Cathedral Round-Up #13: Do Universities do Anything Good?

A commentator last month asked if universities do anything good, so I though I would begin this month’s Cathedral Round-Up by searching for some good news.

Caltech seems to be still doing real research:

And some researchers at MIT are collaborating with folks at Mass General Hospital to improve methods for placing epidurals:

More than 13 million pain-blocking epidural procedures are performed every year in the United States. Although epidurals are generally regarded as safe, there are complications in up to 10 percent of cases, in which the needles are inserted too far or placed in the wrong tissue.

A team of researchers from MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital hopes to improve those numbers with a new sensor that can be embedded into an epidural needle, helping anesthesia doctors guide the needle to the correct location.

Since inserting a giant needle into your spine is really freaky, but going through natural childbirth is hideously painful, I strongly support this kind of research.

Meanwhile, of course:

(note: I don’t have the link to the PDF.)

 

 

 

 

Forbes notes:

More than half of Americans under the age of 25 who have a bachelor’s degree are either unemployed or underemployed. According to The Christian Science Monitor, nearly 1 percent of bartenders and 14 percent of parking lot attendants have a bachelor’s degree.

Adding additional degrees is no guarantee of employment either. According to a recent Urban Institute report, nearly 300,000 Americans with master’s degrees and over 30,000 with doctorates are on public relief. …

Unless you have a “hard” skill, such as a mastery of accounting, or a vocational certificates (e.g., in teaching) your liberal arts education generally will not equip you with the skill set that an employer will need.

Obviously colleges still do some good things. Much of the research I cite here in this blog originated at a college of some sort. And of course, if you are careful and forward thinking, you can use college to obtain useful skills/information.

But between the years, money, and effort students spend, not to mention the absurd political indoctrination, college is probably a net negative for most students.

A few doctors in the 1400s probably saved the lives of their patients, but far more killed them.

Caveat emptor.

Cathedral Round-Up #12: The Rise of Mommy-Law

After reading several books and numerous articles by lawyers of various stripes, you can’t help but notice their philosophy of law. (In this case, Just Mercy, by Bryan Stevenson, and The Real Watergate Scandal, by Geoff Shepard.) Now, I am sure that actual legal scholars and philosophers have developed a whole vocabulary and system of concepts for discussing these sorts of things, but as I am not a legal philosophy scholar, I am limited to my own bumbling language.

The American legal tradition, from the Constitution on down, is based on the notion that man is his own sovereign; judges do not advocate on behalf of one person or group, but dispassionately arbitrate between them.

Thus the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Government does not chose a side.

For the first two hundred years or so of our country, the proper functioning of law was seen as protecting the interests of the individual, both against predation by others and from over-reach by the state. Just as the scientific method protects truth by demanding a theory be falsifiable and tested against this counter-scenario, so the legal system protects freedom by putting the burden of proof on the Prosecution and demanding that the accused be treated as “innocent until proven guilty.”

Properly functioning, the law protects the individual. This idea of law-functioning-as-intended-protects-people is found in both Just Mercy and The Real Watergate Scandal, in which both authors describe cases of judges and prosecutors interfering with the proper functioning of law to deprive defendants of a fair trial. A fair trial, they argue, would have exonerated their defendants.

Obviously this view is still current among lawyers, who like to see themselves as moral people who deserve their paychecks. But among non-lawyers, the view seems to have shifted radically over the past few decades. SJWs in particular seem to have decided that the legal system is not as the protector of rights, but the protector of oppressors.

To some extent, this is due to the absolutely true fact that rich people can afford better lawyers than poor people can, corporations use the legal system to drive down competition, and there are so many laws now on the books that if they want to arrest you, they can almost always find something to charge you with.

And while the BLM crowd appears to be statistically incorrect on the matter of cop-on-black shootings, they are absolutely correct that there are a lot of black people in prison: “One in six black men had been incarcerated as of 2001.”

But these are, we might argue, a practical matter, easily resolved by repealing drug laws or forcing everyone to use public defenders or some other measure I leave for you to imagine. Increasingly, though, it seems like the very ground rules of a “free society protected by laws” are coming under attack.

Take Freedom of Speech.

Free Speech has historically been regarded as necessary for the existence of a free, democratic society, both because it is impossible to discuss important political matters if certain opinions are not allowed to be expressed, and because it is an insult to free men to dictate what they may and may not discuss. That Freedom of Speech covers matters deemed noxious to common sentiments like pornography, flag burning, or KKK rallies was seen mainly as an unpleasant but generally ignorable side-effect of a properly functioning legal necessity. Thus even the hyper-liberal ACLU would defend the rights of the KKK to march and pornographers to publish.

Today, by contrast, Freedom of Speech is regarded by many on the left not as defending their own rights, but as a legal fig leaf to protect bigots, Nazis, Klan members, and Charlie Hebdo while they spread their vile, hate-filled messages.

According to Gallup, 27% of college students favored campus restrictions on  “expressing political views that are upsetting or offensive to certain groups;” 69% favored restrictions on “slurs” and “intentionally offensive” speech; and 63% want their administrations to ban offensive Halloween costumes. Further, 40% of Millennials want the government to restrict speech “offensive to minorites.”

See: Yale’s costume crisis:

(Since Youtube crashes my computer, please let me know if I don’t have the best video.)

When you start demanding that the authorities dictate which costumes you can wear while screaming in outrage at anyone who suggests that you might be old enough to dress yourselves, you don’t want freedom, you want mommy.

