From one perspective, this development seems encouraging. Maybe the lesson of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” is finally starting to take down the destructive DEI delusion.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced that it will end the use of diversity statements in the faculty hiring process. These statements, typically a page-long, were required of all faculty candidates so they could persuade the institution that they could be relied upon to support and enhance the university’s commitment to “diversity.” The statements are now routine in faculty hiring at many public and private universities, as well in corporations and other organizations. I confess that I had not focused on this development sufficiently; it is scary, and the mainstream media and its pundits apparently felt it was not something “the public has a right to know.” [The only previous Ethics Alarms essay on diversity statements is here. I helped sound the alarm, and then did nothing for two years.]
As she announced the reform, MIT’s president Sally Kornbluth, the lone survivor of the fateful Congressional hearing that led to the dismissal of two other female presidents of elite universities, the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard, condemned the statements as compelled speech. “My goals are to tap into the full scope of human talent, to bring the very best to M.I.T. and to make sure they thrive once here,” Dr. Kornbluth said . “We can build an inclusive environment in many ways, but compelled statements impinge on freedom of expression, and they don’t work.”
Interesting phrasing. If they “worked,” whatever sinister meaning that has, would she be eliminating them? The diversity statements are not just compelled speech, they represent compelled ideological conformity. That’s fascist stuff. Explain to me again: who are the “threats to democracy”? It also points to the other perspective besides the one I alluded to at the beginning. The fact that diversity statements has infested academia at all is ominous.
I’d say anyone celebrating Star Wars Day today (“May the Fourth be with you!”) on this May 4 needs to get out more.
In addition to being a day that promises further depressing developments on college campuses as the decades of progressive, anti-American, and Marxist indoctrination have their predictable (and probably intentional) consequences—though somehow the ivory tower revolutionaries in charge of those campuses were oddly unprepared for them!—this date has an ominous history.
The Vietnam protests reached their violent zenith with the National Guard shooting four Kent State students on May 4, 1970, a tragedy eerily reminiscent of the Boston Massacre. I’ve been surprised that there hasn’t been a student fatality in the current unrest yet: as always, the protest organizers are hoping for one to “radicalize” the campuses. Another development that seems inevitable is a terrorist attack in support of Gaza and Hamas. Today is a date that portends that, too: during a huge labor protest at Haymarket Square in Chicago, Illinois on May 4, 1886, a someone threw a bomb among the 200 police officers attempting to break up the demonstration. Police then started shooting at the pro-labor crowd, killing more than a dozen protestors and wounding nearly a hundred, several people in the crowd and injuring dozens more. The protest had been organized by pro-labor activists to protest (and exploit) of the killing of a striker by the Chicago police the day before, and about 1,500 workers participated. That episode galvanized both the labor movement and the progressive movement that produced Teddy Roosevelt, Eugene V. Debs, Clarence Darrow, and Woodrow Wilson.
The anti-war rioting at the Democratic National Convention in 1968 also took place in Chicago, and where do you suppose the Democrats are holding their nominating convention this year? If nothing else, you can accuse the party of being superstitious. That call is the equivalent of naming a new cruise ship “Titanic.”
But wait! There’s more!On May 4, 1994, then Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat reached an agreement in Cairo on Palestinian self-rule, following the Oslo Accords signed in Washington, D.C. on September 13, 1993. The agreement acknowledged Israel’s right to exist! Israeli agreed to withdraw from most of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank town of Jericho, all land won by Israel during the Six-Day War of 1967 when the Arab nations collectively tried to wipe Israel off the map. The Palestinians agreed to avoid terrorism and maintain peace. and prevent violence in the famous “land for peace” bargain. The agreement transferred authority from the Israeli Civil Administration to the newly created Palestinian Authority, its jurisdiction and legislative powers, a Palestinian police force and relations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
Sounds promising, no? Almost immediately after the Israeli military withdrawal, the Palestinians began attacking Israel and its civilians. The periodic terrorism continued: there was never real “peace.” The promise to accept Israel’s right to exist was just words. Seven years later came the “Second Intifada” in 2000, a violent Palestinian uprising against Israel that left over a thousand Israelis dead and thousands injured. The schism was complete when the Palestinians elected the openly terrorist organization Hamas to lead Gaza in 2006. The fable of “The Scorpion and the Frog” comes to mind.
