The Diversity Delusion

by Heather Mac Donald

  As word of the sit-in spread in the press and on the internet, the administration began its sacrifice of Rust. Dean Marcelo Suárez-Orozco sent around a pandering email to faculty and students, announcing that he had become “aware of the last of a series of troubling racial climate incidents at UCLA, most recently associated with [Rust’s class]”—thus conferring legitimacy on the preposterous claim that there was anything racially “troubling” about Rust’s management of his class. Suárez-Orozco went on: “Rest assured I take this extremely seriously. I humbly dedicate myself to listening and to learning from this experience. As a community, we will work towards just, equitable, and lasting solutions. Together, we shall heal.”

  Of course, the very idea of taking “this” “extremely seriously” presupposes that there was something to be taken seriously and solved, as opposed to a mere outburst of narcissistic victimhood. The administration announced that Rust would not teach the remainder of the class by himself but would be joined by three other professors, one of whom, Daniel Solórzano, was the school’s leading proponent of microaggression theory and critical race theory. This reorganization implicitly confirmed the charge that Rust was unfit to supervise “graduate students of color.”

  Unsatisfied with the administration’s response, the protesters posted an online petition riddled with a new crop of grammatical puzzlers. “Students consistently report hostile classroom environments in which the effects of white supremacy, patriarchy, heteronormativity, and other forms of institutionalized oppression have manifested within the department and deride our intellectual capacity, methodological rigor, and ideological legitimacy,” limped one typical sentence.

  A few weeks later, a town hall convened to discuss the Day of Action’s charge of a “hostile and toxic environment for students of Color.” Professor Solórzano presented his typology of microaggressions to explain the school’s racial tensions. Protest organizer Kenjus Watson read a long bill of particulars accusing Rust of lying about his microaggressions. Another black student argued that no reconciliation in the school was possible because Rust had not apologized for his transgressions. Several of Rust’s faculty colleagues in the Division of Social Sciences and Comparative Education attended; none publicly defended him.

  After the meeting, Rust approached the student who had berated him for not seeking forgiveness and tried to engage him in conversation. Ever naïve, Rust again reached out to touch his interlocutor. The student, a large and robust young man, erupted in anger and eventually filed a criminal charge of battery against the seventy-nine-year-old professor. Rust’s employers presented him with a choice: If he agreed to stay off the education-school premises for the remainder of the academic year, they would not pursue disciplinary charges against him. The administration then sent around a letter to students, alerting them that the school would be less dangerous—for a while, at least—with Rust out of the picture.

  The dean and his assistants were just warming up. They formed a committee charged with “examining all aspects of the [school’s] operations and culture from the perspective of race and ethnic relations.” Oblivious to conflicts of interest, they appointed Watson, leader of the anti-Rust protests, as “graduate student researcher” for the committee. None of the allegedly racially “hostile” students who had been penned inside the protest circle was invited to participate. Solórzano would chair the committee.

  The committee’s final report unctuously thanked the student protesters for their brave stand against racial oppression: “Recently, a group of our students have courageously challenged us to reflect on how we enact [the school’s social-justice] mission in our own community. We owe these students a debt of thanks,” opened the report. Watson, in other words, was thanking himself. To laud the students as courageous is absurd: They faced no prospect of negative repercussions from their protest.

  The committee said nothing about the students’ embarrassing writing skills, perhaps because it had almost as much difficulty as they did crafting clear prose: “We welcome the opportunity to step up to the leadership role that accompanies our social justice mission to work on remedying the unsafe and not brave learning spaces within our community and pledge to improving our pedagogical practices and classrooms so that all our students feel their work is valued,” the committee announced.5

  If UCLA were serious about preparing its graduate students for a life of scholarship, it would have rebutted the protesters’ assumption that their work should be off-limits to questions. (According to the Day of Action Statement, “the barrage of questions by white colleagues and the grammar ‘lessons’ by the professor have contributed to a hostile class climate.”) Intellectual debate is essential to the academic endeavor and in no way constitutes a “microaggression,” the administration should have said. There is no likelihood that the class discussions were motivated by racism; virtually every American student in the education school embraces its “social-justice” mission. A graduate student who defended Rust in the UCLA student newspaper opened her op-ed on the dispute with the observation that racism “is deeply embedded within the institutions that make up UCLA” before denouncing Rust’s “unjust … demoniz[ation] as a symbol of white male oppression.”

  But the most stunning failure of the committee’s report and of the school’s leadership more generally was the unwillingness to make any public effort to rebut the students’ calumny against Rust. Surely Rust’s colleagues knew that he lacks any trace of racial condescension or “hostility.” As one of his students put it: “He is pure of heart.” No more poisonous charge can be lodged against someone in today’s university than racial bias or insensitivity. Yet the education-school administration sacrificed Rust’s honor and feelings, not to mention the truth, to avoid further inflaming the protesters. This is not just a moral lapse; it is also an educational one. Rust’s “students of color” profoundly misinterpreted the dynamics of the classroom, seeing racial animus where none existed. Not only did the education school not correct the students’ misperceptions, it celebrated those students as heroes. The administration and complicit faculty have thus all but guaranteed that the protesters and their supporters will go through life lodging similar complaints against equally phantom racism and expecting a similarly laudatory response.

