RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-to-get-fired-at-duke-11556133633

Zion Williamson isn’t the only star leaving Duke University after this academic year. But at least the basketball phenom is allowed to leave voluntarily to pursue an NBA career. A popular professor is being driven off campus for reasons that are not entirely clear.

After teaching for nearly two decades at Duke, Evan Charney was told last year by the university’s Sanford School of Public Policy that his contract would not be renewed after this academic year. He reports that he had not been warned about any problems with his teaching and was not told why he was being dismissed.

This week, as he prepares to depart, he describes what happened after he filed a complaint with Duke’s Faculty Hearing Committee. Unlike his Sanford colleagues, this outfit at least gave him some vague sense of why he was getting sacked:

Professor Charney’s tendency to provoke negative reactions, and perhaps harm, among some students in the classroom due to his confrontational teaching style—a style that had a tendency to be polarizing among students, particularly in a required Sanford course in which not all students could choose to have Professor Charney as an instructor.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/professor-samuel-abrams-spoke-the-truth-he-still-pays-the-price/

Dissenters from campus orthodoxy often need a rare kind of personal fortitude.

Last October, Sarah Lawrence College professor Samuel Abrams wrote an important and insightful essay in the New York Times. While critics of higher education have often focused on faculty bias — in part because a small subset of professors is prone to say ridiculous things — a larger problem has gone mostly unnoticed. Abrams’s research revealed that college administrators are more uniformly progressive even than college faculties. “Liberal staff members,” he wrote, “outnumber their conservative counterparts by the astonishing ratio of 12-to-one,” making them the “most left-leaning group on campus.”

At the conclusion of his piece, Abrams made an argument that rang true to my more than 20 years of litigation experience — “ideological imbalance, coupled with [administrators’] agenda-setting power, threatens the free and open exchange of ideas.”

This is exactly right. Administrators draft and enforce speech codes. Administrators are responsible for creating campus kangaroo courts. Administrators kick Christian student groups off campus, and administrators often take the lead in designing campus programming that features overwhelmingly progressive voices. While conservative media often focus their ire on random radical professors, administrators are busy engaging in the overwhelming majority of campus censorship.

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/04/24/choosing-real-diversity/

“Schools and universities desperately need diversity – but diversity of thought and opinion, not a contrived structure that conditions, divides, and ultimately shuts down exposure to views that don’t line up with the current narrative.”

This nation’s most influential opinion-shapers tell us diversity is an unalloyed good, so self-evidently virtuous that it cannot be questioned. It’s simply a given that every decent person has to support diversity and even the slightest departure from the orthodoxy is heretical.

Universities have become the temples of diversity. They are so committed to the idea that they hand out millions in salaries every year to administrators charged with promoting inclusivity, equity, academic access, and a “welcoming environment” on school grounds. At the University of California, Los Angeles, for instance, the 2017 payroll for its five diversity offices was $3.2 million, according to Campus Reform. Diversity administrators at the University of California, Berkeley, were paid $2.3 million that same year. The diversity-focused employees at the University of California, San Francisco, make more than $2 million a year.

Meanwhile, several schools in the University of California system are requiring math professor candidates to include a “diversity statement” in their applications, listing “past and/or potential contributions to diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

To wonder in 2019 why so much effort is being expended on programs that have zero academic value is to be a subversive. Still, it’s a fair question.