That’s why I call this the rise of Mommy Law, a legal philosophy in which the government’s proper role is no longer to mediate between equals, but to defend the helpless–blacks, women, LGBTQIAs, Muslims, etc.–from their oppressors. It is implicit, under Mommy Law, that these groups have no agency of their own and could not take care of themselves without the government’s help.

Thus, for example, it is now seen as the proper role of law to award millions in damages to gay couples just because someone objected, on religious grounds, to baking them a wedding cake. Likewise, the government has decided it is inappropriate to investigate the Orlando shooter’s Islamic ties, because that would disproportionately impact Muslims.

Interestingly, criminal law–especially as it relates to rape–has been the locus of much of this change for decades. Just Mercy goes into this in some depth, because changes in criminal law over the past few decades have ironically had a major effect on black people, so I regret deeply that I do not have the text at hand to quote for you. In short, IIRC, the emphasis in criminal court cases shifted from the “state” prosecuting a criminal who had disturbed the common order (hence the phrasing, “The State of X vs. Joe Bob,” to the state acting on behalf of the victims. Certain rights of the defendant related to cross-examination of witnesses, especially child victims of rape and other violent crimes, have been curtailed to avoid distressing the witnesses.

(Children, of course, actually are helpless and should be treated as such, but the feminist demand that we “Believe the Children” has still led to many people being incarcerated on obviously false charges, like flying through the air on a magic broom.)

This is all quite understandable in light of the feminists’ War on Rape, which you should be familiar with if you’ve ever spent 5 minutes around feminists. Unfortunately for the feminists, most rapes are difficult to prosecute under normal legal standards. Unlike robbery, in which the transfer of one man’s wallet to another man’s pocket is clearly a crime, people–even strangers–engage in consensual sex all the time. In a great majority of cases, we have nothing more to go on than the testimonies of the two people involved, one of whom claims consensuality and one of whom claims not. Victory in such cases requires lower standards of evidence and a weakening of the presumption of “Innocent until proven guilty.”

And with that very long introduction, here are some recent articles from the Yale Daily News:

State Passes Affirmative Consent Legislation:

Last Wednesday, the Connecticut Senate voted 35 to one in favor of a bill requiring both private and public colleges and universities in the state to adopt affirmative consent as the standard in handling cases of sexual misconduct on campus.

Commonly defined as “yes means yes,” the affirmative consent standard puts the burden of proof on the accused party, who is now responsible for demonstrating that affirmative consent was given before any sexual activity took place. Lawmakers in support of the bill stressed that affirmative consent means “active, informed, unambiguous and voluntary agreement” and will help university administrators handle sexual misconduct on campus with greater efficacy and clarity. Several Connecticut universities, including Yale, already use an affirmative consent standard. …

Students from different colleges and universities across the state gathered in front of the Connecticut State Capitol in April to demonstrate their support for the bill when it was being considered in the House.

Philosophy Community Signs Open Letter in Striking Rebuke of Pogge:

Nearly a month after sexual misconduct allegations arose against renowned Yale philosophy professor Thomas Pogge, simmering anger within the philosophy community has turned into open outrage as more than 200 philosophy professors around the world — including 16 full Yale professors — have signed an open letter condemning Pogge’s alleged misconduct. …

… philosophy professor Shelly Kagan, who was department chair when Pogge was hired, said what Pogge has admitted to doing is inappropriate and unprofessional. During a 2011 UWC investigation, Pogge acknowledged that he had shared a hotel room with Lopez Aguilar and slept on her lap during a flight, although he added that both actions were suggested by her.

“The things about going to the conference with a former student and sharing a hotel room and he admitted to sleeping with his head on her lap. That is not appropriate behavior,” Kagan said in an interview with the News…

Even Affirmative Consent won’t save Pogge.

Teammate launches fundraiser for Montague:

“Just months from graduation and weeks before our basketball team clinched an Ivy League title, Jack Montague was forced to leave school and abandon his team in light of a university sexual assault investigation that presented no evidence that proved his guilt. Not only was Jack stripped of a Yale degree which he had worked over three and half years to earn, he was also denied the once in a lifetime opportunity to play in the NCAA tournament alongside his teammates,” …

The basketball team drew criticism earlier this year for demonstrating support for Montague after rumors of his expulsion began to circulate. In a Feb. 26 home contest against Harvard, 16 days after Montague was expelled, the team took to the court wearing T-shirts with the former captain’s nickname and number on the back. The following week, posters appeared around campus condemning the team for “supporting a rapist.”

Montague suit one of more than 100 alleging universities violated students’ rights:

Filed in a federal court last week, Montague v. Yale University et. al joins more than 100 recent civil suits alleging that college students accused of sexual misconduct were not granted fair hearings in campus proceedings. …

In one of the most powerful critiques of university sexual misconduct procedures, presiding judge F. Dennis Saylor denied Brandeis’s motion to dismiss charges in March, ruling that four of the eight charges, including the breach of contract charge, could stand. …

Explicitly supporting the lower evidence standard mandated by the U.S. Department of Education’s Title IX compliance guidelines, Saylor questioned whether Brandeis’s sexual misconduct procedures have gone too far. …

In recent years, dozens of universities have been taken to court for their handling of sexual misconduct allegations. Lawsuits claiming that accused students’ due process rights were denied have proliferated since the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights issued a public letter to Title IX coordinators in April of 2011. The 19-page document, known as the “Dear Colleague” letter, laid out a series of guidelines for educational institutions that receive federal funding and are thereby obliged to comply with Title IX, the clause of the Education Amendments of 1972 that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex.

Perhaps most significantly, educational institutions were instructed to use a “preponderance of the evidence” standard  — meaning, the letter explains, “it is more likely than not that sexual harassment or violence occurred” — when investigating allegations of sexual harassment or violence.

