Category: Academia

From my beloved alma mater, George Washington University, “Student groups required to update bylaws to meet GW inclusion policy” (The GW Hatchet):

More than 20 student organizations were found to have violated GW’s gender, race and religion nondiscrimination policy, according to an email officials sent to those organizations last month.

“The University does allow organizations to choose between open and selective criteria for membership – however, selective criteria for general membership into the organization must abide by University policy, including its nondiscrimination policies,” the email states.

Graham said officials contacted 23 student organizations like Girls Who Code College Loop, the League of United Latin American Citizens and the Albanian American Student Association.

“Queens Movement is focused on women’s empowerment – how can we be more open and inclusive within our organization if our organization is meant to support women?” Morrisey said in an email.

“Despite these concerns, we remain committed to remaining a safe and empowering place for all of our sisters, regardless of their gender identity, and are confident that these new measures will not infringe upon our ability to do so,” Ades said.

“Title IX tried to protect students from discrimination, and sometimes the best way to do that is to create a space specifically for minority voices,” Mobarhan said in an email. “Orgs like DPE sorority, Women in Finance, GW Women of Color, Women in Computer Science and so much more are necessary for equal opportunity.”

So much great stuff here! GWU is 62 percent female (US News), but those who identify as “women” are examples of a “minority”. It is possible to be a “sister” even if one identifies as a “man”, for example. One will soon be able to identify as a “girl who codes” without identifying as a “girl”. Most confusing: How exactly does a person identify as an Albanian American?

(Readers who thought that I was merely an MIT nerd: I attended GWU as a 14-year-old growing up in Washington, D.C, then transferred to MIT as a 15-year-old sophomore. In other words, I transferred from a school that is now 62 percent female to one that was 17 percent female and called myself intelligent. Also fun: during my attendance there, a dispute arose among the trustees regarding how to make the school more “selective”. One trustee was quoted as responding, “There is a place for a mediocre university in this country and GW is it”. I personally had a great experience there. The professors were passionate about teaching and weren’t consumed with their labs, postdocs, graduate students, etc.)

“A Detailed Look at the Downside of California’s Ban on Affirmative Action” (NYT, August 21):

Twenty-four years ago, California was consumed by debate over affirmative action. A charismatic Black businessman named Ward Connerly led support for Proposition 209, a ballot initiative to ban racial preferences in admission to the state’s world-renowned public universities. The measure passed with 55 percent of the vote and inspired similar changes in nearly a dozen other states.

This November, with an initiative to repeal Proposition 209 on the ballot, California voters will have the opportunity to change their minds.

How are the polls on this one? The New York Times says we need to go back to state-run racism and it will actually be the best thing for the Asian kids who don’t get into the colleges of their choice:

Ending racial preferences in a state university system harmed Black and Hispanic students while doing little to lift whites and Asian-Americans, a study asserts.

Buried in the middle:

Of course, selective university admissions is a zero-sum game. For every Black and Hispanic student excluded by Proposition 209, another student, probably white or Asian-American, took their place. But in focusing on those who got into the most selective U.C. campus at Berkeley, the study found that white and Asian-American students received little concrete benefit from the policy. Mr. Bleemer’s study suggests they would have otherwise enrolled in an equally selective college elsewhere, and had the same chances to graduate and begin successful careers.

The Asian kids weren’t harmed because they earn a lot of money anyway even if they don’t get to attend UC Berkeley at a low cost. But maybe this is just a restatement of what economists have found, i.e., that being smart enough to get into an elite college is a great predictor of income, but attending an elite college isn’t that relevant (summary: what is taught in college is of minimal economic value).

Readers: What’s your prediction about how the California righteous will vote on this one? Will there be a rush to hire Victimhood Studies graduates to restart the sort-by-skin-color system for college applications?

My prediction: Census data show that California is 39.4 percent Hispanic. There’s another roughly 6.5 percent who are Black (and whose lives therefore matter!). Ignoring that these categories may overlap to some extent, my prediction is that 45 percent of Californians vote for to bring back race-based admissions out of self interest (since it is designed to help Black and Hispanic applicants; this number might be off if a lot of the folks in the designated victimhood categories are ineligible to vote due to not being citizens). Then add 15 percent of the remainder. These could be white people who aren’t going to have children, for example. Voting to restore race-based admissions can make them feel good without any personal sacrifice or sacrifice for anyone they care about. That’s 8 percent. So the ballot Proposition passes by 53-47.

