Harvard hires for the Department of Ethnicity, Indigeneity, and Migration

“[Faculty of Arts and Sciences] unveils anti-racism agenda” (Harvard Gazette, August 20, 2020):

Calling on the FAS community to be “relentless, constructively critical, and action-oriented,” Gay said that she would: restart the search for four new senior faculty in ethnicity, indigeneity, and migration (EIM); establish a new visiting professorship in EIM; appoint an inaugural associate dean of diversity, inclusion and belonging; expand the Inequality in American postdoctoral fellows program; initiate a study of racial diversity among senior staff; and create a task force to examine the FAS visual culture.

What happens when you kick everyone off campus five months earlier?

“The calls for racial justice heard on our streets also echo on our campus, as we reckon with our individual and institutional shortcomings and with our faculty’s shared responsibility to bring truth to bear on the pernicious effects of structural inequality,” she said. “I am clear-eyed that the work of real change will be difficult, and for many it will be uncomfortable. Change is messy work. Institutional inertia will threaten to overwhelm even our best efforts. If we are to succeed, we must challenge a status quo that is comfortable and convenient for many.”

A lot of echoes in those empty buildings! The mostly-empty campus will have some new signs:

Finally, Gay outlined the charge for her new Task Force for Visual Culture and Signage. Led by Dean of Arts and Humanities Robin Kelsey, the group will be comprised of faculty, students, and staff, and will pursue a comprehensive study of FAS’s visual culture and articulate guidelines for evolving imagery across campus.

What if the new professors of Indigeneity suggest giving the campus back to the rightful owners of the real estate, i.e., perhaps the Wampanoags or the Massachusetts (the tribe, not to be confused with the current Commonwealth of Maskachusetts)? Will Harvard dip into its $40+ billion (thanks, Donald Trump!) endowment to pay rent on the Native American-owned campus?

Related:

  • Not everyone at Harvard got the memo regarding the benefits to natives of migration. From a Harvard economics professor: “Yes, Immigration Hurts American Workers”
  • also from Harvard’s econ nerds, “Effects of Immigration on African-American Employment and Incarceration” (NBER): For white men, an immigration boost of 10 percent caused their employment rate to fall just 0.7 percentage points; for black men, it fell 2.4 percentage points. That same immigration rise was also correlated with a rise in incarceration rates. For white men, a 10 percent rise in immigration appeared to cause a 0.1 percentage point increase in the incarceration rate for white men. But for black men, it meant a nearly 1 percentage-point rise.

10 thoughts on “Harvard hires for the Department of Ethnicity, Indigeneity, and Migration

  1. “we must challenge a status quo that is comfortable and convenient for many.”

    Over the past six months, Harvard has suddenly decided to do this? On the basis of what new information was this decision made? After being ignorant about racism and supporting the status quo for so many years, how is it credible that Harvard is now acting reasonably? Given these facts, how does Harvard have any intellectual credibility?

  2. Do these people understand their own gibberish? It is beyond comprehension to me. Or are they just going along for the shekels?

  3. Allan Bloom tried to warn everyone in the mid-to-late 1980s. By the late 1990s it was almost too late to save it. Now it is impossible.

    https://archive.org/details/giantsdwarfsessa00bloo/page/12/mode/2up

    “The real disagreement concerns the content of today’s and tomorrow’s elite education. We are now witnessing the introduction of a new “nonelitist,” “nonexclusionary” curriculum in the humanities and in parts of the social sciences, and with it is a program for reforming the human understanding. This is an extremely radical project whose supporters pass it off as mainstream by marching under the colors of all the movements toward a more equal society which almost all Americans endorse. Not recognized for what it is, this radicalism can thus marshal powerful and sometimes angry passions alongside its own fanatic ones. The Closing of the American Mind was brought before this inquisiton and condemned to banishment from the land of the learned…For my sins I have reaped an unabating whirlwind of abuse, paralleled in my experience only by Sartre’s diatribes against his enemies and critics in Les Temps Modernes in the forties and fifties.” – from an address given at Harvard Univesity, December 7, 1988 – Giants and Dwarfs.

