But if risk-averse child-rearing is the source of the problem, why aren’t heterosexual white male students demanding “safe spaces”? They had the same kind of parents as the outraged young women who claim to be under lethal assault from the patriarchy. And they are the targets of a pervasive discourse that portrays them as the root of all evil. Unlike any other group on a college campus, they are stigmatized with impunity, blamed for everything from “rape culture” to racial oppression.
Campus intolerance is at root not a psychological phenomenon but an ideological one. At its center is a worldview that sees Western culture as endemically racist and sexist. The overriding goal of the educational establishment is to teach young people within the ever-growing list of official victim classifications to view themselves as existentially oppressed. One outcome of that teaching is the forceful silencing of contrarian speech.
Such maudlin pleas for self-preservation are typical. An editorial in the Wellesley College student newspaper defended “shutting down rhetoric that undermines the existence and rights of others.”
Offending “rhetoric” frequently includes the greatest works of Western civilization. In November 2015, a Columbia University sophomore announced on Facebook that his “health and life” were threatened by a core curriculum course taught by a white professor. The comment thread exploded with sympathetic rage: “The majority of why?te [sic] students taking [Contemporary Civilization] and on this campus never have to be consistently aware of their identities as white ppl while sitting in CC reading racist, patriarchal texts taught by white professors who most likely are unaware of the various forms of impact that CC texts have on people of color.”
Another sophomore fulminated: “Many of these texts INSPIRED THE RACISM THAT I’M FORCED TO LIVE WITH DAILY, and to expect, or even suggest, that that doesn’t matter, is fucking belittling, insulting, and WAY OUT OF FUCKING LINE.”13 Those “racist” texts include works by Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Rousseau, and Mill.
Many observers dismiss such ignorant tantrums as a phase that will end once the “snowflakes” encounter the real world. But the graduates of the academic victimology complex are remaking the world in their image (as we will see at length in chapter 11). Consider the firing of Google engineer James Damore in August 2017 for questioning the company’s diversity ideology. After attending a diversity training session, Damore wrote a ten-page memo titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber.” He observed that “differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don’t have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership.” Among those traits are assertiveness, a drive for status, an orientation toward things rather than people, and a tolerance for stress. He acknowledged that many of the differences in distribution are small and overlap significantly between the sexes, so that one cannot assume on the basis of sex where any given individual falls on the psychological spectrum. Considerable research supports Damore’s claims regarding male and female career preferences and personality traits.
Damore affirmed his commitment to diversity and suggested ways to make software engineering more people-oriented. But he pointed out that several of Google’s practices for engineering diversity discriminated in favor of women and minorities. And he called for greater openness to ideas that challenge progressive dogma, especially the “science of human nature,” which shows that not all differences are “socially constructed or due to discrimination.”
Google CEO Sundar Pichai employed the academy’s bathetic language of injury in his response to Damore. “The memo has clearly impacted our co-workers, some of whom are hurting and feel judged based on their gender,” he asserted in a memo of his own.14 Yonatan Zunger, a recently departed Google senior engineer, claimed in an online essay that the speculations of Damore, a junior employee, have “caused significant harm to people across this company, and to the company’s entire ability to function.” He added that “not all conversations about ideas even have basic legitimacy”15 [emphasis in original].
Ironically, Google is making even stronger claims than Damore is about the company’s lack of bias against women. US Labor Department auditors allege that the company’s salary differentials reflect sex discrimination; Google strenuously denies it. “We remain committed to treating, and paying, people fairly and without bias with regard to factors like gender or race,” Eileen Naughton, vice president of “people operations,” said in July 2017. “We are proud of our practices and leadership in this area.” But typical of the cognitive dissonance affecting every diversity-obsessed company, Google puts its workers through “implicit bias” training on the theory that such biases inevitably cloud their ability to judge female and minority employees and job applicants fairly.
The corporate world is even mimicking academia in its inhospitality to nonconforming speakers. Earlier in 2017, a Google employee had asked me if I would be interested in speaking there about the police. The employee ultimately decided he could not go through with the invitation, however, citing “personal/professional matters” that he had to take into account for himself. An affiliation, however remote, with someone who challenges the Black Lives Matter narrative is apparently a job hazard at Google. A discrimination lawsuit filed by Damore in January 2018 alleges that Google keeps a black list of right-wing commentators who set off silent security alarms if they try to enter the Google campus.
Don’t assume that the discipline of the marketplace will prevent this imported academic victimology from harming business competitiveness. Google sets managerial goals for increased diversity. Damore wrote that he has observed such goals resulting in discrimination. That is fully believable. A comment on an internal anonymous discussion app warned that more Google employees need to stand up “against the insanity. Otherwise ‘Diversity and Inclusion’ which is essentially a pipeline from Women’s and African Studies, will ruin the company.”16
The more resources that US companies spend on engineering diversity while global competing firms base themselves on meritocracy, the more we blunt our scientific edge. Employees are thinking about leaving Google because of its heavy-handed ideology, Damore said in an interview after his firing. While the prestige of elite companies may outweigh the burden of censorship for now, there may come a point when the calculus changes.
