Cathedral Round Up #6: Dartmouth’s Diversity Scam

This month, I decided to take a look at Dartmouth, better known for drunken frat parties than Ivy League-style academic excellence.

Keggy the Keg, Dartmouth’s mascot

So it turns out that being part of the Ivy League actually has nothing to do with academic excellence; it’s just an athletic conference. That’s right, the entire perception of academic prestige is due to Dartmouth and Harvard occasionally playing football together.

Dartmouth’s motto is Vox clamantis in deserto, which is Latin for “Help, I’m stuck in New Hampshire!”

Technically, that’s still better than Cornell’s motto, “I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study.”

(That’s… not a motto.)

Dartmouth comes across like a culturally blue-tribe white frat guy who’s never actually met any black or Hispanic people, but knows that anti-racism is the difference between people like him and beer-swilling rednecks from the South.

Don’t ask me why; I hail from one of those regions where Prohibition is still in force.

As you would expect, Dartmouth is therefore trying to correct its “whiteness problem.”

From The Dartmouth, which bills itself as America’s Oldest Student Newspaper, Vice Provost Aims for Faculty Diversity:

“Vice provost for academic initiatives Denise Anthony, who assumed the position last October, has been entrusted to help retain and recruit a diverse faculty at the College.”

Anthony is a sociologist whose specialty appears to be patient trust of electronic health care records, which doesn’t seem like an ideal background for the job, but then, it’s probably not hurting her. The article continues:

Anthony’s new position was publicized during College President Phil Hanlon’s “Moving Dartmouth Forward” speech late last month, in which he also said the College has committed $1 million per year to further this diversity initiative. …

Diversity is big business these days.

“To the extent that we are an educational institution and really training the next generation of thinkers and leaders, it is also necessary to have a diverse faculty to be training those leaders to recognize the value of diversity,” Anthony said.

If you were my student and you produced a sentence like that, I would circle it in red and tell you to fix it. There is no “extent” to which Dartmouth is an educational institution; Dartmouth is an educational institution.

Her goal, she said, is to increase recruitment and retention for underrepresented groups such as African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans and Asian Americans in a variety of fields and women in science.

I’m circling this one in red, too.

Any time a department does a faculty search, that department works with the dean to create a search committee. The $1 million in annual funds will go in part toward increasing resources for department search committees, such as websites and literature on unconscious bias that search committees can utilize before they commence a search, she said. These resources will be available to any department.

Wow, a million dollars to recommend a website!

The sheer level of scam astounds me. This woman is being given $1 million dollars a year to email links to other professors. Hey, Dartmouth, I’ll make you a deal: pay me a measly $900,000 per year, and I’ll email you all the links you want. You get to save $100,000, and my links will be much more entertaining.

Plus, I’ve got much better credentials.

Success for the program would mean an increase in the number of underrepresented faculty and in their retention, along with the full engagement of those faculty members.

Not the production of knowledge or education of students or any of those silly, results-based measures of “academic” success. After all, Anthony thinks Dartmouth is only an educational institution “to an extent.” Perhaps its other purpose is simply “to hire people.”

Anthony said she meets with faculty and staff from the Geisel School of Medicine and the Thayer School of Engineering daily to talk about diversity on a student and staff level.

Every day? What do they have to talk about?

Day One

Anthony: So, is the Engineering Department still mostly white?

Engineering Faculty: Yes.

Anthony: Well, that’s enough talk to justify billing this lunch to the department. Let’s get started on our appetizers.

Day Two

Anthony: So, is the Engineering Department still mostly white?

Engineering Faculty: … You know new students only really start school once a year, right? And that day wasn’t yesterday.

Anthony: Is that a yes?

Engineering Faculty: Yes.

Anthony: Well, that’s enough talk to justify billing this lunch to the department. Let’s get started on our appetizers.

Repeat ad nauseam. But moving on with the article…

Chair of the African and African American studies program and English professor Gretchen Gerzina, who has been teaching at the College for 10 years, said that she thinks faculty of color leave Dartmouth for a variety of reasons…

Gretchen Gerzina is about as black as Rachel Dolezal, complete with the fake-permed hair:

Rachel Dolezal

Yale has this same problem:

Elizabeth Alexander, poet, Yale professor

You know, I might think this is funny, but I bet actually black women don’t think it’s funny when majority white-DNA women perm their hair and take jobs meant for blacks.

Fact is, it is actually trivially simple to hire black people if you want to. There are, after all, nearly 42 million black people in this country, and even though Dartmouth is, as Gerzina notes, located in an isolated backwoods with little to do on a Friday night but attend frat parties, it still would not take much effort to find a couple hundred who would be willing to come write poetry and opine for Dartmouth’s students on the “African American experience.”

These might not be folks with the kind of credentials traditionally looked for in Ivy League professors, but it is easy to wave that away by pointing out, quite accurately, that such credential requirements disproportionately rule out black (and Hispanic) applicants.

But finding (and keeping) qualified black professors, especially in fields with technical requirements that you can’t just wave away, is much harder, hence the continuous demands that elite institutions allocate more money to attract them. Being even vaguely black is a high-demand commodity.

Let’s finish the article:

Between 2006 and 2013, Yale University had a faculty diversity initiative, which focused on increasing the number of underrepresented minority faculty members and women in science. The initiative set the hiring goal of 30 minority and 30 female professors from 2006 until June 2013.  As of February 2013, the University was able to retain 22 minority and 18 female faculty members, one year after the university hired 56 minority and 30 female faculty members.

