The Diversity Delusion

by Heather Mac Donald

  Several days later, a male student unknown to Gardner accosted her on a school elevator and asked her how she could feel at greater risk of physical harm at the law school than in a high-crime area. Gardner wrote about the encounter on Facebook as an example of why she felt unsafe at the school, adding a string of other purported abuses that suggested a paranoid streak: “people … publicly mock, disrespect, and dismiss me when it appeals to the majority.… everyone knows exactly who I am and stares at me when I walk through the halls because essentially, I am a fly in the milk.… there’s some deep-seated abhorrence and intolerance of me among the masses, but they hide it in their microaggressions and behind their keyboards.”

  A day later, Gardner published on Facebook an anonymous hate-mail note that she said had been left in her mailbox: “stop being such a sensitive [n—r].” Gardner added: “And to all those of you who disrespectfully took part in that fb thread [presumably the one about crime and root causes], who liked comments and encouraged our classmates detestable behavior (on and off of fb), YOU actively contributed to this racially hostile campus environment.… I hope you are all proud of yourselves.”

  The school immediately went into crisis mode, outstripping its Sander T-shirt response. After the Black Law Students Association presented Dean Moran with a petition denouncing the school’s “lack of institutional commitment to student of color presence and safety,” she wrote to the student body that she was “personally sensitive to and aware of the kinds of challenges faced by students of color, in and out of the classroom.” In a breathtakingly condescending gesture, Moran announced that the school would be holding seminars “to help students with cross-cultural competency and communication skills,” an agenda later expanded to include “practical strategies for becoming a better ally.”8 This increasingly popular “ally” mission may come as a surprise to the average student, who thought that he had enrolled in college to get an education, not to be enlisted in the allegedly titanic struggle of black and Hispanic students against hostile academic forces. The school encouraged incoming first-year law students in the fall of 2014 to be tested for unconscious bias, for which they could receive counseling at the school’s expense. (For more on the idea of implicit bias, see chapter 5.) The faculty needed an antiracism tune-up as well, in Dean Moran’s eyes: The school would offer a faculty workshop on the neuroscience of unconscious bias and its impact on legal education, followed by workshops on “facilitating classroom discussions about race, diversity, and discrimination.” Of course, the administration trotted out the usual parade of additional diversity initiatives, including a new Director of Student Learning Environment and Academic Affairs, tasked with “promoting and supporting diversity,” and a new grievance procedure for student-bias complaints.

  The chance that the hate-mail note was real is far lower than the chance that it was a hoax, to apply David Hume’s test for miracles. UCLA’s law students, like law students everywhere, are almost obsessively career-oriented. They have most likely spent their previous four years strategizing about law school admissions, with the hope of landing a lucrative job down the road with their newly minted JD. It would be an act of utter folly, contrary to the future orientation that helped land them at UCLA, to put their future career in jeopardy by sending so crude and juvenile a note, one that would simply serve as a pretext for more racial agitation.

  Dean Moran announced on February 20, 2014, that a police investigation into the origin of the note was underway. That was the last mention of the investigation from the administration. Rumors circulated among the faculty that the note had proved a hoax. Eventually, the UCLA police department declared the incident “unfounded,” meaning, according to a sergeant, that the message, even if real, did not rise to the level of a crime. The police department did not attempt to determine the note’s provenance.

  But in the unlikely event that the note was real, Moran’s reaction was still excessive. Even if one law student sent a hate note, that aberrant behavior doesn’t represent the daily reality at the school. It is ludicrous to suggest that UCLA’s white and Asian students need “cross-cultural competency” training in how to talk to blacks and Hispanics. The Facebook comments defending a self-help discussion in response to the local robberies were civil and reasoned, contrary to Gardner’s characterization of them as “disrespectful” and “detestable.” As for the faculty, no evidence exists that they are guilty of “unconscious bias” in their teaching, and it is an insult to imply otherwise. The entire law school environment is a paragon of racial tolerance, as any fair-minded administrator should recognize.

  Moran should have condemned the hate note, if real, as the action of one immature, unmoored individual who grossly violated everything that the law school embodies, promised an investigation, and left it at that. Instead, she chose to feed the patent delusion that black students are under siege and “unsafe” at the school, thus encouraging in them a lifelong disposition toward similarly baseless perceptions. (Moran announced without explanation at the start of the 2014 fall semester that she would be leaving her position as soon as a replacement could be found.)

  UCLA’s third outbreak of racial complaint, in November 2013, prompted a response from the head of the university itself. A student-made video blamed UCLA for the allegedly low number of black male undergraduates at the school—3.3 percent—in a state with only a 6-percent black population. The film quickly received more than 2 million views on YouTube.

  Black Bruins opens with a shot of the names of two Black Panthers killed by a rival radical at a UCLA student meeting in 1969. Implication: UCLA is responsible for their deaths. Apparently, that shooting was just the start of UCLA’s long war against men of color. The camera pans to a group of hostile-looking black male students standing outside a campus building behind the filmmaker, third-year African American–studies major Sy Stokes. Accompanied by ominous music, Stokes recites a frequently unintelligible rap denouncing UCLA as a “fraudulent institutionalized racist corporation” that deliberately excludes blacks and that “refuses to come to [their] defense.”

