectives in their teaching?

“UW-Madison will seek philanthropic support to create an endowed chair to focus on conservative political thought, classical economic theory, or classical liberalism, depending on the donor’s interest, conducting a national search to fill the position.”

This from a University is a declaration of academic and intellectual bankruptcy and I really really wonder how you Harry can pretend to believe that anybody promoting this sellout of Academia to political power cares about diversity.

These positions – and there are many of those in US academia – as you know very well, are not intended to foster critical scholarly research of conservatism but to provide well-paid positions for right wing pretend scholars who would not be hired under the normal rules of academic competition. In Colorado ((ands btw is not even new, see https://www.colorado.edu/center/benson/CTP), they hired an actual fascist, John Eastman.

57

Tm 04.04.24 at 11:45 am

Will economists be denied tenure if they refuse to include Marxist perspectives in their teaching?

“UW-Madison will seek philanthropic support to create an endowed chair to focus on conservative political thought, classical economic theory, or classical liberalism, depending on the donor’s interest, conducting a national search to fill the position.”

This from a University is a declaration of academic and intellectual bankruptcy and I really really wonder how you Harry can pretend to believe that anybody promoting this sellout of Academia to political power cares about diversity.

These positions – and there are many of those in US academia – as you know very well, are not intended to foster critical scholarly research of conservatism but to provide well-paid positions for right wing pretend scholars who would not be hired under the normal rules of academic competition. In Colorado (https://www.colorado.edu/center/benson/CTP), they hired an actual fascist, John Eastman.

Of course if you believe that academia must represent the political landscape (an absurd belief), then you have to support hiring fascist professors. You have to support hiring professors who do not believe in learning, science and critical inquiry.

(Sorry previous comment got garbled).

58

TM 04.04.24 at 12:06 pm

Harry 40: „note that (2) is phrased exactly so that climate change denial needn’t — indeed shouldn’t — be taught in climate science classes“

That is not true – the wording is so vague that it will mean exactly what those with the power to enforce it want it to mean – and I think this statement is pathologically naive, and sadly typical for the delusion many liberals in Harry‘s position are still indulging in.

59

Tm 04.04.24 at 12:12 pm

Also this: „I would hope that US academics are aware that, like it or not, they are part of the culture war.“ (Anna M)

60

Harry 04.04.24 at 1:29 pm

“I think this statement is pathologically naive, and sadly typical for the delusion many liberals in Harry‘s position are still indulging in”

Really, you sound such a condescending and pompous git.
More forgivably, you don’t understand how hiring works at a major university in the US. Or politics.
Anyway, we’re done.

As for J-D, as MrMister says “It seems to me that you are so much anti-anti-abortion that you can’t accept the idea that someone could “reasonably” be anti abortion.” In fact nearly everyone believes (rightly) that 8 month old fetuses have the kind of moral status that makes it usually wrong to kill them. (My grandchildren were just born, just shy of 8 months. Maybe it would have been right to kill them at that stage to save my daughter’s life. But not normally). J-D’s comment smacks of the exact kind of anti-intellectualism displayed by the legislators he despises.

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steven t johnson 04.04.24 at 3:26 pm

Potemkin meritocracy is pointedly offensive to those who claim the problem with DEI is that it is not meritocracy, a blessed state of affairs we already enjoy. DEI I sometimes fear is where the worst of the excluded, the ones reliably tested for blind fealty to the class system, are promoted to wrangle the lower orders of their particular persuasion. I could name names, but why dwell? Also, the general consensus here appears to be that class is irrelevant and thus the class system is not to be opposed

Stephen@47 “Do you not feel that supporters of Donald Trump are in an important way inferior? Aztecs, Confederate supporters of slavery, Pol Pot’s followers?. Or do you mean racial group, but that hardly seems relevant to the argument.” These are direct questions, so I will answer. The claim racial groups which overlaps into national, ethnic, language, religious and economic groups don’t seem relevant is entirely incorrect. Groups whose members can change their minds and join other groups are not the kinds of groups who are held to be inferior by nature.

Even the second question manages to confuse the Aztec empire and its flower wars with all the supposedly irrelevant groups. Confederate supporters of slavery and the Khmer Rouge are political parties which is the kind of group which genuinely borders on irrelevant. The reasons for that are, political parties are more self-selected than ascribed; the primary engine for professed adherence to political parties is conformism; much of what is called politics is ephemeral and irrelevant and such a collection of fads that absent cultivation by owners of media it’s not even clear to what extent the supposed adherents even know, much less are committed to, the policies and programs. Plus of course fandom (irrational by definition) seems to take over. But it is hard to justify accusing fans of Taylor Swift or the Chicago Cubs of being “inferior,” by any collection of correct facts and sound arguments….but now I’m repeating myself.

