OCT 2, 2019Harry LewisHarry Lewis0 Comments

In his new book The Assault on American Excellence, Yale law professor Anthony Kronman traces many of the current woes of American universities back to the use of one word in one opinion in one court case.

That word is “diversity” and the opinion was Justice Lewis Powell’s in the 1978 Bakke case about minority admissions. To consolidate a five-vote majority, Powell’s opinion allowed race to be considered as one factor in the admissions process but ruled out the use of racial quotas or separate minority admissions programs.

Powell’s opinion has, Kronman says, “reshaped every aspect of educational policy and experience. It has bred bureaucracies and changed the mood on campus in ways that undermine the ideas of academic freedom and individual self-discovery that Powell puts at the center of his defense of diversity as an academic good.” Kronman himself supports affirmative action, which he regards as constitutionally permissible “in order to help cure the lingering effects of past discrimination in society at large.” But he argues that Powell’s particular argument for race-consciousness is catastrophically wrong.

The problem, Kronman argues, is that Powell conflated two quite different things.

On the one hand, democracy depends on a premise of equality. As a matter of civic principle and racial justice, all are created equal. But a university is not a democracy. It has teachers and students. It has better students and worse students. It has hierarchy. It is, in a word, an aristocracy—not a social or hereditary aristocracy, but an institution in which individual quality matters and comparisons and rankings require no apology.

It was a tragic mistake, Kronman argues, to impose the rules of democracy in academia. The alleged consequences of this conflation ripple through the book, through its discussions of excellence, speech, diversity, and the renaming of memorials.

Paleontologist Steven J. Gould proposed to resolve the tension between science and religion by declaring the two to be “nonoverlapping magisteria,” each estimable on its own, but sowing confusion when melded. Similarly, Kronman in effect argues that Powell confused civic and academic magisteria by treating race as one of several educationally relevant forms of diversity.

Improperly using a democratic ideal to justify racial preferences, Kronman argues, caused many of the harmless quirks and serious pathologies of the modern university.

The renaming of “Masters” of the residential colleges at Yale had less to do with alleged reminders of slave-owning than with a simple mistrust of hierarchy. The classroom speech of both blacks and whites is distorted because the mere fact of a student’s blackness was said to add something educationally important—but interracial dialog crashes to a halt once it is posited that only a black student can know how it feels to be black. The premise that black students, whatever their talents, are valued particularly for increasing the diversity of the student body puts a burden on those students to represent their race, and in class to defend positions identified with blacks generally. It is then only a small step to conclude that those students would be intolerably uncomfortable in buildings named for defenders of slavery.

Most of all, Kronman argues, Powell’s pretext for considering race in college admissions has created a generation of academic liars, who are doing pretty much what Powell said they couldn’t with admissions while using his loophole as an excuse for doing it.

Some of Kronman’s examples are more persuasive than others. But there can be little question that “diversity”—now generally coupled with the folksy “inclusion” and “belonging”—has become the Swiss Army knife of academic rationales. Almost any program can be justified on the basis of “DIB.” At Harvard, DIB has even been used to shut down single-gender clubs because they preclude gender diversity. (A federal judge has indicated that Harvard’s policy may violate Title IX, so, bizarrely, DIB is being used to justify what may be an unlawfully discriminatory social policy.)

And diversity is big business, well beyond the admissions offices that spawned it. On the day I am writing, more than 100 open job descriptions at Harvard specifically mention it, including one for a “Senior Diversity Talent Sourcer,” whatever that means. And people wonder why higher education costs so much!

Diversity has both sensitized and numbed the ears of everyone on campus. Whether or not “the most qualified person should get the job” is offensive speech, “I hope a diverse person will get the job” is abominable. Diversity training is ubiquitous, never mind that that such crash courses, part of a multibillion-dollar diversity industry, seem to have little lasting effect and may even be counterproductive.

Kronman’s argument makes good reading and invites us to revisit Emerson, Whitman, and de Tocqueville to remind ourselves what democracy means in these crazy political times. But Kronman stretches his central thesis beyond the breaking point in some examples—just as I found Gould’s nonoverlapping magisteria an unconvincing way to make peace between Genesis and Darwin. Kronman’s disdain for the effects on today’s colleges of what he calls “the vocational ideal” is a throwback to the culture of a socially aristocratic university. When students are brought to campus from families that have never had money, can one really be surprised that many will prioritize commitment to family financial security over reading the Great Books?

Today’s college curricula tend to glory in their own intellectual diversity and thereby fail to convey a uniting sense of educational purpose. Students recognize the curricular emperor’s nakedness and seek employability as the sure thing they can take with them when they graduate.

To rue this is to hark back to the plaint of Harvard’s Charles Eliot a century and a half ago: “The practical spirit and the literary or scholastic spirit are both good, but they are incompatible. If commingled, they are both spoiled.” In fact, these magisteria do overlap, and if students don’t understand that, it’s because they aren’t being inspired to respect the beauty, power, and importance of the life of the mind. That failure may be the most grievous deficit of the modern university.