Eric Schmidt, outgoing chairman of Google parent Alphabet Inc., told a June 2017 shareholder meeting that Google was founded on the principle of “science-based thinking.” It says a lot about the corporate world that it makes universities look like an open marketplace of ideas. Research into biological differences may be unwelcome in much of academia, but it proceeds on the margins nevertheless. In the country’s most powerful companies, however, it is enough to disparage a scientific finding as a “stereotype” to absolve the speaker from considering the question: But is it true?
And now that zeal for censoring politically incorrect facts is working its way into the apparatus of government itself. In February 2018, an associate general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board released an official “Advice Memorandum” holding that Google was justified in firing Damore. Damore had filed a complaint with the NLRB in August 2017, but withdrew it in January 2018 after filing a lawsuit in state court. The associate general counsel went ahead and published her opinion anyway, though the issue was moot.
Damore’s statements about “purported biological differences between men and women” were “discriminatory and constituted sexual harassment,” declared NLRB counsel Jayme Sophir. Sophir sneers that Damore tried to cloak his comments with “‘scientific’ references and analysis.” She makes no effort to determine whether that science met traditional research standards, which it does. If it contradicts feminist ideology, it must be both wrong and suppressed. Sophir notes that some of Google’s employees had complained that Damore’s memo made them feel “unsafe at work.” Thus does bathos-filled academic victimology get bootstrapped into further assaults on rational inquiry outside the academy.
&
nbsp; Sophir’s advice memo does not have the force of law, but it is a barometer of which way the wind is blowing in government bureaucracies. As we will see, her views are hardly unique. The logic of her ruling means that any academic researcher investigating biological differences between the sexes is at risk of his job. Evolutionary biologists, psychologists, linguists, neurologists, or economists—anyone who has documented different risk preferences, ways of communicating, emotional bonding, or levels of aggression between males and females—could be fired for engaging in what Sophir labels “harmful, discriminatory, and disruptive” practices. This ruling, were it to become the standard governmental response to research on the sexes, would end that field of science entirely and create a chilling effect in many other areas.
* * *
Faculty and campus administrators must start defending the Enlightenment legacy of reason and civil debate. But even if dissenting thought were welcome on college campuses, the ideology of victimhood would still wreak havoc on American society and civil harmony. The silencing of speech is a massive problem, but it is a symptom of an even more profound distortion of reality. This distortion has its roots partly in well-intentioned public policies designed to advance minorities in the American education system, particularly in higher education; the objective failure of these policies has led to ever-more contorted theoretical efforts to explain their failures as the result of systemic racism, leading to an ideology of victimization that largely defines the campus environment today.
2
ELITES TO AFFIRMATIVE ACTION VOTERS: DROP DEAD
In 1996, Californians voted to ban race and gender preferences in government and education. Ten years later, the chancellor of the state-funded University of California at Berkeley, Robert Birgeneau, announced a new vice chancellor for equity and inclusion, charged with making Berkeley more “inclusive” and “less hostile” to “underrepresented minority … groups.” This move became just another expression of the University of California’s unrelenting resistance to the 1996 voter initiative, in every way possible short of patent violation. Stasi apparatchiks disappeared more meekly after the Soviet Empire’s collapse than California’s race commissars have retreated after voters tried to oust their preference regime.
California shows the power, and the limitations, of the crusade for a color-blind America led by Ward Connerly, architect of the 1996 antipreference initiative. Without a doubt, Proposition 209, as that measure is called, has cut the use of race quotas in the Golden State’s government. But it has also exposed the contempt of the elites—above all, in education—for the popular will. “Diversity”—meaning socially engineered racial proportionality—is now the official ideology of the education behemoth, and California shows what happens when that ideology comes into conflict with the law.
When Prop. 209 passed, a few politicians, such as San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, loudly vowed to disobey it. Most public officials, though, were more circumspect. Doubtless they counted on a highly publicized lawsuit, filed the day after the election, to eviscerate the new constitutional amendment before it affected their operations. A coalition of ethnic advocacy groups and big labor, represented gratis by some of the state’s top law firms, had sued to block the amendment from taking effect. The plaintiffs argued, remarkably, that requiring government to treat everyone equally violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
The plaintiffs could not have found a more sympathetic audience than Judge Thelton Henderson, one of the federal bench’s most liberal activists. He quickly issued an injunction against Prop. 209, on the grounds that American society is so racist and sexist that only special preferences for minorities and women could ensure their constitutional right to equal protection. Henderson’s 1996 ruling was the high point of the preference racket’s reception in the courts. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed Henderson’s ruling the next year, declaring that Prop. 209’s ban on discrimination and preferential treatment was fully compatible with the Equal Protection Clause—a point evidently not obvious to the crème of the state’s lawyers.
From then on, state and federal judges would show an admirable respect both for voter intent and for the plain meaning of the state’s new constitutional amendment. Not so for California’s bureaucrats and pols. Many chose passive resistance or tried to hide noncompliance under Orwellian name changes: San Jose’s affirmative action bureaucracy rechristened itself the “Office of Equality Assurance,” for instance.