This lower standard, used in campus proceedings involving sexual misconduct but not in criminal cases, reduces the level of certainty required to find students guilty of sexual misconduct, opening the door for students to claim that their due process rights — to hear and respond to evidence, or to cross-examine opposing witnesses, among others — were violated.

Due process is a constitutional right, but Rendell-Baker v. Kohn (1982) ruled that private universities are not required to adhere to the same standards of due process as courts. A student undergoing a Title IX investigation at a college is not guaranteed the same rights — a jury of one’s peers or the right to know opposing evidence, for example — as a criminal who committed a comparable crime in a non-university setting.

So what else has been going on at Yale?

Yalies Mourn and Offer Support in Wake of Orlando Shooting

Galvez said she was away from campus when the tragedy took place and found it difficult to grasp that people of her community are dying for being their authentic selves.

She added that the shooting was a violation of a safe space for queer people of color, who have been deemed unworthy of love, civil liberties and now the right to live.

“Our Latinx, LGBTQ and Yale communities at large are hurting — we are mourning for our hermanxs,” she said. “There are some that will use this incident to target those in our Muslim communities, however, it is love and not hate that will help us in our path towards alleviating our hearts. Indeed, our Muslim hermanxs are also hurting and mourning with us.” …

As a non-native Spanish speaker, I suppose I don’t have a right to get anal about the butchering of grammatical gender endings in English-renderings of Spanish words, but how do you even pronounce “hermanxs”?

I remember those long ago days of Spanish class, when we first learned about this whole concept of “grammatical gender” and how it operates in Spanish, and some of us started bristling up and saying, “But isn’t that sexist?” Our Mexican teacher immediately shot us down. No, grammatical gender is just part of how the language operates, not an expression of how people feel about men and women.

According to Wikipedia, Proto-Indo-European had to genders, “Animate and Inanimate.” Oh those bigots! Latin had three genders, indicating that the Romans were really into trans rights. Swahili has 18 genders, evidence of severe mutation after a nuclear accident (also, ninja turtles.) English has only a few evil words left, like “duchess,” because it is the current year and we are now enlightened.

(Duchessship is one of the few words in English with three identical letters in a row.)

Etymologically, the term “gender” in “grammatical gender” actually doesn’t mean “the word is a girl or a boy.” It just means “type” or “kind,” as in the word “genus,” a taxonomic rank above species but below family for classifying groups of animals, eg, house cats and wildcats are both in the genus Felis.

I am an absolute blast at parties.

Continuing on…

He added that the majority of the Orlando victims were Blacks or Latinx enjoying Latin Night at Pulse nightclub, a place where people should be able to dance free from stigma and discrimination. That many have overlooked this important fact or used the tragedy to scapegoat Muslims is frustrating, Paredes said. …

LGBTQ Co-Op Coordinator Kyle Ranieri ’18 said the Orlando shooting has deeply affected him and many of his queer friends. To attack gay clubs and bars is to devastate “the epicenter of queer communities,” Ranieri said.

Ranieri said he is pleased with Salovey’s email, which recognized the tragedy as a targeted attack against the LGBTQ Latinx community, but he expects the administration to take steps to ensure a safe campus for queer people of color in the coming semester.

It’s Yale’s job to keep gay blacks and Hispanics safe from the likes of the Orlando shooter, but not from Muslims.

The Divide: A portrait of Muslim Student Life at Yale:

Ishrat Mannan ’17 stood by a lonely table, pamphlets in hand. Her disinterested classmates streamed past her, lining up to attend the event of the day: a talk by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, titled “Clash of Civilizations: Islam and the West.” Even though the physical distance that separated them could not have been more than a few feet, Mannan found that she and her fellow Yalies might as well have been in different ideological worlds. In one, Islam was a symbol of peace and a way of life. In the other, it was a foreign relic of a bygone era, interesting to study but not to take seriously. “That huge divide,” recalls Mannan, “just felt really, really disheartening.” …

Acceptance can be hard in a place as secular as Yale. …

Whether it is in Global Affairs or Modern Middle East Studies, Islam is usually taught from the specific viewpoint of radical violence and national security. It’s not that good classes about Islam don’t exist at Yale. Rather, it’s that students choose not to take them.

“[Classes about Islamic civilization] are not the popular, sexy classes that get high attendance,” says Bajwa. “Muslim civilization, Muslim history, intellectual history, social history, Muslim culture’s contributions to society, those are the classes that have anemic attendance.” …

I can’t imagine why.

Yale’s general academic attitude toward Islam is just the tip of the iceberg. If anything, it is reflective of subtle Islamophobia on parts of campus. This tension between the Muslim and non-Muslim Yale communities has manifested itself more than once in Yale’s recent history.

Seven years ago, the master of Branford College invited Kurt Westergaard, one of the 12 Danish cartoonists who drew offensive cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in 2005, to a Master’s Tea. …

Then in 2012, the New York Police Department’s massive spying operation on at least 15 Muslim student organizations across the country came to light, and with it the revelation that Yale students had been the unwitting targets of extensive surveillance, suspected solely on the basis of their religion. The incident hit hard, but fortunately the Yale administration issued a statement of support for the Muslim community on campus, with former University Vice President Linda Lorimer telling the News that Yale “supports [the MSA’s] goals and aims and is grateful for its leadership on our campus,” adding that she had been “both inspired and educated by the MSA.”

I think that is the opposite of Islamaphobia on campus, but who can keep track of such detaisl?

