RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/07/05/a-university-capitulates-to-the-woke-mob/

May and June were lovely months. The cherry trees in Riverside Park put on their annual extravaganza. The eastern redbuds came a beat later with their mysterious clusters of lavender flowers bursting straight out of their bark. And free-range New Yorkers met the sunlight, maskless as the day they were born. This glorious freedom was bound to fade, but not before we had one more gift: the revelation that the trustees of the University of North Carolina had summoned the courage to say “no” to the proposal that Nikole Hannah-Jones, author of the New York Times‘ now-infamous “1619 Project,” be appointed with tenure to UNC’s Hussman School of Journalism. 

I expressed my delight in this development several weeks after it was reported. And while the American higher education establishment was seething with resentment over the decision, it looked like those UNC trustees had the gravel to stick with their unpopular choice.

Now we know better. Last week, in a 9-4 vote, the UNC trustees approved a grant of tenure to the award-winning journalist. No explanation was offered, but the decision followed an intense campaign of vilification of the trustees for their failure to recognize Hannah-Jones’ exceptional merits.

Kudos to the four trustees—Dave Boliek, Haywood Cochrane, Allie Ray McCullen, and John Preyer—who had the fortitude to stand against the surrender. 

The vote is a significant defeat for those of us who hope to see American colleges and universities cease their seemingly relentless slide into the politicization of their faculty, curricula, and academic standards. 

Hannah-Jones’ tenured appointment, of course, is far from the first time that a public university board has capitulated to pressure to go along with a meretricious appointment, and it won’t be the last time either. It feels a little different, however, because it was preceded by that short spring of hope. 

What should we make of the trustees’ reversal? Some of the lessons will be abundantly clear to Hannah-Jones’ supporters. Noise works. Bluster, threats, and intimidation are effective ways to advance an academic appointment that is meritless on its face. University trustees are as susceptible to social and political pressure as anyone else. The trick is to spot their particular vulnerabilities. 

The other lesson is more speculative. UNC has willingly sacrificed some of its reputation for high academic standards in order to appease its woke critics, to land a celebrity journalist, and to stave off the threat of a boycott by some other black academics. 

The university faces a potential cost in doing this—the cost of reputational damage. That cost, of course, is unknowable at this point. Will the Hussman School fail to attract some good students who are turned off by the prospect of studying under a teacher who has conspicuously played fast and loose with the facts? Or will her celebrity and the controversy itself yield a bonanza of starstruck students? Plainly, UNC faces no reputational cost within the progressive American professoriate which rallied to her cause. But what happens among alumni, parents, and taxpayers in North Carolina? 

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/07/universities-dont-celebrate-diversity-they-crush-it/

What the ideologically monolithic campus approach to ‘diversity’ forgets.

American universities have made it a part of their mission to embrace so-called diversity. Through a combination of outreach groups, equity officers (so official!), affirmative-action policies, and more, schools across the country have implemented measures to be as “accepting” as possible. To an extent, colleges are right to take steps to prevent the formation of a homogenous student body. Part of a university’s job is to prepare undergraduates for the rest of their lives. If all the students at Columbia were wealthy white kids from the Upper East Side, they wouldn’t be living in an environment that represents the world around them. But as they are so prone to do, the bureaucrats residing in the ivory tower have overcorrected.

As has been described in countless works, intellectual diversity at universities has greatly suffered. The pervasive cloud of wokism has seeped into almost every branch of academia. Law professors cut portions of curricula, such as the study of laws pertaining to rape, Jim Crow, and abuse, to avoid offending their students. Public medical schools punish discussion of “microaggression theory.” Worst of all, untold numbers of faculty have faced repercussions for expressing the slightest disagreement with the woke, hyper-inclusive ideology that progressives peddle.

But it is not only intellectual diversity that suffers in today’s college climate. Even the diversity that admissions officers favor, diversity of background, is weakened by wokeness.

The unhinged drive toward inclusion has resulted in some terribly exclusive practices. According to a report published by the National Association of Scholars, covering 173 private and public universities from all 50 states, over 70 percent of the schools surveyed offered separate, racially designated graduation ceremonies and residential areas. Elite institutions such as Harvard and Columbia have hopped on the bandwagon. But how will the broader student body reap the benefits of a diverse campus if the students opt into self-segregated programs?

One particularly innovative school, Chapman University, a midsize California university, has decided to host not one, not two, but seven individual graduation ceremonies based on students’ various ways of self-identifying. As one can imagine, there are problems with this. For one, it creates an almost comical scenario for Chapman students who fit under multiple categories. Maybe a gay, disabled, and Afro-Latino student should get five graduations! But, more seriously, the profusion of separate ceremonies detracts from the primary purpose of commencement. It is supposed to be a time when students in STEM, humanities, and business programs abandon their differences for the sake of celebrating their accomplishments together. Students toss their caps as one because they have finished as one. It seems wrong to have them throw their caps in separate groupuscules.