I wonder how many of the campus protesters are conversant in this history?
You know, or should, that your conduct is unethical and outrageous when it makes Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fl.) look good by comparison Gaetz voted against HR 690, as every member of the House should have since it is throbbingly unconstitutional on its face, no question, no argument, a flat out First Amendment violation. Gaetz told his followers on Twitter/X that he voted against the proposed legislation because it is a “ridiculous hate speech bill.”
“Antisemitism is wrong, but this legislation is written without regard for the Constitution, common sense, or even the common understanding of the meaning of words,” he wrote. Bingo. The bill, in weasel words remarkable even by recent Congressional standards, declares that “anti-Semitism” is a violation of title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (42 U.S.C. 2000d et seq.), and embraces an expansive definition of the term “adopted on May 26, 2016, by the IHRA, of which the United States is a member, which definition has been adopted by the Department of State; and… includes the “[c]ontemporary examples of antisemitism” identified in the IHRA definition.”
The IHRA definition includes examples of pure speech, and I would expect any junior in high school to know that these cannot be criminalized:
The Dexter Taylor case raises interesting Second Amendment issues to be sure.
A New York jury found Taylor guilty of second-degree criminal possession of a loaded weapon, four counts of third-degree criminal possession of a weapon, five counts of criminal possession of a firearm, second-degree criminal possession of five or more firearms, unlawful possession of pistol ammunition, violation of certificate of registration, prohibition on unfinished frames or receivers. Now Taylor, a 52-year-old African-American software engineer, is on Rikers Island waiting to be sentenced. He became interested in gunsmithing as a hobby years ago, but a joint ATF/NYPD task force discovered he was legally buying gun parts from various companies and began investigating him, leading to a SWAT raid and his arrest. His legal team explains his side of the case here.
That’s not the focus of this post, however. This is: during his trial, Judge Abena Darkehallegedly said at one point, “Do not bring the Second Amendment into this courtroom. It doesn’t exist here. So you can’t argue Second Amendment. This is New York.” Darkeh was appointed by New York City’s crypto-communist Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2015.
USC has banned this year’s graduating class valedictorian, Asna Tabassum, from Chino Hill, California, from making her speech during the university’s commencement ceremony. The justification: anti-Israel (or pro-Palestine…same thing, really) posts on Instagram, including thise calling for the “complete abolition” of Israel.
Asna is a Muslim, not that there’s anything wrong with that. USC officials chose her from nearly 100 student applicants who had GPAs of 3.98 or higher. It seemed like a good idea at the time: certainly in this age of enlightened DEI, the woke school wasn’t going to choose any icky white male. Tabassum majored in biomedical engineering with a minor in resistance to genocide—wait, what??? USC has a “resistance to genocide” major?
This excellent Comment of the Day (which I happen to agree with completely, though that is never a requirement for COTDs) was sparked by a statement by esteemed EA squid, Extradimensional Cephalopod. This seem like a propitious time to salute EC, who is very thoughtful on this classic ethics conflict issue, for alerting me to a Zoom debate on abortion held by his group, Braver Angels (“leading the nation’s largest cross-partisan, volunteer-led movement to bridge the partisan divide…”).
Extradimensional Cephalopod said: It sounds like you’re presupposing the existence of a person who is killed in that situation. I think it’s simple enough to understand that people live in human brains, and if a human body hasn’t developed a brain, that means a person cannot yet have started to live in that body. Does that make sense?
Presuming the concept of personhood is morally relevant, then it makes sense. That presumption is the entire basis upon which the pro-choice point of view rests.
Accept as presented the assumption that personhood is an objectively definable state before which there is no ethical alarm set off by choosing an abortion.
Even granting without dissent that most essential assumption gains nothing.
Existence preceding personhood — the interval between achieving that status and conception — still has precisely two ways of ending: natural cause, or homicide. There is no other option.
Burge’s tweet above was in response to the episode described by ultra-woke UC Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky in the statement below (you can view Chemerinsky’s damning Ethics Alarms dossier here).
OK, maybe I just telegraphed my personal bias in reaction to this quiz, so I’ll keep my opinion to myself until the commentariat weighs in. I’ll try, anyway.