Perhaps the toughest blow, though came last year, with the William F. Buckley Jr. Program’s invitation of Hirsi Ali, a well-known anti-Islamic speaker. …

Who is this Hirsi Ali? According to Wikipedia:

Ayaan Hirsi Ali … is a Dutch-American activist, author, and former politician of Somali origin. She is a leading opponent of female genital mutilation, and calls for a reformation of Islam.^[1]…

Ayaan was born in 1969^[14] in Mogadishu, Somalia.^[15] Her father, Hirsi Magan Isse, was a prominent member of the Somali Salvation Democratic Front and a leading figure in the Somalian Revolution. Shortly after she was born, her father was imprisoned owing to his opposition to the Siad Barre government.^[16][17]

Hirsi Ali’s father had studied abroad and was opposed to female genital mutilation. But, while he was imprisoned, Hirsi Ali’s grandmother had the traditional procedure performed on five-year-old Hirsi Ali.^[16]

After her father escaped from prison, he and the family left Somalia, going to Saudi Arabia and then to Ethiopia, before settling in Nairobi, Kenya, by 1980. There he established a comfortable upper-class life for them. Hirsi Ali attended the English-language Muslim Girls’ Secondary School. By the time she reached her teens, Saudi Arabia was funding religious education in numerous countries and its religious views were becoming influential among many Muslims. A charismatic religious teacher, trained under this aegis, joined Hirsi Ali’s school. She inspired the teenaged Ayaan, as well as some fellow students, to adopt the more rigorous Saudi Arabian interpretations of Islam, as opposed to the more relaxed versions then current in Somalia and Kenya. Hirsi Ali said later that she had long been impressed by the Qur’an and had lived “by the Book, for the Book” throughout her childhood.^[18]

Yup, Hirsi Ali is clearly an ignorant, anti-Muslim bigot. Back to Yale:

What started off as a small event exploded into a raging firestorm that drew in the national media and numerous student organizations across campus. Arguments were made, op-eds were written, letters were sent, and before anyone knew it, Hirsi Ali’s event had somehow evolved into an epic showdown between protecting free speech and preserving a safe space. … “A lot of people have become very open about how disillusioned they are with Yale,” says Mannan…

Just as it is really hard to be black at Harvard, it’s really hard to be Muslim at Yale.

Money Talks: Yale recently decided to name one college after Anna Murray (“an intellectual, an activist and member of the clergy” and “a queer woman of color and civil rights activist“) and one after Benjamin Franklin (due to one donor’s request,) and some students are unhappy:

But we shouldn’t honor one donor’s request that stands so wildly in contrast to the prevailing opinion and wishes of students on campus. … But it’s also true that Yale students today are unimpressed — and angry, saddened and deeply frustrated — with this naming decision. But one day, some of us will have wallets that rival Johnson’s, and will be in a position to make these types of decisions to steward and direct this institution. Yale is raising us to be its future alumni, and as future alumni, we can perhaps — as a whole — value the voices of students on campus over our own egos. We must hope for more decisions that look like Pauli Murray College, and much fewer that look like Franklin.

They should have named it after Hamilton.

Our Missed Opportunity:

Amidst the tears and painful conversations last semester, a note of optimism hung in the air. The March of Resilience in November affirmed a widespread commitment to, in University President Peter Salovey’s own words, “a better Yale.” Student activists delivered concrete policy demands to administrators, with some tangible results. Despite the University’s past failures to address the concerns of students and faculty of color, there was a glimmer of hope.

At around 5:30 p.m. Wednesday, that hope was unceremoniously dashed. …

Murray College, a symbol of progress and equality, will stand next to Franklin College, whose name seems to have carried a $250 million price tag.

The new college will be permanently engraved with the name of Benjamin Franklin, a slaveowner whose only affiliation with Yale is one honorary degree.

Ben Franklin dashed their hopes.

Yale will eliminate a title to which few were attached, and name one residential college after a queer woman of color. But in deciding to do so, they have paradoxically insulted the very students who have fought so hard for change. When paired with its calculated verdicts on Calhoun and Franklin College, the symbols of progress start to look rather unprogressive.

That’s because protesting over the names of colleges is actually really dumb.

Salovey: We cannot seek truth by hiding it:

Some students have expressed the view that their engagement and advocacy in the fall were wasted. Nothing could be further from the truth. We value your voices, and the initiatives we announced then and now reflect our respect for the student, alumni, faculty and staff who participated.

Initiatives for a more inclusive Yale, some already underway and others newly announced in November, are being implemented. We want to be held accountable as we fulfill important commitments to strengthen the academic enterprise, expand programs for students, improve institutional structures and increase representation of diversity on campus. …

Scholars and students across the University engage in these activities each day. The research and education mission of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale is a major participant in conversations on campus and across the nation. The new Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity and Transnational Migration will add new voices, on our campus and around the world. We must use our voices and our influence as students and as educators to share that knowledge with broader society and seek solutions, not just solace. …

Help us shape the historical study of names and memorials to be undertaken throughout the campus. The Committee on Art in Public Places requests student and faculty insights into what iconography we must create and change to better reflect the nature of our community and our history. Submit a proposal to the juried competition that will select a piece of art to defy the beliefs of John C. Calhoun by shining a light on equality and justice.

Let us end with Yale News’s Commencement 2016 Opinion:

But college is no easier at Yale than anywhere else. In these four years you have lost friends, flunked tests and cried in courtyards when you realized life was more confusing than an admissions brochure made it out to be. You have turned tears into change as you held your Yale accountable. You have called for racial justice, environmental change, mental health reform, sexual consent, international human rights and so much more. From New Haven to St. Louis, college voices like yours are shaping the course of this country. And in expressing your experience of isolation and oppression, you found a community and a home here. Perhaps this is the most important lesson you have taught us: None of us are alone.