  I asked Dean Suárez-Orozco whether his administration believed that Rust was an appropriate target of a racial protest; he refused to answer, citing through a spokesman “personnel privacy rights.” In light of the open humiliation of Rust, as well as the administration and committee’s existing public comments, it is cowardly to hide behind alleged “privacy rights” to avoid answering questions about a painfully public affair.

  The closest that the administration came to acknowledging the possibility that the protesters had misconstrued the classroom dynamics was a brief passage in the Race and Ethnic Relations Committee report. According to the committee, there exists no right or wrong interpretation in alleged racial incidents—just different perspectives, each equally valid: “Any incident or experience shared by a community will always generate multiple narratives, each of which has the right to be respected and validated as an experience of events. No single version of any incident is a full explanation of a complex situation, particularly one that carries the heavy weight of issues emotionally charged by historical legacies of racism, power imbalance, and systematic abuses that often go unrecognized and without articulation in our culture.” Though the committee gave no indication that it had considered, much less “validated,” a narrative about Rust’s class that discounted the claim of racism, implicit in its invocation of “issues emotionally charged by historical legacies of racism” is the hint that there may be another side to the protesters’ portrayal of Rust’s class. That’s cold comfort, though, to Rust or anyone who cares about the truth. In fact, the committee’s seemingly evenhanded gesture of epistemological inclusiveness was even more of a moral dodge than it first appeared. It let the committee sidestep its responsibility of deciding
whether the racial accusation was justified; in practice, the racism charge will always trump a denial of racism. Once such a charge is launched, every campus administration will act as if it were true and will introduce a host of measures to counteract the alleged bias.

  The committee concluded by congratulating itself and the school’s leadership for identifying “the racial climate challenges that emerged in the Fall Quarter and mov[ing] quickly and decisively to address them.” The authors lacked the integrity to name these “racial climate challenges” or to specify how the school addressed them, but presumably the administration did so by cordoning off the school from Rust’s dangerous presence. The report went on to recommend the bureaucracy inflation that is every school’s default response to racial protest: in this case, a new associate dean for equity and diversity, a permanent committee on equity and diversity, diversity training for the faculty, and a beefed-up grievance process for lodging complaints of racial discrimination, among other measures lifted directly from the protesters’ petition.

  Kenjus Watson, the “only Male of Color” in Rust’s class and lead protest organizer, moved on to codirect the “Intergroup dialogue program” at Los Angeles’s Occidental College the following summer. In fact, Watson became a font of “Intergroup dialogue” across the country, yet another content-free academic fraud. “Intergroup dialogue” courses, in the words of the Occidental catalog, seek to “enhance students’ knowledge, understanding, and awareness about diversity and social justice while nurturing the development of constructive intergroup relations and leadership skills”—all for academic credit. Watson has taught “Intergroup dialogue” courses at Penn State, St. Louis University, and the University of Michigan, covering such topics as “Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Black Masculinity.” The Day of Action Statement had denounced Rust’s arm pat: “this singling out of this Male Student of Color reached an inexcusable culmination when the professor physically shook this student’s arm in a questionable, patronizing and facetious effort to remind student of the importance of dialogue.” Someone who felt so offended by Rust’s innocuous gesture is not the ideal candidate for promoting “constructive intergroup relations,” even if that were a legitimate academic field. But Watson has undoubtedly spread his version of “dialogue” and “social justice” to numerous receptive “Students of Color,” who will have learned to see everything through a lens of racial offense.

  For the next three years, Suárez-Orozco and his administration colleagues would hound Rust, driving him from one makeshift off-campus office space to another and filing baseless charges against him. Finally, in August 2017, Suárez-Orozco sent out a one-line memo to the ed school faculty affirming that Rust had full status as emeritus professor—the closest thing to an apology that Rust ever received.

  Barely a week after the 2013 Day of Action at the education school, a different microaggression incident convulsed UCLA’s law school. Once again, the administration failed to push back against clearly ungrounded student claims of racial injury.

  Richard Sander, whom we met in previous chapters, taught an enthusiastic group of students in his first-year property class in the fall of 2013. Building on that class spirit, he proposed a softball match between his students and the other first-year property-law section. Sander’s students wanted to make team T-shirts and came up with a design featuring the logo #teamsander and a picture of their professor holding a baseball bat, embellished with such property terms as “replevin” and “trover.” A few days before the game, a number of Sander’s students wore their T-shirts to class. An email storm immediately broke out among the first-year black students, charging Sander’s class with microaggression.

  Because of Sander’s work on mismatch theory, UCLA’s minority law students saw in the Team Sander T-shirts a racial slight against them. In the words of the school’s Diversity Action Committee on Campus Climate, the students “felt triggered” by the shirt—an au courant phrase of campus victimology meaning that the shirt had engendered traumatic recollections of other racist abuse that the students had experienced. The shirts were a manifestation of “white privilege,” according to a Facebook commenter, consistent with “racist/classist/sexist comments made inside and outside of the classroom.”