And look what a harmonious place Yale has become:

Meanwhile at The Dartmouth Review, Eyes Wide Open at the Protest:

Black-clad protesters gathered in front of Dartmouth Hall, forming a crowd roughly one hundred fifty strong.  Ostensibly there to denounce the removal of shirts from a display in Collis, the Black Lives Matter collective began to sing songs and chant their eponymous catchphrase. Not content to merely demonstrate there for the night, the band descended from their high-water mark to march into Baker-Berry Library.

“F*** you, you filthy white f***s!” “F*** you and your comfort!” “F*** you, you racist s***!”

These shouted epithets were the first indication that many students had of the coming storm.  The sign-wielding, obscenity-shouting protesters proceeded through the usually quiet backwaters of the library.  They surged first through first-floor Berry, then up the stairs to the normally undisturbed floors of the building, before coming back down to the ground floor of Novack.

Throngs of protesters converged around fellow students who had not joined in their long march. They confronted students who bore “symbols of oppression”: “gangster hats” and Beats-brand headphones.  The flood of demonstrators self-consciously overstepped every boundary, opening the doors of study spaces with students reviewing for exams. Those who tried to close their doors were harassed further. One student abandoned the study room and ran out of the library. The protesters followed her out of the library, shouting obscenities the whole way.

Students who refused to listen to or join their outbursts were shouted down.  “Stand the f*** up!”  “You filthy racist white piece of s***!”  Men and women alike were pushed and shoved by the group.  “If we can’t have it, shut it down!” they cried.  Another woman was pinned to a wall by protesters who unleashed their insults, shouting “filthy white b****!” in her face.

The Dartmouth has a rebuttal article, which claims that,

“These allegations of physical assault are lies to make white students look like the victims and students of color to look like the perpetrators,” Abera said. “The protest was meant to shut down the library. Whatever discomfort that many white students felt in that library is a fraction of the discomfort that many Natives, blacks, Latina and LGBTQ people feel frequently.” …

Many of the demonstrators then approached the sitting students and chanted “F**k your white privilege” and “F**k your white asses,” demonstrator Dan Korff-Korn ’19 said.

“It was important to point out that the students sitting there in the library at the computers represented this greater degree of ignorance, apathy and privilege that you see at Dartmouth, …” Korff-Korn said. …

Comments such as “F*** your white privilege” were not personal or racist attacks on individual white persons in the library, Diakanwa said. Instead, these comments were meant to target the legacy of white supremacy that many students have benefited from and students of color are fighting against, he said.

Got that? “Fuck your white ass” is not supposed to be a personal or racist attack.

The Dartmouth also brings us The Death of Peaceful Protests? about no, not the difficulties of studying at Dartmouth, busy highways being shut down, convenience stores burned down by protestors, a police precinct occupied by protestors, or a man wearing a “Stop Killng Black Men” t-shirt getting his head bashed in with a hammer by a “Black Lives Matter” protester:

(Also from the article about the guy hit with the hammer:

Some of the protesters made their way to a freeway in Oakland and blocked traffic. The California Highway Patrol said some tried to light a patrol vehicle on fire and threw rocks, bottles and an explosive at officers. Highway patrol officers responded with tear gas. [source])

No, it’s about some dudes in Oregon occupying a building in the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, which, while lovely:

Is not exactly densely inhabited.

The Death of Peaceful Protests? claims that:

If the armed men were African-American, they would be called thugs. If they were Muslim, they would be called terrorists. The showdown between the armed protestors and the government illuminates a tremendous hypocrisy. We label violent groups based on the race or religion of their members.

Look, I am the first person to complain about inconsistent language use, but I’d like to see one credible news source that has called Time Magazine’s #4 Person of the Year “thugs.” I’d like to see a single non-violent (and until violence happens, I’m going to call this non-violent) Muslim take-over of a building in some rural part of the country called a “terrorist” act.

The author further argues:

The federal government has not been quick to respond due to its experience with right-wing militant groups in Waco and Ruby Ridge in the 1990s. …

Additionally, the occupation has exposed the government’s fear of antagonizing right-wing groups. Our nation’s leaders have given such extremists carte blanche. They can act with impunity. If the armed men were African-American or Muslim, the government would have mustered all of its strength to crush the opposition.”

Actually an image of the Obama administration crushing Black Lives Matter protesters. Loretta Lynch is driving the first tank.

The government hasn’t been “hands off” with the Oregon militia thing because they’re afraid of antagonizing right-wing groups, (goodness knows militias aren’t exactly one of Obama’s core voting demographics,) or because we’ve somehow become more pro-white guys with guns since 1993, but because everyone basically agrees that this:

Branch Davidian Compound in Flames

is a really bad way for a standoff to end. From Texas Monthly, The Fire that Time:

We found the women and children huddled together, under blankets. There were 27 bodies, two of them pregnant women. They were covered in debris—not just construction debris but spent rounds of grenades and ammunition. I suspect that the blankets were moist, to try and keep out the smoke. But there was such a rip-roaring fire that they were trapped. That was the most profound and distressing aspect of this entire case. To see that mass of human remains was a horrific thing for all of us. …

Many of the Davidian children’s remains went unclaimed because whole families were dead or their relatives were too poor to pay for funeral services or no one wanted them. And so all those bodies that had been at the coroner’s office were buried, without markers, in paupers’ graves in a Waco cemetery.

Martin We had to stand behind the caution tape. We watched them bring out coffin after coffin and drop them in the ground. It was a horrible thing.

No one really cares about some random building in rural Oregon, even if there are some guys with guns holed up in it.

In our final article from The Dartmouth, Educated Action reminds us that young people vote liberal, therefore, be sure to vote, because who could argue with logic like this?