New York City has agreed to pay $17.5 million to settle a lawsuit filed in a 2018 class-action lawsuit by Jamilla Clark and Arwa Aziz, two Muslim women who claimed their rights were violated when police forced them to remove their hijabs for the police to take their “mug shots.”
The financial settlement requires approval by Judge Analisa Torres of U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, and I fervently hope…never mind! My mouth is zipped!
Commenter Dr. Emilio Lizardo revealed this morning in the comments to “At Princeton, Students Feel “Unsafe” in the Company of a Conservative Professor” that the policy at issue had already been reversed by the time I wrote about it:
“By April 2, the policy was reversed after an intervention from the club’s Graduate Board. In the seven days in between, debate over the policy rose from the club’s private GroupMe to the headlines of national right-wing publications. Club leadership maintains that the reversal was not due to national media scrutiny.”
So Ethics Alarms can’t claim even a smidgen of credit for the reversal. Nonetheless, the lesson here, as we have already seen elsewhere, is that when organizations and institutions install discriminatory and self-evidently unethical procedures and policies in the name of wokeness, political correctness, aspiring fascism of the far left, DEI or other perversions of core American principles and are quickly exposed, assailed and embarrassed, they usually back down. (Usually.)
A further lesson is that the organizations and institutions know that what they are doing is indefensible except from the “by any means necessary” perspective driving the Left in its crusade to re-make America. They know it, but they try anyway, hoping that any single instance will fly under the metaphorical radar long enough to become institutionalized. When they get caught, their reaction is, “OK, too soon. We’ll hold off on this one for now.”
Their assumption, and it is, frighteningly, probably correct, that the current DEI, Black Lives Matter, open borders, climate change hysteria, anti-free speech…freedom of association…equal treatment under the law and due process wack-a-mole contest it has forced our society into playing will inevitably result in a slow, steady ratcheting-up of anti-democratic practices that become accepted as norms. This is how the public education system became an indoctrination process. It is how the initially admirable goals of affirmative action became the racist practice of “diversity, equity and inclusion.” It is how journalism in the US. became partisan propaganda.
The fact that only conservative publications and news sources treated the Princeton story as “fit to print” and necessary illumination to stop democracy from “dying in darkness” is also significant. This doesn’t mean that the story wasn’t important or objectively worth reporting on. The conduct of the mainstream media in ignoring it proves that its purpose is not to keep the public informed, but to assist the Far Left in laying waste to America’s traditional interpretation of democracy. The Princeton story is important, and the fact that only conservative sources publicized it (only Fox News among the news networks picked it up) doesn’t prove their bias. It proves the sinister, deliberate complicity of the mainstream media as it attempts to keep Americans from realizing what is going on right under their noses until it is too late.
The Princetonian wrote that a debate over the policy arose only after “headlines of national right-wing publications” exposed it. If the story sparked a debate, it means it was a story worth reporting. The MSM didn’t report on the story because the Far Left doesn’t want any debate. In an honest debate they lose, just as they lose on abortion, illegal immigration, and so many other issues. If they felt they could win on the merits, then they would want debate. Instead, their media tries to bury the facts. This isn’t a conservative “conspiracy theory.” It is reality.
Finally, the club’s claim that “the reversal was not due to national media scrutiny” is another damning piece of evidence. Gaslighting, denial, “Jumbo”-ism and “It isn’t what it is” (Yoo’s Rationalization,” #64) mania have become such reflex tools of the Left that comparisons with “1984” are unavoidable. The border is secure. Bidenomics is a success. Inflation isn’t a problem. The President didn’t extol the “Transgender Day of Visibility” on Easter. He’s as sharp as a tack. The Trump prosecutions aren’t political. January 6 was an insurrection. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.
The Princeton student club episode is an important one for American to understand. They can only understand it if they know about it.
Boy I wish I knew how to get the readership here back on the rising curve it seemed to be on in 2016...
The photo above, showing three illuminated cross along Lower Manhattan Skyline in New York city symbolizing the three crosses on Calvary, contrasts sharply with Item #3 of the previous post noting that the White House viewed Easter egg decorations with “religious symbols” inappropriate for the day’s festivities.
I ask, without irony or innuendo: “Is this progress?”
Ethics Alarms 