  This racial interpretation was wholly fanciful. Affirmative action had never come up during Sander’s class; most of his students were not even aware of mismatch theory. Their choice of team name was solely an expression of gratitude for the class’s camaraderie. Nevertheless, the first-year black students called a meeting for the next day to discuss their response to the alleged microaggression. Several of Sander’s property-law students attended, in the hope of rebutting the idea that the T-shirt was a political statement; some of the minority students objected to their presence, and the meeting devolved into a shouting match.

  Sander’s students left the T-shirts at home for the softball game, but tensions remained high. Several students notified the legal gossip blog Above the Law about the T-shirt offense, and the blog gleefully ran a series of posts about “racism” at the UCLA law school. One post included an anonymous claim from a black student that the law school no longer assigns blacks to Sander’s first-year property classes (there were none that year in his section) because taking a class taught by an opponent of racial preferences is too “awful.” The anonymous source claimed that black students wouldn’t feel comfortable seeking additional help from Sander for fear of “contributing to his research” on mismatch theory by admitting that they didn’t understand a concept.6 This is an understandable, if unfortunate, reaction to Sander’s work, but it’s hard to see any way around the dilemma. Sander pursues his research on racial preferences in good faith and goes where the facts lead him. He happens to be a committed liberal, passionately dedicated to racial equality, who has empirically come to the conclusion that affirmative action impedes black academic progress. No one has ever alleged that he treats all his students with anything other than respect. In any case, the creation of the Team Sander T-shirts had nothing to do with mismatch theory.

  The day after the softball game, which the first-year black students and a few others in the opposing property-law section boycotted, law school dean Rachel Moran sent an email to the first-year class about the T-shirt incident and the “hurt feelings” that it had caused. Rather than rebutting the idea that the T-shirts were racially disrespectful, Moran took refuge in epistemological agnosticism, like the UCLA ed school bureaucrats. She urged students to be “respectful of one another’s feelings and open to understanding different points of view.” In theory, this is anodyne advice, but unless Moran believed that the T-shirts were justifiably viewed as a racial insult, she should have corrected the students’ misperception and helped them gain some perspective on what constitutes a true racial offense. Moreover, if T-shirts with Sander’s name and picture could legitimately be seen as an attack on black students, then Sander’s very presence on campus must also constitute an attack on black students. Moran let that possibility hang out there.

  The rest of Moran’s email signaled where her heart lay. She promised that her administration would “facilitate constructive conversations in safe spaces for all of our students.” This melodramatic “safety” rhetoric, deployed so promiscuously during the Rust incident (and constantly thrown around by campus feminists as well), lies at the heart of academic victimology. Any college bureaucrat who uses it has cast his lot with the fiction that his college is dangerous for minority and female students outside a few places of sanctuary.

  Meanwhile, Sander asked a dean if the school had, in fact, stopped assigning black students to his class, as Above the Law had reported. The school has no such policy, the dean told him. Another T-shirt-inspired rumor held that Sander somehow penalizes blacks in grading, even though grading throughout the school is blind to students’ identities. To the contrary, Sander learned, his first-year black students do better in his classes than in their other classes, earning a B on average, compared with
a B– elsewhere. Sander asked the administration to put those facts out there to rebut the various falsehoods; it declined to do so, for fear of stirring up more protest.

  Racial agitation continued into the new semester. The Black Law Students Association held a demonstration in February 2014, protesting the fact that there were only 33 blacks out of 1,100 students at the law school—apparently, the law school is to blame for the small pool of black college graduates nationwide and in California with remotely competitive LSAT scores and grades. The school twists itself into knots trying to admit as many black students as possible without violating California’s ban on racial preferences so flagrantly that even the press takes notice. In fact, both UCLA and UC Berkeley law schools admit blacks at a 400 percent higher rate than can be explained on race-neutral grounds, according to a paper by a pro–affirmative action economist at Berkeley, Danny Yagan. No matter. The protesters wore T-shirts with “33/1,100” on them and made a YouTube video titled 33, containing personal testimonials about the stress of being one of UCLA’s black law students: “It’s so far from being a safe space that it would be better for my mental health if I stayed at home,” said one girl. Other students complained that they were looked to in class to represent the black perspective—precisely the role that the “diversity” rationale for racial preferences assigns to minority students.7

  Meanwhile, a string of robberies near UCLA was prompting a discussion on the law school’s student Facebook page about self-defense tips. The school’s most vociferous critic of alleged white privilege and institutional racism, first-year student Alexis Morgan Gardner, argued that the robbery perpetrators were “clearly victims to life circumstances (and probably poverty) as well” and that the discussion should address the root causes of crime, not just “reactionary” measures. A few other students replied that a “root causes” discussion, however important, was secondary to the security issue. Gardner responded, mangling English idiom along the way: “I FEAR FOR MY SAFETY MORE HERE (at the law school) in this hostile space where the future ‘leaders of America’ are so intolerable to alternative perspectives” than in her own home, with “extremely higher” crime statistics. “It sounds like a lynch mob in the making,” she added.