The real question of course is whether I think Trumpers are inferior in their whole persons, because their whole kind is inferior in some sense. I suspect Stephen has confused me with some LawyersGunsandMoney type. And the question is supposed to be read by those in the know as, Do I think bigotry is inherited and DNA commands that white people obsessively persecute Black people for fun and the satisfaction of their biological instincts? (No quotes, this is not Stephen’s literal words, which are quoted above.) The answer is no.

To the literal question, the answer is also a slightly qualified “no,” in air quotes because I distinguish between thoughtless conformists; victims of mass media who really think crime is exploding and so on; people who confuse personalities with programs and policies and imagine you can vote against something nebulous symbolized by one person by voting for another person, as against the political operatives, the money men, the hired guns from the think tanks, the local bigwigs, in short the true beneficiaries.
I do very much think of that groups most are liars and most are irrationalists by principle and most have cultivated a lack of empathy for the lower orders. I think irrationalism is wrong. But is that really the same thing as thinking their kind is inferior?

On the notion that of course a person can reasonably be for compulsory pregnancy. It is not reasonable to counterpose late term abortions. Most late term abortions are medical problems and we have already seen that laws against abortion intervene in the medical care of women, just as they were intended to. Even if for some reason though, a woman took the whim late in pregnancy to abort, it is astonishing anyone could argue that an unwanted child is a Moral Good, especially if the poor thing is punished by being forced on a hostile and unfit mother.

Besides, artificially restricting the issues for inflammatory effect is unreasonable. At a late state, Caesarean section comes into play as a method of terminating pregnancy, as it is intended to do. There are reasonable moral questions about when it would be unethical to perform a C-section. Forcing into existence a child doomed to terrible suffering if not death is morally questionable indeed. My guess is that whatever estimated period of fetal development permits a humane chance at survival after such delivery would be very much later than any compulsory pregnancy advocate wishes. I even suspect many of those people would be angry at the idea that a woman could choose a C-section ad lib, though obviously I can’t be sure.

62

Harry 04.04.24 at 3:36 pm

“On the notion that of course a person can reasonably be for compulsory pregnancy.”

No form of words used or mentioned in my comments has suggested it should ever, let alone sometimes, be compulsory to take a pregnancy to term.

“Forcing into existence a child doomed to terrible suffering if not death is morally questionable indeed”

Almost nobody, including almost everyone who thinks it should, usually, be compulsory to carry a fetus to term, disagrees with this. Its a fringe position, made to seem mainstream by pro-life and pro-choice advocacy groups.

Though of course, its still a position philosophers want to consider, because we need to consider fringe, and sometimes obviously false, positions in order to get the kind of clarity and precision that’s part of our stock in trade.

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steven t johnson 04.04.24 at 3:45 pm

Harry@62 It is unclear to me how Supreme Court decisions and laws passed by state legislatures and executive orders by governors can be deemed fringe positions. When I figure this out, I may respond.

64

engels 04.04.24 at 4:10 pm

The original question was about the morality of abortion. The people saying it shouldn’t be discussed are referring to legal permissibility. This confusion is a feature of the abortion “debate” in US ime and is one of the many reasons it’s so superficial and terrible.

65

TM 04.04.24 at 4:16 pm

Harry @ 60: “Really, you sound such a condescending and pompous git.
More forgivably, you don’t understand how hiring works at a major university in the US. Or politics. Anyway, we’re done.”

So instead of engaging with criticism, you respond with an insult and an ad hominem attack against the person making the criticism. This is kind of what I hoped you’d do, except you exceeded expectations. I take it that you actually think I should have “self-censored” my criticism. At least I should have been more polite. And perhaps you are right! But this is precisely what you have been denying above (re J-D et al). What you are doing here is indeed create a hostile atmosphere which makes it difficult for less privileged people like myself to express their views freely without fear of negative repercussions.

66

MisterMr 04.04.24 at 4:36 pm

For clarity, the problem is not if we are pro- or anti- abortion (or whatever other cultural issue), but if it is possible to have a space of “reasonable” dialogue where people of both sides can discuss about it, or not.

In case of teaching, the question is where and in what situation the teacher can state his/her opinions on similar issues and/or treat the student’s opinions as unreasonable (as the teacher is in a position of power VS the student).