America: Unraveling at the Seams

It’s hard to concentrate on genetics when you feel like your own society is coming apart at the seams. I am very glad today that I am not in Dallas; I can only imagine what the people there (police and civilians,) must be feeling, but it can’t be good. Likewise, having seen the video of Philando Castile’s death, I am sure the African American community is likewise distressed.

From BLM to Donald Trump, racial tensions are on the rise and whites are usually blamed:

(This was tweeted the day after 9 police officers were shot, 5 killed, in Dallas.)

Or, more subtlely:

This post is not an exhaustive look at the dynamics of race and violence in America (I haven’t the time or resources,) but here are some links on the subject if you want them:

Slate Star Codex: Race and Justice: Much more than you wanted to know, (a review of just about everything on the subject Scott could find;) The Color of Crime, (2016 revised edition;) the Bureau of Justice crime stats website; and from the NY Times: Surprising New evidence shows bias in police use of force but not in shootings. And more, Study: BLM is wrong about police.

Rather, this is a quick look at the demographic reality vs the narrative:

Alton Sterling, a black man, was recently shot by police officer Howie Lake (white) and Blane Salamoni (medium-hued Italian.)

Philando Castile, (black) was recently shot by police officer Jeronimo Yanez, (Hispanic.)

George Zimmerman, (Hispanic) shot Trayvon Martin (black.)

The recent spree-killing at an Oregon college that killed (IIRC,) 7 people, was committed by a black man.

The Fort Hood Army Base shooting was committed by a Muslim man. The San Bernardino Christmas Party shooting, which IIRC killed 14 people, was committed by a Muslim couple.

The Orlando shooting, which left 49 people dead, was committed by a Muslim man; most of his victims were black and Hispanic. Most likely all of his victims were gay, (but apparently the shooter himself wasn’t. I am not totally convinced, though.)

6 police officers were involved in the death of Freddie Gray, black. Half of those officers were black, half white. The entire chain of command, from the Baltimore City police force to the Attorney General to the President himself is, of course, heavily black.

Police officer Peter Liang, Asian, killed Akai Gurley, black. The judge who threw out Liang’s guilty verdict, Danny Chun, is also Asian.

Mike Brown, black, was shot by a white cop.

Eric Gardner, black guy, strangled by white cops

Spree killer Eliot Roger was half Asian/half white.

The Virginia Tech shooter was Asian.

Mass-murderer Dylan Roof: white guy, black victims

Batman theater shooter: white guy, many victims

That guy who shot up a kindergarten was white. Victims weren’t chosen by race.

Violence by protestors (Hispanic, black, and white?) against Trump supporters (mostly white.)

In the recent anti-cop violence:

The five police officers recently shot by a black guy in Dallas included 4 whites and one Hispanic (Zamarripa.)

An Asian guy ambushed a police officer (I don’t know the victim’s race.)

A black guy ambushed two police offices (victims’ race unknown.)

Black guy attacked police officer’s home, officer’s race unknown.

Three police-related people + one civilian shot at a Michigan courthouse; 2 dead.

Why do people who think that whites are racist against minorities simultaneously try to increase immigration from non-white countries, instead of recommending that non-whites stay very far away? It doesn’t seem like Asians and Hispanics are refraining from shooting blacks, even if whites are the ones who get blamed for it.

Note that these are just the cases that have been prominent in the media/I have heard of/that come immediately to mind. The data, as you are probably aware, shows that most crime is of the far more conventional variety of black on black and white on white, but see all of the links above if you want real crime stats. Also, I have refrained from opining on guilt.

Forgive me; I forgot where this came from. Please let me know f you recognize it so I can properly credit it.

Cathedral Round-Up #11: The Joke’s on Them

Dean Minnow writes in Where Theory Meets Practice (HLS Bulletin):

Earlier this year, some students pressed for reconsideration of the [Harvard Law School] shield. Adopted by the Harvard Corporation in 1937, it was based on the family crest of Isaac Royall Jr. the son of an Antiguan slaveholder. Royall’s bequest helped to endow the first professorship of law at Harvard. I created a committee to examine the issue and recruited faculty and alumni to serve alongside student representatives and staff, selected by their own communities. The Harvard Corporation accepted the committee’s recommendation… The experience afforded over 1,000 people a chance to participate in deliberations over our symbol and framed discussions that will continue as we review our past and rededicate our future.

The former shield

But where did this push to change the seal come from? After all, the seal itself is rather innocuous, just three bundles of wheat surmounted by Harvard’s motto, Veritas. I doubt the average student walking around Harvard’s campus gives it (or any other shield) much thought.

A Question of History (HLS bulletin) reports:

Research by Visiting Professor Daniel Coquillette ’71 for his new history of HLS surfaced the ties between the Royall family and slave labor. In 2007, Janet Halley also explored the topic in the lecture she gave when she became the Royall Professor. Each year, [Dean] Minow has talked to incoming 1Ls about the Royall legacy, citing slavery as an example of how injustice is sometimes perpetuated through law.

Isaac Royall

Wikipedia informs us that:

Harvard Law School was established in 1817, making it the oldest continuously-operating law school in the nation. … The school’s origins can be traced to the estate of Isaac Royall, a wealthy Antiguan slave trader who immigrated to Boston. His Medford estate, the Isaac Royall House, is now a museum which features the only remaining slave quarters in the northeast United States. The Royall chair was traditionally held by the dean of the law school. However, because Royall was a slaveholder, Deans Elena Kagan and Martha Minow declined the Royall chair.