  4. Full PDF of The Closing of the American Mind:

    https://iwcenglish1.typepad.com/Documents/14434540-The-Closing-of-the-American-Mind.pdf

    “The old view was that, by recognizing and accepting man’s natural rights, men found a fundamental basis of unity and sameness. Class, race, religion, national origin or culture all disappear or become dim when bathed in the light of natural rights, which give men common interests and make them truly brothers. The immigrant had to put behind him the claims of the Old
    World in favor of a new and easily acquired education. This did not
    necessarily mean abandoning old daily habits or religions, but it did mean
    subordinating them to new principles. There was a tendency, if not a
    necessity, to homogenize nature itself.

    The recent education of openness has rejected all that. It pays no
    attention to natural rights or the historical origins of our regime, which
    are now thought to have been essentially flawed and regressive.”

    That was then. 32 years later, we’re light years away.

  5. It’s also enlightening to read Bloom’s chapter “The Sixties” which begins on Page 313:

    “You don’t have to intimidate us,” said the famous professor of philosophy in April 1969, to ten thousand triumphant students supporting a
    group of black students who had just persuaded “us,” the faculty of
    Cornell University, to do their will by threatening the use of firearms as
    well as threatening the lives of individual professors. A member of the
    ample press corps newly specialized in reporting the hottest item of the
    day, the university, muttered, “You said it, brother.” The reporter had
    learned a proper contempt for the moral and intellectual qualities of
    professors. Servility, vanity and lack of conviction are not difficult to
    discern.

    The professors, the repositories of our best traditions and highest
    intellectual aspirations, were fawning over what was nothing better than
    a rabble; publicly confessing their guilt and apologizing for not having
    understood the most important moral issues, the proper response to which
    they were learning from the mob; expressing their willingness to change
    the university’s goals and the content of what they taught. As I surveyed
    this spectacle, Marx’s overused dictum kept coming to my mind against
    my will: History always repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second
    as farce. The American university in the sixties was experiencing the same
    dismantling of the structure of rational inquiry as had the German university in the thirties. No longer believing in their higher vocation, both gave way to a highly ideologized student populace. And the content of the
    ideology was the same—value commitment. ”

    And what about the third time? Tragedy, farce, and then what?

    It’s been just about 50 years. We are not yet at the peak of the curve and we really don’t know what is on the other side.

    https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0237458#abstract0

    http://peterturchin.com/

  6. “EIM” is already overworked.

    From https://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/EIM :

    EIM
    Category filter:
    Acronym Definition
    EIM Enterprise Information Management
    EIM Enterprise Identity Mapping (IBM)
    EIM Energy Imbalance Market
    EIM Exercise Is Medicine
    EIM Employee Internet Management
    EIM Events in Motion (various locations)
    EIM Excellence in Management (self-storage management; California)
    EIM Ethernet Interface Module
    EIM Enterprise Identity Mapping
    EIM Electrical Interface Module
    EIM Employee Incentive Management
    EIM Enterprise Incentive Management
    EIM Enterprise Instant Messaging
    EIM Electronic Image Management
    EIM European Institute for the Media
    EIM Enterprise Integration Manager (Siebel)
    EIM Eigen Initiatief Model (Dutch: Own Initiative Model)
    EIM Electronic Information Management (Mountain View, CA)
    EIM Événement Indésirable Médicamenteux (French: Adverse Drug Event)
    EIM Emirates Internet and Multimedia
    EIM Everything in Moderation (nutrition)
    EIM École Internationale de Montpellier (French: International School of Montpellier; Montpellier, France)
    EIM Elephants in Mud (band)
    EIM Etisalat Internet Mail (United Arab Emirates)
    EIM Escuela de Idiomas Modernos (Universidad Central de Venezuela)
    EIM Enterprise Integration Management
    EIM Employment Income Manual (UK)
    EIM Effective Index Method
    EIM Early Injury Management (work safety; Chevron)
    EIM École Internationale de Montréal (Canada)
    EIM Espace Industriel Modulaire (French: Modular Industrial Space)
    EIM Energy Information Management
    EIM Emergency Information Management
    EIM External Interface Manager
    EIM Enterprise Integration & Middleware
    EIM Environmental Impact Monitoring
    EIM Enterprise Image Management
    EIM Electronic Inserting Machine
    EIM End Item Manager
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