There are situations, such as creationism, where a teacher should react strongly against misconceptions, because we are speaking of issues of fact; on other questions, such as abortion or are transwomen real women, we are speaking fondamentally of moral questions, not of matter of fact, so they are different and shouldn’t IMHO be mentioned unless we are speaking of a moral philosophy class or similar (and students shouldn’t lament of teacher’s opinion if they are stated outside the classroom).

There are situations that are more borderline, such as the idea of wheter this or that author has aesthetic value and/or should or should not be taught if/when they offend this or that sensibility (because aesthetics are still a matter of values, often they are mixed with ethics).

67

TM 04.04.24 at 4:39 pm

And despite your immature and insulting demeanor, Professor, I’m ready to continue this debate because I believe in “a culture of free inquiry, free expression, and intellectual diversity”.

We were arguing about whether academics teaching Climate Change might be faced with negative repercussions of the new Indiana Law. And you claim that this would never happen because of “how hiring works at a major university”. Perhaps it won’t happen openly but what will definitely happen (and I can tell this because contrary to your assumption I do actually have years of experience with US academia) is that an assistant professor whose duty includes teaching Climate Change will be very careful how they express themselves, knowing that anything they say that right wing ideology disapproves of could lead to complaints and the need to justify themselves, and might endanger their tenure. This is especially true on more conservative campuses (of which there are many! Far more than Harvard than there are Harvards and Madisons), where many students have a conservative background and have been exposed to Climate Change denial all their lives as an article of faith. From the point of view of these students, and their parents, and the politicians they vote for, Climate Change denial clearly seems to be part of “scholarly works from a variety of political or ideological frameworks that may exist within and are applicable to the faculty member’s academic discipline” .

So what is likely to happen is that the Assistant Professor will feel compelled to “present both sides”, and will feel compelled to refrain from accurately characterizing climate change denial as a politically motivated, academically bankrupt lie. They will, in the words that you yourself have used, exert “self-censorship”. This I think is obvious. To claim otherwise is naive at best. And if you disagree with that conclusion, Professor, you’ll have to do better than spewing insults.

68

TM 04.04.24 at 4:45 pm

LFC @30: “No university presidents were fired for the reason engels cites… what got Gay fired were the cumulative plagiarism allegations”

Gay was not fired because of plagiarism allegations. She was fired because she got into the crosshairs of right wing culture warriors, for the reason engels stated, and the plagiarism was just a pretext. We know this because those who went after her said so explicitly and publicly. There is absolutely no doubt that Gay, whether plagiarism or not, would still have her job if it were not for the Palestine issue. To pretend otherwise is just delusional.

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Harry 04.04.24 at 5:49 pm

“What you are doing here is indeed create a hostile atmosphere which makes it difficult for less privileged people like myself to express their views freely without fear of negative repercussions”

I think you are quite capable of dealing with an insult or two. Don’t dish it out if you can’t take it. People can judge for themselves, and they will.

“This is kind of what I hoped you’d do, except you exceeded expectations”

Odd to complain, then.

70

LFC 04.04.24 at 6:28 pm

TM @68
This topic is somewhat tangential to the thread, but engels brought it up and his comment was let through, so I will respond to you.

What happened as far as I can tell — and I followed the chain of events closely — is that Gay was caught in a storm in which the I/P conflict and related matters were central. Of course some people were out to get her, but she did not handle the situation very well. Now, it was a difficult situation to handle well and she’d only been in the job about six months, so I have a good deal of sympathy for her. But that’s neither here nor there.

After her congressional testimony, the Harvard Corporation put out a statement supporting her. Then the plagiarism allegations started to surface, and key members of the Corporation started to change their minds. So it was a combination of things, but the plagiarism allegations were important in weakening her already weakened hold on office. (Imo, the plagiarism allegations should have been given a full, transparent, and independent investigation, which did not happen, but my opinion on this is irrelevant to the question of why she was fired.)

Engels’s original statement is that she “got fired for permitting legitimate on-campus protest….” That statement is false. She got fired mainly because: (1) she did a fairly poor job of explaining publicly why these protests were permissible and why they should be permissible, (2) she accepted, for purposes of answering a loaded question, the incorrect premise that use of the word “intifada” is equivalent to a call for genocide, and (3) she was charged with plagiarism of a sort that, in some cases, would have gotten an undergraduate in serious trouble, let alone a member of the faculty.

As I said, I have sympathy for her, and if I were king she might still be president of Harvard. But that is irrelevant. Engels made a statement about why she was fired and that statement, as engels articulated it, is false.