So HLS changed its shield because Dean Minow wanted them to. She encouraged the student body to view the shield as a symbol of racist oppression until they reacted and demanded its removal.

Of course, if HLS were actually committed to SJW goals, the best thing they could do is shut down, fire the teachers, give their endowment to the poor, and perhaps burn it all down and shoot a few lawyers for good measure. For every HLS grad who devotes their life to getting improperly convicted death row inmates out of prison, there are a dozen others working to keep them in; for every student who swears they are going to serve the poor, a hundred spend their days defending mega-corporations; for every Obama, there’s a Scalia.

If Dean Minow were actually devoted to “social justice,” as she puts it, she would devote herself to cases like Professor Parker’s:

Seven years ago I walked into the hospital for surgery. A cervical decompression and fusion, it was supposed to help me keep on mountain hiking. In the recovery room, I woke up paralyzed. I won’t walk again. I’m a tetraplegic. …

We launched two suits—one against the surgeon, the other against the company that was supposed to “monitor” spinal signals electronically throughout the operation. …

It turned out that almost no monitoring was done. There was no doctor observing incoming data in real time; there was no recording of data during most of the procedure; what records existed were, in large part, destroyed; …

We settled. But the company twice recently had to pay big fines for overcharging Medicare and claimed to be on the verge of bankruptcy. That limited the settlement. The hospital, I understand, went right on doing business with that company. …

After a grinding delay of four and a half years—there’s a special barrier to malpractice suits—we went to trial and we lost. We lost to an insurance company affiliated with ­Harvard.

If anyone could use a whole school full of angry lawyers on their side, surely it’s a healthy guy rendered a tetraplegiac via medical incompetence. But no, it’s the goddam shield that gets people’s attention. How many millions of dollars did Harvard spend on this “committee” that apparently listened to a thousand people’s opinions? How much will it cost to design and manufacture new seals to hang all over campus? How many of the people SJWs claim to care about could have been helped with that money?

But the overwhelming tone of the HLS Bulletin is not “SJW,” but relentless, soul-crushing, corporate formality. I wish I had a single word for it–like “norminess,” but oh so much more.

Just as some Christians* feel the influence of their faith in every aspect of their lives, while others make a show of going to church and calling themselves “Christian” but are otherwise unmoved by faith, so to do some SJWs come across as “true believers,” who want to increase acceptance for society’s outcasts, whether drag queens or criminals, and some come across as stiff formalists who wouldn’t touch a transsexual with a ten-foot pole but still want it to be known that they disapprove of North Carolina’s bathroom bill.

*I am sure this dichotomy shows up in all religions.

Like a real estate speculator who tries to invest in land that he thinks will go up in value, I suspect that much of Harvard’s business is to attach its name to future leaders. They are, for the most part, highly intelligent folks, but if intelligence were the only criterion, Harvard’s student body would look more like Caltech’s. Rather, Harvard is interested in people like Obama, multi-ethnic, internationalist, multi-lingual, and destined for at least a diplomatic post with the state department (that bet turned out even better than expected for HLS); the recently deceased Antonin “Nino” Scalia, or Koen Lenaerts, ’78, President of the European Court of Justice.

What does it all mean?

I’m not exactly sure, but I think it’s classism.

Which means classism is a lot worse than I generally give it credit for.

I did enjoy He Was Not a Crook: Former staffer in the Nixon administration continues to defend his boss:

Based on documents he uncovered from the Watergate proceedings housed in the National Archives, [Shepard’s] book contends that charges of a cover-up that ultimately forced Nixon to resign from office proved unfounded. Even the “smoking gun” tape that appeared to show the president seeking to limit the FBI’s Watergate investigation was misunderstood, Shepard contends: It was in fact an attempt to keep the names of Democratic donors to the Nixon campaign from becoming public. Yet the cover-up charges were buttressed by biased prosecutors and judges who colluded to ensure the downfall of the president, he believes.

“Judges and prosecutors aren’t supposed to get together in advance and make decisions, and that’s what it turns out they were doing,” he said. “It’s just startling, what was going on.” …

“He wasn’t a highfalutin Easterner,” as Shepard put it, nor was either one among the “sons of prominent men” like those who were introduced by one of his professors during a first-year class at Harvard Law. …

Although for many people Nixon’s legacy can be summed up in one word, Shepard says the president he served should be celebrated for his foreign policy acumen and domestic achievements, such as efforts to combat drug abuse.

“The people who have loathed Richard Nixon—just this visceral hatred of this guy from nowhere, without culture, without family, without a Harvard education, who kept winning elections,” he said, “they want to give him no credit for anything.”

Shepard’s book, “The Real Watergate Scandal: Collusion, Conspiracy, and the Plot That Brought Nixon Down,” is available from Amazon (or possibly your local library) if you’re interested.

There were also several articles about police and crime, (it’s a hot-button issue these days,) like:

Meeting at Cops’ Corner:

In just one decade, Everett, Massachusetts, once a predominantly white city, has become the most racially and ethnically diverse in the commonwealth. Building communication between police officers and local youth is a priority for Chief of the Everett Police Department Steven A. Mazzie, who is white, as are 86 percent of his officers. Last fall he invited a team of HLS students from the Harvard Negotiation & Mediation Clinical Program to Everett for an impartial assessment.

(Statistically, Everett seems to be doing slightly better than average for a Boston neighborhood, crime-wise.)