There can be little question that “diversity”—now generally coupled with the folksy “inclusion” and “belonging”—has become the Swiss Army knife of academic rationales.

Others will have their own quarrels with the details of Kronman’s argument. But the question raised by his title is not easily dismissed. Has the slavish obeisance to “diversity,” in all its questionable range of meanings and implications, amounted to an assault on excellence? It is commonplace now to hear the question reduced almost to a tautology: Diversity drives excellence. True in some ways, but not others: the first-place math team is no less excellent if it is ethnically homogeneous. Such claims must be parsed, and that conversation can be risky in a diversity-dominant culture.

A striking tension does exist between one form of diversity and one form of academic excellence. It is very hard—in my university, and I suspect in others—for students from socioeconomically disadvantaged school and family backgrounds, no matter how talented and ambitious, to get the nearly straight-A four-year record required for Phi Beta Kappa, degrees summa cum laude, and the like. Thresholds for top academic honors are astronomically high, and it is hard to get over the bar with even one B on the record. This preparation bias is unfair but does not excite outrage, even though nothing makes students feel less “included and belonging” than to lack the educational background of their classmates.

Fighting preparation bias seems elitist, a breach of what Kronman calls the anti-subordination principle that prevails in academia (don’t say one person is better than another). Arguably, grade compression is another example of anti-subordination. But the resulting unfairness is the product of layers of social neglect, especially the inequality of America’s high schools—itself a consequence of regional income inequality—and the failure of faculty to take responsibility for educating a student body of varied backgrounds. Under assault or not, academic excellence is an awkward notion in institutions that celebrate diversity and assemble a cross-section of society in their classrooms.

Kronman here missed an opportunity to light a candle to excellence while cursing the darkness. Grading systems have long since fallen to Goodhart’s Law, that a measure ceases to be useful as a measure once it becomes a target. So, to some degree, have standardized tests, because of differential access to AP courses, test prep, and the like, for which holistic admissions processes are in part intended to compensate. Colleges themselves have made few comparable educational adjustments.

Few care about any socioeconomic divide among summas because that summa won’t mean much to anyone after graduation day. It’s not a good measure of anything important. The best engineer, doctor, or scholar is not the one who had microscopically higher grades. Academic souls are multidimensional and not easily ranked. How can today’s colleges both represent the breadth of society and incentivize and reward real excellence?

Harry Lewis is Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard and author of Excellence Without a Soul.

https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2019/10/overlapping-magisteria-a-review-of-anthony-kronmans-the-assault-on-american-excellence/

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4356036&forum_id=2#38923031)

Kronman describes in less stark terms what was predicted in 1969 by a Yale alum who opposed diversity admits.

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But as practiced in most of the top American universities, affirmative action also involves using different admissions standards for applicants of different races, which automatically creates differences in academic readiness and achievement. Although these gaps vary from college to college, studies have found that Asian students enter with combined math/verbal SAT scores on the order of 80 points higher than white students and 200 points higher than black students. A similar pattern occurs for high-school grades. These differences are large, and they matter: High-school grades and SAT scores predict later success as measured by college grades and graduation rates.

As a result of these disparate admissions standards, many students spend four years in a social environment where race conveys useful information about the academic capacity of their peers. People notice useful social cues, and one of the strongest causes of stereotypes is exposure to real group differences. If a school commits to doubling the number of black students, it will have to reach deeper into its pool of black applicants, admitting those with weaker qualifications, particularly if most other schools are doing the same thing. This is likely to make racial gaps larger, which would strengthen the negative stereotypes that students of color find when they arrive on campus.

The immediate damage to the standards of Yale Law School needs no elaboration. But beyond this, it seems to me the admission policy adopted by the Law School faculty will serve to perpetuate the very ideas and prejudices it is designed to combat. If in a given class the great majority of the black students are at the bottom of the class, this factor is bound to instill, unconsciously at least, some sense of intellectual superiority among the white students and some sense of intellectual inferiority among the black students. Such a pairing in the same school of the brightest white students in the country with black students of mediocre academic qualifications is social experiment with loaded dice and a stacked deck. The faculty can talk around the clock about disadvantaged background, and it can excuse inferior performance because of poverty, environment, inadequate cultural tradition, lack of educational opportunity, etc. The fact remains that black and white students will be exposed to each other under circumstances in which demonstrated intellectual superiority rests with the whites.