Related:

• “Kamala’s America?”: California today boasts a fabulously rich technology elite; it’s also home to the highest poverty rate among the states, adjusted for costs, according to the U.S. Census. Under its largely one-party regime, notes liberal economist James Galbraith, California has seen inequality grow at among the fastest rates in the country. The state endures the widest gap between middle and upper incomes in the country—72 percent, compared with a national average of 57 percent.
• “Prop 16 confusion: Affirmative action ballot measure struggling in polls” (NBC): … despite the recent political wave in favor of social justice, the ballot measure isn’t polling particularly well. Why? It may have something to do with the measure’s confusing wording. … “Watching a focus group with Black voters from Los Angeles, they all said no we won’t vote for this as it was read to them,” said Eva Patterson, who co-chairs the Yes on 16 campaign. “Then we explained that it was in favor of affirmative action and equal opportunity, and they all said, ‘Of course we’ll vote for this.'” … The latest polling on Proposition 16 shows 31% of Californians in favor, 47% opposed and 22% unsure. In the Bay Area, the numbers are a bit more in favor of the measure: 40% for, 41% against and 19% not sure. [It is “equal opportunity” because opportunity is based on skin color and anyone who wants to can follow Justin Trudeau’s lead in adjusting skin color?]

American Great Awakenings have tended to require public confessions of sin. Stand up in front of the congregation, admit that you’re a sinner, and let the healing and forgiveness begin. This was extended to Alcoholics Anonymous. Stand up and admit that you’re an alcoholic. More recently, this has been adapted for the Great Awokening: stand up and admit that you’re a racist.

Princeton tried this collectively, via a letter from its president, and was not rewarded with the conventional “Hello, Princeton,” but instead with a letter from the Feds demanding to know if Princeton was lying in past years about not being racist (or maybe Princeton is lying now about being racist?).

From a 2008 coast-to-coast helicopter trip (ferrying a Robinson R44 from the factory):

The home page of the University of Chicago’s Department of English currently contains the following statement:

The English department at the University of Chicago believes that Black Lives Matter, and that the lives of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and Rayshard Brooks matter, as do thousands of others named and unnamed who have been subject to police violence. As literary scholars, we attend to the histories, atmospheres, and scenes of anti-Black racism and racial violence in the United States and across the world. We are committed to the struggle of Black and Indigenous people, and all racialized and dispossessed people, against inequality and brutality.

For the 2020-2021 graduate admissions cycle, the University of Chicago English Department is accepting only applicants interested in working in and with Black Studies. We understand Black Studies to be a capacious intellectual project that spans a variety of methodological approaches, fields, geographical areas, languages, and time periods. For more information on faculty and current graduate students in this area, please visit our Black Studies page.

I’m wondering how this can be enforced. Suppose that an accepted student, a few months after enrolling (which means turning on Zoom from his/her/zir/their mom’s house?), decides “In demography and in the workforce, Blacks in the U.S. are being replaced by Hispanic and Asian immigrants, so in looking toward the future I would rather do a thesis in Hispanic Studies.” Can the university then expel the student? The department says:

all scholars have a responsibility to know the literatures of African American, African diasporic, and colonized peoples, regardless of area of specialization, as a core competence of the profession.

What if, after a year of reading these literatures, a student says “these authors are terrible compared to what Japanese-Americans and Chinese-Americans have written in English; I want to do my thesis on the lyrics of K-pop”? Does that student similarly get expelled?

From a cross-country trip in the Robinson R44:

Update, September 22: the home page has been edited to remove the Black Studies-only limitation. But the brave language lives on at archive.org:

“Professor Jessica Krug admits she lied about being black: ‘I cancel myself’” (New York Post):

Despite publicly living as a black woman for years, George Washington University associate professor Jessica Krug admitted Thursday that she is actually a “culture leech” — who is white.

“For the better part of my adult life, every move I’ve made, every relationship I’ve formed, has been rooted in the napalm toxic soil of lies,” Krug, 38, writes in a brief but life-shattering Medium post titled “The Truth, and the Anti-Black Violence of My Lies.”

The self-proclaimed “historian of politics, ideas, and cultural practices in Africa and the African Diaspora” goes on to detail a lengthy trail of public deception.

Krug has a Ph.D. and is the author of the book “Fugitive Modernities: Kisama and the Politics of Freedom,” which “interrogates the political practices and discourses through which those who fled from slavery and the violence of the slave trade in Angola forged coherent political communities outside of, and in opposition to, state politics,” according to her GW faculty profile.

Can the university, which I attended as a 14-year-old back in the Jimmy Carter malaise years, fire her? If so, on what grounds? Can they say “We hired you because of your skin color and we would never have hired such a weak thinker and scholar with white skin”?

(The Medium essay is pretty awesome. I think she deserves her job:

I have eschewed my lived experience as a white Jewish child in suburban Kansas City under various assumed identities within a Blackness that I had no right to claim: first North African Blackness, then US rooted Blackness, then Caribbean rooted Bronx Blackness. … my continued appropriation of a Black Caribbean identity is not only, in the starkest terms, wrong — unethical, immoral, anti-Black, colonial — but it means that every step I’ve taken has gaslighted those whom I love.

as the story unfolds, I think we will learn that she is primarily a victim:

When I was a teenager fleeing trauma, I could just run away to a new place and become a new person.

)

Loosely related…