Without the efforts of a small public interest law firm, some of the state’s largest government employers would still be using racial preferences for hiring and would be requiring contractors to do the same. The Pacific Legal Foundation had to drag into court the city and county of San Francisco, the Sacramento municipal utility district, the state lottery commission, the state bond commission, and the California community college system, among others, to vindicate the people’s will. The Los Angeles and Berkeley school districts continued to assign students and teachers by race, even though the foundation had won suits challenging the practice in other school districts.
California’s then–attorney general, Bill Lockyer, filed an amicus brief supporting San Jose’s continuing preferential-outreach requirements for contractors. As for enforcing the state constitution against violators of 209, Lockyer could not be bothered. Members of the state legislature also busily tried to thwart the voters’ fiat, often under pressure from Latino advocates. In a particularly strained move, the state assembly in 2003 adopted a definition of discrimination put forward by the 1969 UN International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, whose terms would have restored racial preferences in contracting. California courts saw through this ruse and overruled it in 2004.
Ward Connerly estimated in 2006 that 65 to 75 percent of California’s agencies no longer use race in hiring or contracting—hardly resounding compliance but a huge improvement over the pre-209 era. A propreference organization claimed in 2004 that transportation-construction contracts awarded to minority-owned businesses had dropped 50 percent since 1996 and that the percentage of women in the construction trades had declined by one third. These figures suggest the extent to which race and gender discrimination had been keeping many noncompetitive enterprises afloat.
California’s university system is a different matter entirely. That die-hard center of race and gender obsession has managed to stay out of court (except for one sweetheart suit brought by propreference advocates) through fiendishly clever compliance with the letter of the law, while riding roughshod over its spirit. In doing so, university officials have revealed a fatalism about the low academic achievement of blacks and Hispanics that they would decry as rankest bigotry in a 1950s Southerner.
After Prop. 209’s passage, UC Berkeley, like the rest of the UC system, “went through a depression figuring out what to do,” says Robert Laird, Berkeley’s propreferences admissions director from 1993 to 1999. The system’s despair was understandable. It had relied on wildly unequal double standards to achieve its smattering of “underrepresented minorities,” especially at Berkeley and UCLA, the most competitive campuses. The median SAT score of blacks and Hispanics in Berkeley’s liberal arts programs was 250 points lower (on a 1600-point scale) than that of whites and Asians. This test-score gap was hard to miss in the classroom. Renowned Berkeley philosophy professor John Searle, who judges affirmative action “a disaster,” recounted that “they admitted people who could barely read.”
The downward trajectory of those students was inevitable, Searle said. “You’d be delighted to find that your introductory philosophy class looked like the United Nations, but that salt-and-pepper effect was lost after six to eight weeks,” he recalled. “There was a huge dropout rate of affirmative-action admits in my classes by mid-terms. No one had taught them the need to go to class. So we started introducing BS majors, in an effort to make the university ready for them, rather than making them ready for the university.�
�� Searle recalled a black studies class before his that was “as segregated as Mississippi in the 1950s.” One day, Searle recounted, the professor had written on the blackboard that a particular tribe in Africa “wore colorful clothing.”1
Even though preference beneficiaries often chose the easiest majors—there were few blacks and Hispanics in the most competitive engineering and computer science majors, for example—graduation rates also reflected the qualifications gap. The average six-year graduation rate for blacks and “Chicanos” (California-speak for Mexican Americans) admitted from 1991 to 1997, the last year of preferences, was about 20 percent below that of whites and Asians. The university always put on a happy face when publicly discussing the fate of its “diversity” admits. Internally, however, even the true believers couldn’t ignore the problems. A psychology professor at UC San Diego recalled that “every meeting of the faculty senate’s student affirmative-action committee was a lugubrious affair. They’d look at graduation rates, grades, and other indicators and say, ‘What we’re doing is failing.’”2
Yet for the preference lobby, a failing diversity student is better than no diversity student at all—because the game is not about the students but about the self-image of the institution that so beneficently extends its largesse to them. Thus, when “underrepresented minorities” accepted at Berkeley dropped by half in 1998, the first year that Prop. 209 went into effect, and by nearly that much at UCLA, the university sprang into action. Never mind that the drops at other campuses were much smaller. Berkeley’s then-chancellor, Robert Berdahl, came to the Berkeley Law School and demanded that the faculty increase its shrunken minority admissions. When a professor asked how the school was supposed to do that consistent with 209, Berdahl responded testily that he didn’t care how they did it, but do it they must. UCLA law professor Richard Sander was on a committee to discuss what could be done after 209. “The tone among many of the faculty and administrators present was not ‘How do we comply with the law in good faith?’ but ‘What is the likelihood of getting caught if we do not comply?’” he said. “Some faculty observed that admissions decisions in many graduate departments rested on so many subjective criteria that it would be easy to make the continued consideration of race invisible to outsiders.”3
The Diversity Delusion Page 4
