End DEI !

From her outstanding site Bari Weiss articulates the fundamental flaw with DEI.  It is shameful that it took the explosion in anti Semitism on our campuses to see the problem but I have long objected to the infection of this mind virus.  From her essay End DEI:

What I saw was a worldview that replaced basic ideas of good and evil with a new rubric: the powerless (good) and the powerful (bad). It replaced lots of things. Color blindness with race obsession. Ideas with identity. Debate with denunciation. Persuasion with public shaming. The rule of law with the fury of the mob.

People were to be given authority in this new order not in recognition of their gifts, hard work, accomplishments, or contributions to society, but in inverse proportion to the disadvantages their group had suffered, as defined by radical ideologues. According to them, as James Kirchick concisely put it: “Muslim > gay, black > female, and everybody > the Jews.”

I was an undergraduate back then, but you didn’t need a PhD to see where this could go. And so I watched, in horror, sounding alarms as loudly as I could.

I was told by most Jewish leaders that, yes, it wasn’t great, but not to be so hysterical. Campuses were always hotbeds of radicalism, they said. This ideology, they promised, would surely dissipate as young people made their way in the world.

It did not.

Over the past two decades I saw this inverted worldview swallow all of the crucial sense-making institutions of American life. It started with the universities. Then it moved on to cultural institutions—including some I knew well, like The New York Times—as well as every major museum, philanthropy, and media company. Then on to our medical schools and our law schools. It’s taken root at nearly every major corporation. It’s inside our high schools and even our elementary schools. The takeover is so comprehensive that it’s now almost hard to notice it—because it is everywhere.

We have been seeing for several years now the damage this ideology has done: DEI, and its cadres of enforcers, undermine the central missions of the institutions that adopt it. But nothing has made the dangers of DEI clearer than what’s happening these days on our college campuses—the places where our future leaders are nurtured.

It is there that professors are compelled to pledge fidelity to DEI in order to get hired, promoted, or tenured. (For more on this, please read John Sailer’s Free Press piece: How DEI Is Supplanting Truth as the Mission of American Universities.) And it is there that the hideousness of this worldview has been on full display over the past few weeks: we see students and professors immersed not in facts, knowledge, and history, but in a dehumanizing ideology that has led them to celebrate or justify terrorism.

It is time to end DEI for good. No more standing by as people are encouraged to segregate themselves. No more forced declarations that you will prioritize identity over excellence. No more compelled speech. No more going along with little lies for the sake of being polite.

HKO

The Free Press is a must subscription.



The Identity Trap

From a review of The Identity Trap in Commentary Magazine:

The identity synthesis has come to exert tremendous influence over public life in a remarkably short span of time. Its illiberal premises and principles are exacerbated by the sheer intolerance of its methods. It seeks not merely to narrow the circle of human sympathy by encouraging everyone to see the world through the ever-present prism of identity; it also forthrightly rejects Enlightenment values and neutral rules such as free speech. By treating innocent bystanders and other outsiders with extreme prejudice, it hopes to coerce humanity into adopting a radical vision of all that is right and good. Unsurprisingly, the growing acceptance of identitarian nostrums has been attended by an increasingly censorious culture that stifles individuals’ ability to engage in dialogue and debate about crucial social and cultural matters.

Mounk does not flinch from recognizing the past—and present—injustices that have blighted the lives of so many individuals and groups around the world, including in the most advanced Western societies. But he maintains that it’s possible to acknowledge the full force of these injustices, and earnestly attempt to remedy them, without succumbing to the identity synthesis. For our sake, it better be. The alternative would be to cede the moral high ground to a cynically regressive ideology whose view of the world denies progress and invites the conclusion that the universal values that liberal democracies revere are no more than a fig leaf for a system of rank oppression.

The fact that an ideology diametrically opposed to philosophical liberalism and the American experiment has been adopted almost overnight in the highest echelons of society is prima facie evidence that something has gone terribly wrong in the American elite.

HKO

I disagree with Mounk that this shift is sudden.  It has been ignored, tolerated, and excused for decades.  It is shameful that it took the overt antiSemitism displayed after October 7 for it to be recognized for what it is.  Identity politics was destined to end poorly.



We Have Only Seen the Tip of the Iceberg

The hearings in Congress from presidents Liz Magill of The University of Pennsylvania, Claudine Gay of Harvard and Sally Kornbluth of MIT have gone viral and are so detrimental to the reputation of their schools that Magill has already resigned.  It is shameful that it took blatant antisemitism to expose a problem that has developed over decades.

These three women making over seven figures each to run our leading universities acted like puppets of their legal and HR departments and were incapable of comprehending their blatant hypocrisy and the lunacy of their positions.  Even MSNBC and Al Sharpton were critical of their performance.  To think that merely replacing them will come close to solving the underlying problem, however, is incredibly short sighted.

These leaders are only the tip of the iceberg.  They should be held accountable but don’t stop there. They represent institutions that are deeply flawed.  It is about much more than just antisemitism. There are three fundament problems.

The universities have abandoned any requirements for civil decency from their students.  Screaming at professors, shouting down invited speakers, vandalism, and threatening students and professors has been tolerated as free speech.  Such behavior should lead to expulsion.  Entering students should sign a code of conduct and be held accountable to it.

With all of the claims for diversity the one they need the most is intellectual diversity.  It is fine to discuss critical theory and Marxism but not without the balance of constitutional democracy and free markets.  It is shameful when graduates have studied Howard Zinn, Karl Marx, or Ibram Kindi but have never heard of Gordon Wood, Friedrich Hayek, or Thomas Sowell.  Hiring practices should seek a far more balanced faculty.