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John Q 04.04.24 at 7:25 pm

From the viewpoint of Republicans, climate change is an issue of scientific controversy in which only one side of the debate is being taught in colleges. The majority view (at least until recently) is that this imbalance is the result of a corrupt conspiracy to secure funding. Large-scale statements by supposed scientists opposing the mainstream view have regularly been produced

That’s changing, as the evidence of heating becomes undeniable, and the appeal of solar and wind energy increases

https://www.indystar.com/story/news/politics/2021/06/25/indiana-congressmen-mix-climate-change-conservative-values/5325122001/

But the act as written would certainly apply here.

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engels 04.05.24 at 7:35 am

73

engels 04.05.24 at 2:31 pm

On the main topic—right-wing DEI—this might be relevant:

…Against the onslaught of liberal multiculturalism and mass consumerism, de Benoist now argued that the Nouvelle Droite should struggle to uphold the ‘right to difference’. From here, it was a short distance to claiming a belated kinship with the plight of Third World nations. ‘Undertaken under the aegis of missionaries, armies, and merchants, the Westernization of the planet has represented an imperialist movement fed by the desire to erase all otherness’, he wrote with Charles Champetier in their Manifesto for a European Renaissance (2012). The authors insisted that the Nouvelle Droite ‘upholds equally ethnic groups, languages, and regional cultures under the threat of extinction’ and ‘supports peoples struggling against Western imperialism’. Today, the preservation of anthropological difference and a sense of indigenous fragility are common tropes on the European far right. ‘We refuse to become the Indians of Europe’, proclaims the manifesto of the neo-fascist youth group Génération Identitaire…

https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/sea-and-earth

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LFC 04.05.24 at 3:06 pm

@ engels

Of course Ackman et al. were out to get her. But Philip Weiss at Mondoweiss skates over one inconvenient fact: right after the congressional testimony, Magill was fired but Gay was not. At that point the Harvard Corp. issued a statement called, iirc, “Our President,” which said the Corp. stood behind her.

Ackman is still unhappy btw, which shows that he does not control what’s going on at his alma mater quite in the way that Philip Weiss wants his readers to think. Task forces have been set up on antisemitism and Islamophobia, and Ackman (and Summers) didn’t like the fact that a particular professor (D. Penslar) was named to co-chair the antisemitism task force. But he remains on the task force.

Penslar came under fire over past statements that critics said downplayed the presence of antisemitism at Harvard. The intense criticism pushed Penslar to consider resigning, but he stayed on after an outpouring of support from Harvard colleagues and Jewish Studies scholars.

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/2/26/garber-membership-harvard-task-forces/

I dislike Ackman as much as you do, but his influence (fortunately) has limits.

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Stephen 04.05.24 at 6:57 pm

I am delighted to find that steven t johnson @61 and I are agreed on at least one point. He poses the question “Do I think bigotry is inherited and DNA commands that white people obsessively persecute Black people for fun and the satisfaction of their biological instincts?”, and for him the answer is NO.

For me also, as resoundingly as I can make it.

What I am not so delighted to find is that, despite his acknowledgment that these are not in fact my actual words, he claims that this is how “the question is supposed to be read by those in the know.” I think he means that this is how I supposed my words should be read, though I am not quite clear by whom, or what connection I am supposed to have to these hypothetical third-party readers. I cannot imagine by what train of thought – I can hardly say, of logic – he derived that opinion.

I would advise stj to have less faith in his powers of telepathy, and to try to restrict himself to rationally defensible arguments.

76

engels 04.05.24 at 9:04 pm

I didn’t say Ackman was all-powerful or Israel was the only issue. I think it was an unholy alliance of racists, anti-wokeists, Zionists and others. An irony is that as best I can tell Gay was never remotely left-wing or pro-Palestinian but I guess that makes her a better target pour encourager les autres.

77

Moz in Oz 04.05.24 at 11:33 pm

At the risk of discussing the original topic, I recall back in the 1980’s attending Feminist Studies tutorials as an undergrad where the point was made that we were undertaking the academic study of feminism, not primarily practicing faminism. So while our behaviour could be informed by feminism, the objection “that’s not feminist” was generally out of place. Which is perhaps exemplified by the first tutorial topic being “what does feminism mean to you” :)

But I was doing that recreationally while studying engineering, where diversity of thought is more the challenge of accepting that a photon is both a wave and a particle, at the same time, regardless of how you would prefer it to identify. Our “DEI” practice was a bunch of Indonesian students, many of whom were Muslim and some of the woman covered their hair. In a very white, very Christian conservative town in New Zealand that was more diversity than some people were comfortable with (Women? In Engineering! Inconceivable!)