  One passage concerns black paint, which Stokes claims black children were taught to avoid and which symbolized the melanin in their skin. Since black paints are only used to write words on a white background, Stokes proposes, and “if words are all we are good for, then don’t you dare tell us to silence our voices when we dare to speak.” We are left to wonder not just at the passage’s logic, but also at who is telling blacks to silence their voices.

  According to Black Bruins, UCLA is as much at fault for the 74-percent black-male graduation rate as it is for the 3.3-percent black-male enrollment rate.

  Never mind that the school has poured millions into academic support services and the usual panoply of multicultural programming. Never mind that the school has come up with scheme after scheme, as noted earlier, to get around California’s constitutional ban on governmental racial preferences, admitting black students at more than double the rate than can be explained by their credentials and socioeconomic status, and at three times the rate of much poorer Asians. Never mind that all males—at less than 45 percent—are underrepresented in the undergraduate population and that whites—at 28 percent—are also underrepresented compared with their 39-percent share of California’s population. UCLA’s overall black enrollment—3.8 percent in 2013, when females are included—is actually higher than one would expect, given that the entire state population of 6 percent includes children and adults who would not be applying for admission to college. (And it is virtually identical to black enrollment in the entire University of California system.) But other factors also limit enrollment.

  In 2013, when this controversy was raging, only 11 percent of black eighth-graders in California were proficient in math, compared with 42 percent of whites and 61 percent of Asians; 15 percent of black eighth-graders were proficient at reading, compared with 44 percent of whites and 51 percent of Asians.9 Black elementary school students in California are chro
nically truant at nearly four times the state average. Only 5 percent of applications to UCLA even come from black students.10 Black Bruins mentioned none of these facts, of course, but they show that UCLA has used every possible lever, legal or not, to boost its black student population.

  UCLA’s administrators couldn’t line up fast enough to thank Stokes for his work and praise its artistic qualities. Janina Montero, UCLA’s vice chancellor for student affairs, was first out of the gate. “In their video ‘Black Bruin [The Spoken Word],’ a number of UCLA students eloquently and powerfully expressed their frustration and disappointment with the low number of African-American male students on campus,” she said in a published statement. “As a public institution that values a diverse student body, we share their dissatisfaction and frustration.”11 Was UCLA a “fraudulent institutionalized racist corporation” that tries to ruin the “hopes and dreams” of black students and that “refuses” to come to their “defense”? Apparently so, given Montero’s fulsome “Amen” to the entirety of Stokes’s message. Montero provided none of the academic or demographic data that would explain the 3.3-percent black-male enrollment figure. The only cause of that “low” number, according to Montero, is California’s ban on “considering race in the admissions process.” Montero eagerly reminded readers that the University of California was trying to overturn that ban in the Supreme Court. Why it should be necessary to consider race in the admissions process to achieve “diversity” went unexplained.

  UCLA soon concluded that a mere vice chancellor was insufficient to respond to Stokes’s masterpiece. Chancellor Gene Block stepped up to the plate, anticipating the servility of Yale’s Peter Salovey and Emory’s James Wagner. “We are proud when [our students] convey their thoughts, experiences and feelings—as they have done recently in several now viral videos,” Block wrote in a campus-wide memo.12 These students’ “powerful first-hand accounts” testify to the “true impacts” of California’s ban on racial preferences, the chancellor said. As Stokes had done, Block painted a dire picture of black student life at UCLA: “Too often, many of our students of color feel isolated, as strangers in their own house. Others feel targeted—mocked or marginalized, rather than recognized and valued.” Were “students of color” right to “feel targeted—mocked and marginalized”? It would appear so. Block left unsaid who was doing the “mocking” and “marginalizing,” but he seemed to believe that he presided over a student body and faculty of bigots. Block went on to chastise UCLA for its reluctance to have “conversations about race.” “Make no mistake: [such conversations] can be very difficult. They are inevitably emotional. They can make people defensive. They sometimes lead to accusations. But we cannot be afraid to have these conversations, because they are so critically important not just to our university, but to society.”

  Pace Block, UCLA spends vast amounts of time having “conversations about race.” But if he wants to engender even more, a good place to start would be with some facts. He could rebut the baseless allegation that UCLA deliberately destroys blacks’ “dreams.” He could lay out the vast academic-achievement gap, whose existence demolishes the claim that the absence of racial proportionality in the student body or faculty results from bias. Most important, he could provide a dose of reality. “This campus is one of the world’s most enviable educational institutions,” he could say, “whose academic splendors lie open to all its students. You will never again have as ready an opportunity to absorb knowledge. Exploit the privilege. You are surrounded by well-meaning, compassionate faculty who only want to help you. Study, write, and immerse yourself in timeless books. Apply yourself with everything you’ve got, and you will graduate prepared for a productive, intellectually rich life.”