No one can be expected to accept an inferior status willingly. The black students, unable to compete on even terms in the study of law, inevitably will seek other means to achieve recognition and self-expression. This is likely to take two forms. First, agitation to change the environment from one in which they are unable to compete to one in which they can. Demands will be made for elimination of competition, reduction in standards of performance, adoption of courses of study which do not require intensive legal analysis, and recognition for academic credit of sociological activities which have only an indirect relationship to legal training. Second, it seems probable that this group will seek personal satisfaction and public recognition by aggressive conduct, which, although ostensibly directed at external injustices and problems, will in fact be primarily motivated by the psychological needs of the members of the group to overcome feelings of inferiority caused by lack of success in their studies. Since the common denominator of the group of students with lower qualifications is one of race this aggressive expression will undoubtedly take the form of racial demands–the employment of faculty on the basis of race, a marking system based on race, the establishment of a black curriculum and a black law journal, an increase in black financial aid, and a rule against expulsion of black students who fail to satisfy minimum academic standards.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4356036&forum_id=2#38923195)

same thing at Evergreen State when they threatened the dean.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4356036&forum_id=2#38923255)

But the author wasnt studying these things, he was studying the impact of “diversity”.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4356036&forum_id=2#38923191)

"Academics," any response?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4356036&forum_id=2#38923231)

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A Harvard Dean Applauds a Yale Dean’s Assessment of ‘Diversity’

By GEORGE LEEF

October 3, 2019 2:18 PM

Former Yale Law School dean Anthony Kronman has recently written a gutsy book entitled The Assault on American Excellence. I say “gutsy” because in elite academic circles these days, even the slightest dissent from the idea that the quest for more diversity is always good, always a step toward social justice is apt to land you in hot water with the “progressives.” Kronman does more than slightly dissent. He argues that the diversity mania has been quite harmful.

The Martin Center was fortunate enough to get former Harvard dean Harry Lewis, author of a splendid book himself (Excellence Without a Soul), to review Kronman’s book and today we publish his review.

American colleges and universities have been dominated by a “diversity” agenda since the 1978 Bakke case, where Justice Powell’s lone opinion was the fulcrum for the Court, an opinion in which he suggested off-hand that it might be all right for schools to use race as a small “plus-factor” to achieve some possible educational benefits from having a more diverse student body. That has had very harmful consequences. Lewis writes, “Most of all, Kronman argues, Powell’s pretext for considering race in college admissions has created a generation of academic liars, who are doing pretty much what Powell said they couldn’t with admissions while using his loophole as an excuse for doing it.” That is to say, college officials say that they run their preference programs in order to improve the climate for learning when what they’re actually doing is just seeking racial quotas.

The harmful effects have rippled throughout our campuses. Among them is speech. “Diversity has both sensitized and numbed the ears of everyone on campus” Lewis writes. “Whether or not “the most qualified person should get the job” is offensive speech, ‘I hope a diverse person will get the job’ is abominable.” And it leads to a huge waste of money: “Diversity training is ubiquitous, never mind that that such crash courses, part of a multibillion-dollar diversity industry, seem to have little lasting effect and may even be counterproductive.”

Kronman and Lewis also see the damage that racial preferences for “diversity” do to the students who are given places in elite colleges where they aren’t really academically competitive. As Lewis says, “This preparation bias is unfair but does not excite outrage, even though nothing makes students feel less ‘included and belonging’ than to lack the educational background of their classmates.”

If the U.S. ever breaks free of its diversity mania, the forthright views of a few people like Anthony Kronman and Harry Lewis will no doubt play an important role.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/diversity-higher-education-harvard-dean-applauds-yale-dean-assessment/

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4356036&forum_id=2#38939815)

the universities are the product of the upper class...the upper class created universities ...the universities were where the upper class sent their children...in general...

therefore the universities took on the perspective of the upper class...the upper class bought labor...the lower class sells labor...therefore, in general, the white upper class of colonial america LIKED nonwhites because nonwhites offered cheap labor competition to whites, depressing wages...

for the same reason, whites of lower class colonial america hated nonwhites...because they depressed wages...

so the subculture of universities naturally took on a love for nonwhites because of self-interest...and likewise, because the upper class saw working class whites as an obstacle to the obtaining of cheap nonwhite labor, the upper class disliked the white working class...this is all about Capital vs Labor...

then as time went on, white collar work became more important, which necessitated that white working class people take on more schooling...the universities basically created the curriculum for formal secondary schooling...that curriculum then took on the pro-nonwhite/anti-working-class-white perspective that pervaded the universities...this was the situation over 100 years ago when working class whites started going to school more because of the growth of white collar jobs...

young white children of the working class started ingesting the propaganda in the curriculum...this propaganda was naturally pro-nonwhite/anti-working-class-white because the upper class had that perspective...

that was the genesis of the civil rights movement, which ramped up the pro-nonwhite/anti-working-class-white propaganda...

so the civil rights movement and its child, the modern SJW culture are all the product of a Capital vs Labor propaganda war waged by the upper class via the educational curriculum and propaganda

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4356036&forum_id=2#38940854)

lmao so unlike real life, at a university there are people of varying competence

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4356036&forum_id=2#38941351)