Solutions from Cincinnati: Mayor John Cranley ’99 champions his city’s unique police-community accord:

Now in its 14th year, a compact on policing in Cincinnati, Ohio, focused on building strong police-community relationships is a lauded model nationwide. John Cranley ’99, now the city’s mayor, was there from the start of the landmark agreement known as the Collaborative.

While Cincinnati is not mega-violent St. Louis, with nearly 50 murders and “non-neglicent manslaughter”s per 100k citizens year, it is the tenth most homicidal city in the country. (Everett, and Boston generally, are doing better.) On the plus side, violent crime has fallen since it spiked following the 2001 Cincinnati anti-police riots, though we need a few more years to tell whether it has stabilized around 65-75 murders per year after hitting a low in 2012, or if it’s headed back up.

and The New Age of Surveillance: Cellphones may be the least of your privacy concerns:

Welcome to the Internet of Things. It may be about to change our lives as radically as the Internet itself did 20 years ago. …

This technology is already available in everything from home appliances to Fitbits and children’s toys, and over the next 10 years, it is expected to become a multitrillion-dollar industry …

All that personal data—just waiting to be mined. The implications for privacy, national security, human rights, cyberespionage and the economy are staggering.

Cathedral Round-Up #10

… as Vattimo suggests, the “accomplished nihilism of the real (Western) world gives us nothing substantial for our rhetorics except an insubstantial rhetoric. .. I criticize intellectual practices that are too close to the narcissism of insiders, whose proposition and theories, despite their critical appearance, recode forms of stabilization; I seek instead to affirm the possibility of something like a nonrationalizing (counternarcissistic) intellectual endeavor. –Sande Cohen, Academia and the Luster of Capital

Chances are you recall the uprisings on college campuses around the country last fall, sparked by the Yale Halloween Costume Email controversy and the Missouri protest. The protestors presented their respective colleges with Demands, largely centering on public apologies for past injustice, mandatory SJW-indoctrination for all students and faculty, and more money for minority teachers, staff, students, and programs.

So I wanted to check up on how colleges have responded. (List is not inclusive; I have tried to focus on the most well-known institutions.)

Response to Amherst College Demands:

President Martin’s Statement on Campus Protests

On Thursday night I attended a student-organized protest against racism and other entrenched forms of prejudice and inequality. … Over the course of several days, a significant number of students have spoken eloquently and movingly about their experiences of racism and prejudice on and off campus.  The depth and intensity of their pain and exhaustion are evident. … It is good that our students have seized this opportunity to speak, rather than further internalizing the isolation and lack of caring they have described.  What we have heard requires a concerted, rigorous, and sustained response.

The organizers of the protests also presented me with a list of demands on Thursday evening.  While expressing support for their goals, I explained that the formulation of those demands assumed more authority and control than a president has or should have. … I explained that I did not intend to respond to the demands item by item, or to meet each demand as specified, but instead to write a statement that would be responsive to the spirit of what they are trying to achieve—systemic changes that we know we need to make. … I was asked to read this statement to students today in Frost Library and did so at noon.

Also:

• Trustees abandon Lord Jeffery Amherst, commander who endorsed plan to “extirpate” Indians with smallpox-laden blankets, as symbol and unofficial mascot of Amherst College. School name will remain.

Response to Boston College Demands:

… the university announced it would convene a university committee on race. The Undergraduate Government at Boston College set a January 19 deadline for the administration to release a plan to “create a more racially inclusive campus,” but the administration missed the deadline and didn’t release any statement as to when an action plan would be released. …
Boston College spokesman Jack Dunn that suggest there isn’t any problem that needs to be addressed. In November, Dunn stated, “The supposition that BC is an institutionally racist place is a difficult argument to make … I think that’s a false assumption, an unfair assumption, and impugns the integrity of so many good people on this campus who’ve joined this community precisely because they’re people of good will who oppose all elements of bigotry,” according to an article in the college’s independent newspaper, The Heights.

Response to Brandeis University Demands:

Acting Brandeis University President Lisa M. Lynch is pushing for changes she hopes will increase diversity in the student body and staff — but she won’t do it on a timetable set by student protesters.

Lynch, with the backing of the Waltham school’s board of trustees, sent a multipage letter to the campus community this weekend after meeting with students who have occupied the Bernstein-Marcus Administrative Center — which includes Lynch’s office. …

“The atmosphere described by our students is painful to hear and calls on all of us to address these issues,’’ Lynch wrote. In her letter, Lynch aligned herself broadly with the goal of increasing diversity at all levels of the university …

Also:

• After a 12-day sit-in, Brandeis commits to increasing applicants of color (now 17 percent) by 5 to 10 percentage points annually and to double underrepresented faculty members (5 percent in 2014) by 2021.

See also: Reaffirming and Accelerating Brandeis’ Commitment to Diversity, Inclusion, and Racial Justice and Statements of Support and Commitments to Action to Advance Diversity and Inclusion at Brandeis University by Department, School, and Program

Response to Brown University Demands:

On Monday, Nov. 16, … Concerned Graduate Students of Color at Brown University came together to publish a list of demands and request a written response from the administration within one week. The working draft of the Diversity and Inclusion Action Plan (DIAP) was released by President Christina Paxson’s office on Nov. 19, 2015. … We, Graduate Students of Color, reject this plan as a response to our demands.

The anticipated 10-year, $100 million investment in diversity and inclusion sounds impressive, but note that this is a mere 3 percent of Paxson’s new $3 billion Brown Together capital campaign.  …

See also Brown U releases $100 million plan to increase inclusivity, ; plan later increased to $165 million.

Also:

• Brown faculty vote on Feb. 2 that Columbus Day will be known as Indigenous People’s Day, prompted by students objecting: “We don’t celebrate genocide.”