  Rather than opting for the truth, Block kowtowed further. “I also appreciate that trust is earned and, among our critics, we must and will work harder to earn it,” he wrote, in closing. He did not explain why UCLA should be mistrusted. Had it misled its black students? Discriminated against them? Block did not say. He did, however, remind them of UCLA’s soon-to-be-hired new vice chancellor for equity, diversity, and inclusion and the two inaptly named “diversity prevention officers,” the latter of whom would “investigate … racial and ethnic bias or discrimination among our faculty as well as providing education and training.” And he bludgeoned the faculty yet again to pass a “diversity” course requirement for undergraduates, something of a sacred crusade for Block.

  More layers of diversity bureaucracy won’t have the slightest effect on black high schoolers’ inadequate academic skills, which is the sole reason that blacks are not proportionally represented in the college student body. Stokes came closer to this fact than the administration did in an MSNBC interview following the breakout video: “I feel the focus is, you know, there’s this general consensus within the black community, mostly, you know, the lower socioeconomic-status areas, that you either become a rapper, or a basketball player, or football player to become successful,” he said. “The stress on academics isn’t there anymore—or it actually never was.” Stokes immediately obliterated this inadvertent acknowledgment of personal responsibility with more victimology, however: “It’s used against us to keep us at that low point,” he said.13 The problem, in other words, is not blacks’ lack of engagement in school; it’s that society somehow “uses” that lack of engagement to keep blacks down.

  Other colleges embrace the academic-racism fiction just as fervently. In March 2014, for example, Harvard’s black students posted their own viral photo series, I, Too, Am Harvard, displaying the alleged microaggressions to which Harvard’s own eggshell plaintiffs have been subject (the series’ creator, the daughter of two critical race-theory law professors, explained: “We have to show that, like, these little daily microaggressions are just, like, part of the bubbling up of greater tensions that are, like, underlying this whole, like, post racial, this, like, post racial surface”). Students at Oberlin, Fordham, and numerous other schools have created webpages to catalog their racial slights at the hands of other students.

  The indulgence of this fiction is far from innocuous. Any student who believes that the university is an “unsafe,” racially hostile environment is unlikely to take full advantage of its resources. Growing up means learning the difference between a real problem and a trivial one. Being asked: “So, like, what are you?” (a Fordham “microaggression”) belongs in the trivial category, especially in a world that has been taught for the last three decades that the most important thing about an individual is his racial and ethnic identity. The time spent agitating about such innocent, if clumsy, inquiries would be far better dedicated to studying for an organic chemistry or a French literature exam. (As this book will show, the equally preposterous conceit that the university is “unsafe” for females has similarly distorting effects, creating more perpetual victims whose fragile egos are constantly threatened by the ordinary give-and-take of life and who see a “war on women” at every turn.)

  The universities’ encouragement of victimology has wider implications beyond the campus. The same imperative to repress any acknowledgment of black academic underachievement as the cause of black underrepresentation in higher education is more fatefully at work in repressing awareness of disproportionate black criminality as the cause of black overrepresentation in the criminal-justice system. When a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, shot Michael Brown, an unarmed black teen, in August 2014, for example, the media suppressed any information about the incident that complicated its favored narrative about police brutality, all the while pumping out strained stories about racism in law enforcement and public life more generally. The result was days of violence, looting, and arson, from a populace that had been told at every opportunity that it is the target of ubiquitous discrimination.

  Colleges today are determined to preserve in many of their students the thin skin and solipsism of adolescence. They build ever more monumental bureaucracies to indulge those traits. By now, of course, man
y of the adults running colleges are indistinguishable from their eggshell-plaintiff students. The rest of us bear the costs, in the maintenance of public policies founded on an equally spurious victimology.

  * * *

  MICROAGGRESSION, MACRO-CRAZY

  * * *

  Early in 2015, the University of California’s new president, Janet Napolitano, asked all deans and department chairs in the university’s ten campuses to undergo training in overcoming their “implicit biases” toward women and minorities. The department heads also needed training, according to the UC president, in how to avoid committing microaggressions. A more insulting and mindless exercise would be hard to imagine. But Napolitano’s seminar possesses a larger significance: It demolishes any remaining hope that college administrators possess a firmer grip on reality than the narcissistic students over whom they preside.

  The “Fostering Inclusive Excellence: Strategies and Tools for Department Chairs and Deans” seminar presumes that University of California faculty are so bigoted that they will refuse to hire the most qualified candidate for a professorship if that candidate happens to be female or an “underrepresented minority”—i.e., black or Hispanic. Attendees at the seminar were subjected to an “interactive theater scenario” called “Ready to Vote?” that showed white male computer-science professors on a fictional hiring committee failing to “value diversity.” The author of the scenario, a professor of performance studies and ethnic studies at the University of California at San Diego, seems never to have attended a faculty-hiring committee meeting in her life. Nor, it would seem, has Napolitano. How otherwise could they not know that faculty searches in the sciences, far from shunning females and minorities, are often a determined exercise in tracking down female and non-Asian minority candidates who haven’t already been snapped up by more well-endowed competitors? (See chapter 11 on STEM.) Females in the sciences are hired and promoted nationwide at rates above their representation in applicant pools. Too few black and Hispanic science PhDs exist to have inspired many reliable studies analyzing their hiring chances.