I think the DEI bill referenced and similar ideas are very tempting for academics to treat as fun thought experiments, but it’s important to remember that they’re actually a very serious attempt by powerful people to attack something they hate. The latter context matters, because as mentioned above, the same people are also fans of slavery, especially forced pregnancy, execution and so on. This isn’t a trolley problem, it’s a very direct “politicians want the power to dictate what may be tuaght in universities, and who may teach it”.

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steven t johnson 04.06.24 at 12:05 am

Stephen@74 Now I will venture into mind reading, to suggest that Stephen doesn’t think those hypothetical readers are fictional. Stephen’s indignation on behalf of those hypothetical readers makes no sense otherwise. Those people are of course those who manage to identify themselves with the deplorables. And Stephen is eager to resoundingly “agree” that white people are not genetically programmed to hate Black people and such precisely because he perceives it as an attack on wokeness. Maybe he even is pleased that someone he perceives as a Marxist (I have no credentials in that, by the way) or something else obnoxious was ju jitsued into attacking real threats like Hilary Clinton or the 1619 project.

Too late, the shorter version just occurred to me: Trying to anticipate hostile misreadings is not a claim to telepathy.

79

Tm 04.06.24 at 1:43 pm

LFC 73: this may seem tangential to the OP but it really isn’t. What I’m observing is the US liberal habit of whistling in the dark. The fascist goons are out to get you, they say so openly and consistently, and yet there are liberal academics around who still pretend that what is happening isn’t happening. Liberal University presidents lost their jobs as the result of a right wing smear campaign. Red states following Florida‘s lead are pulverizing Academic Freedom and weakening if not effectively abolishing tenure protections (https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2022/04/the-end-of-tenure-in-red-states). And some participants in this thread are responding with delusional arguments like
– They surely won’t do anything bad to academic freedom;
– They may have good intentions;
– The fascists don’t always get everything they want.

„Move on, nothing to see here.“ This is ridiculous.

I believe an earlier comment of mine got lost.

80

J-D 04.07.24 at 9:32 am

I believe an earlier comment of mine got lost.

When a comment of mine does not appear I don’t usually mention it because (a) if there’s a technical problem it may be impossible or impractical to do anything about it and (b) if our hosts don’t want to publish comments of mine, that’s their prerogative.

However, since you mention your issue I will add in a spirit of solidarity that some comments I wrote have not been published.

81

TM 04.09.24 at 12:35 pm

Here’s more relevant material concerning the right wign attacks on academic freedom, with respects to LFC.

https://donmoynihan.substack.com/p/open-season-on-scholars-of-race

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LFC 04.10.24 at 5:33 pm

TM @79 & 81
That the right wing is targeting scholars of color who study race is undisputed. There are two somewhat separate questions here: (1) why did the right wing target Gay? and (2) why was Gay forced to resign? (One could also ask: was forcing her to resign the right decision?)

I’m not at all denying that there is a right-wing assault on DEI and scholars who study race (in one way or another), and on academic freedom more broadly. That’s quite obvious. I was addressing the specifics of this case. I’m also not defending the decision to fire her. I was trying to explain the sequence of events as it unfolded. Nothing you have said @79 applies to me at all.

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TM 04.15.24 at 8:38 am

LFC: “(1) why did the right wing target Gay? and (2) why was Gay forced to resign?”

A simple observation is that Gay wouldn’t have been forced to resign if the right wing hadn’t targeted her with a smear campaign. So the second question is meaningless without at least taking into account the answer to the first.

Even if the plagiarism accusations turned out to be the proximate cause of her fall, that is beside the point because nobody would have cared about it if there hadn’t been a right wing campaign targeting her for completely different reasons. So the ultimate cause was the right wing campaign. The conditions for that campaign to succeed (or even to gain traction, which in itself already constitutes success) include the following:

An organized, well-funded network of right wing culture war goons starting a politically motivated smear campaign
A right wing media circus amplifying said campaign
A weaponized Congressional committee controlled by Republicans
Donors putting pressure on the university boards
Board members caving to that pressure

If Gay had been a conservative or right wing University President who committed plagiarism, none of this would have been possible or even conveivable. If you still wish to dispute all of this and claim that “what got Gay fired were the cumulative plagiarism allegations” , then I think you fail to do what you claim to be doing, namely “addressing the specifics of this case”.

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TM 04.15.24 at 8:50 am

In my list, I forgot another essential condition:
– A manipulable mainstream media ecosystem willing to repeat and amplify the right wing media’s smear campaign. Plagiarism allegations have never before been national front page news and the NYTimes etc. would under other circumstances (e. g. if the subjects had been right wing scholars) never have published these allegations as broadly. (Just as they would never publish hundreds of articles, often front pagers, about the age of Republican political candidates. We know this because it’s happening before our very eyes.)

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