And finally, end DEI.  The amount of money wasted on this is absurd.  That so much antisemitism is tolerated on campuses bloated with DEI hires makes this the Orwellian acronym of the century.

Withholding big donations certainly got their attention, but it needs to go much further.  Stop preferential hiring from these schools.  The boards that have upheld these dysfunctional institutions also need to be replaced.



Finally Reaching Their Moment of Shame

From Andrew Sullivan at The Daily Dish, The Day The Empress’ Clothes Fell Off:

Freedom of speech in the Ivy League extends exclusively to the voices of the oppressed; they are also permitted to disrupt classes, deplatform or shout down controversial speakers, hurl obscenities, force members of oppressor groups — i.e. Jewish students and teachers in the latest case — into locked libraries and offices during protests, and blocked from classrooms. Jewish students have even been assaulted — at Harvard, at Columbia, at UMass Amherst, at Tulane. Assaults by woke students used to be rare, such as the 2017 mob at Middlebury that put Allison Stanger in a neck brace — but since 10/7, they’re intensifying.

If a member of an oppressor class says something edgy, it is a form of violence. If a member of an oppressed class commits actual violence, it’s speech. That’s why many Harvard students instantly supported a fundamentalist terror cult that killed, tortured, systematically raped and kidnapped Jews just for being Jews in their own country. Because they have been taught it’s the only moral position to take. They’ve diligently read their Fanon, and must be puzzled over what the problem is. Palestinians are victims of a “colonial,” “white,” “settler-state” and any violence they commit is thereby justified.



The Aftershock

October 7 was a shock in the scale, surprise, and the sheer brutality of the attack.

The second shock was the enormous outpouring of support for Hamas and the Palestinians in Russia, European cities and even more disturbing, the colleges and universities in this country. Before WWII, before we knew the horrors that followed, there was a sellout rally in Madison Square Garden in support of the Nazi movement.

The rallies to support Hamas AFTER their depravity was available for all to see was worse; maybe not in one place, but the number of Hamas supporters and the diverse locations and the intensity and the threats was the worse display of anti-Semitism ever seen in this country. And that is not hyperbole. The hesitation to call this out for the outrage that it was, the stretch to find any moral relativism, the inability to identify evil when it explodes in your face, and the cowardly demeaner towards these new Nazis is an absolute abdication of moral leadership in too many of our colleges.

I am glad to see big donors close their checkbooks and I hope students either leave or refuse to attend these cesspools of anti-Semitism.  I hope state legislatures hold the taxpayer supported schools accountable as well.

Is this a restriction on free speech? Yes.  As it would be if they refused a Klan rally, or a Nazi rally.Calling the restriction of the oldest of hatreds a limit on free speech in light of the restrictions on free speech the woke were allowed to get away with is the height of hypocrisy.  You can get fired for using the wrong pronouns or questioning the ability of men to bear children but cheering the sadistic murder of Jews is now supposed to be protected free speech.

This has been brewing on college campuses for decades.  Phyllis Chesler, a leftist feminist, wrote of it in The New Anti-Semitism, published in 2003.  Since then, it has grown much worse, tolerated in the name of free speech, or dismissed as an insignificant minority.  But what we tolerate we teach, and the graduates indoctrinated with this poison now occupy positions in the media, government, higher and secondary education, nonprofits and even some of our corporations.

The media, apoplectic for weeks from hatred displayed in Charlottesville in 2017, lack the same outrage at the depth and scale of the hatred that followed the Hamas attack on October 7.  It is worth noting how often the cry against Zionism quickly turned to plain hatred of Jews.  It has always been a false distinction.  Jewish sympathizers for these attacks on Israel are progressive kapos, selling their soul hoping the alligator eats them last.

DEI hustlers have exposed their moral bankruptcy as well.  The same goes for BLM, blindly supported by Jewish sympathizers.

I confess that as much as I have been aware of this growing tolerance for anti-Semitism in our colleges and media institutions, I was surprised by the depth and scale of the hatred and the blind ignorance that enabled it. Hopefully this new awareness will last and dismantle the infrastructure that enabled this growth in Anti-Semitism with the same commitment Israel will show towards Hamas.

P.S.

Opinion: Nothing has prepared me for the antisemitism I see on college campuses now

Liberal Jews Have No Reason To Be Surprised By Progressive Antisemitism

I regret that the progressive label has been perverted and applied to the worst of the woke ideology.  The progressives of Teddy and Franklin Roosevelts’ era would not recognize the term as it is used today.



Cancelling Cancel Culture

I confess to a strong sense of schadenfreude at seeing the social justice warriors have their main weapon turned on them.  Big donors are withholding money from universities who tolerate real hate, not just hate speech, and not just the crocodile tears, virtue signaling, and microaggression nonsense.  Graduates are now being held to account for their views when hitting the job market.  Supporting Hamas after their savage attack on October 7 may have been the bridge too far, but the illiberal restraint on speech and the cancel culture is also being cancelled.

I always thought identity politics would end badly.  The reaction will not be just about the tolerance of anti-Semitism but will address all the other values that embraced it.  The idea that this is just a small portion of the student population and is thus an overreaction is bull shit.  The percentage of cops who assault unarmed blacks is much smaller and that did not stop nationwide riots.

Cancel all these social justice grifters, anti-Semites, and illiberal fascists.  When you live by the sword……