Response to Claremont McKenna College Demands:

• Mary Spellman, dean of students at Claremont McKenna College in California, steps down after making a statement about students not fitting “our C.M.C. mold.”

Response to Dartmouth College Demands: (warning PDF)

… we write as members of the senior leadership of the College and people who care deeply about Dartmouth. We want to share a message with the community: we hear your concerns about ensuring that Dartmouth is not only diverse in numbers, but also a place where all community members thrive. …

We couldn’t agree with you more. Diversity is one of the cornerstones of our academic community and, like you, we want Dartmouth to be a campus where our students gain the confidence and skills to work and lead in a global society. … Recently, a presentation of the “Freedom Budget” document highlighted for us that we, as the administration, must engage the campus more effectively in current and future action to achieve our shared vision for Dartmouth …

• More than $30 million will be invested in the Society of Fellows program to bring recent post-doctorates to campus. Post-doctoral programs have been an effective tool for recruiting diverse faculty from other campuses. …
• The E.E. Just Program, which supports the academic success of under-represented students in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, will undergo a major expansion.
• The Office of the President is sponsoring a three-year program project to help make Dartmouth Outing Club activities accessible to students receiving financial aid.
• Dartmouth will provide $1 million in recurring funds to support the cost of hiring faculty who bring diverse perspectives to campus.

We can and will do more.

Response to Duke U Demands: (also PDF)

In response to student demands presented at the Duke Tomorrow forum Nov. 20, President Richard Brodhead sent an email last Tuesday to the students who organized the forum assuring them of his commitment to deal with the concerns they raised. … Brodhead’s email noted that the Task Force on Bias and Hate Issues will be responsible for considering many of the demands presented. He added that orientation programs and faculty diversity efforts—which were also included in the demands—are already in place.

“We look forward to working with all members of the Duke community to make the University a better place,” Brodhead wrote in the email.

Response to Emory Demands:

• Emory promises task force to “examine the feasibility of a geofence” to block the social media app Yik Yak in university ZIP codes to protect African-American students from what a black student group calls “intolerable and psychologically detrimental material.”

Response to Georgetown Demands:

• Mulledy Hall and McSherry Hall — named for Georgetown presidents who organized the sale of 272 slaves to settle university debts — are renamed. Students further demand the creation of an endowment, at the current value of the sale’s profit, to recruit “black identifying” professors.

Response to Harvard U Demands:

HLS seal re-designed by “Reclaiming HLS”

[Minow] has already taken several steps to respond to some of the student demands and formulated her own plans to improve race relations at the schools. She has appointed a committee to consider changing the school’s seal, which she said last Monday would require the Harvard Corporation’s approval; administrators have also said they will work to create a more diverse faculty and hire a staff member to focus on diversity issues. …

On Friday, however, Minow primarily watched and listened as students spoke. “Thinking, listening, thank you,” she said, after Leland S. Shelton, the president of the Harvard Black Law Students Association, reiterated each demand and asked if she was prepared to immediately agree to any of them. …

In an email sent to Law School affiliates on Friday, Minow wrote that she will carefully consider the student demands.

“I listened carefully,” Minow wrote. “I will do my best to ensure that we find ways to work together, joining students, staff, and faculty to address proposals and above all to strengthen this School and its possibilities to be better and to make the world better.”

Also:

College officials released the working group’s report Thursday. It included recommendations to diversify the College, and to support affinity-based students groups on campus and in multicultural centers, among others.

Harvard Law School has decided to officially chance the seal, though I don’t know yet what to.

Response to Ithaca College Demands:

• Thomas R. Rochon, president of Ithaca College, pens an opinion piece asserting college presidents should step up, not down; in January, he announces he will step down, effective next year.

Response to Johns Hopkins Demands: (also)

Called on to address the student’s demands, Daniels pointed to the new Faculty Diversity Initiative, a multimillion dollar effort designed to help each of the university’s divisions find, attract, and retain the most talented faculty representing a broad diversity of backgrounds and experiences. The effort, unveiled earlier Monday, has been in the works for more than a year.

In response to a question suggesting that the initiative could lead to more qualified candidates being passed over, Provost Robert C. Lieberman said: “I would very, very strongly resist the premise of your question, which is that sometimes diversity and excellence or standards are opposed to each other. They in fact reinforce each other, and we will only be excellent to the extent that we are diverse.”

Daniels pledged transparency on the topic in the form of a report on the composition of the faculty, to be issued every two years. He also announced plans to strengthen the university’s Center for Africana Studies with the addition of five new faculty members—two in the center, two in the Department of History, and one interdisciplinary scholar.

One of the students’ requests was for a mandatory cultural competency course for all undergraduates. Daniels said that a single course required for all students “goes against the grain of choice that is embedded in our curriculum,” but that “other approaches to that issue are on the table.” He said possibilities open to discussion include establishment of a distribution requirement, mandating that students choose from among a set of courses in which cultural differences are considered.

Daniels also backed establishing a comprehensive diversity training program for the faculty, staff, and all students. A pilot training program was implemented at student orientation this past fall, and a working group to develop training recommendations will be launched by the start of the spring semester.

Response to Missouri State U Demands (not to be confused with U Missouri):

The joint statement from MSU president Clif Smart and Board of Governors Chair Stephen Hoven explained ongoing efforts to increase diversity and inclusion, announced plans to expand multicultural programming and outlined numerous ways students can help shape decisions.

“Recently, a group of students took the time and initiative to remind us of our responsibility and commitment to provide you with an inclusive environment that fosters learning, growth and opportunity. Pointing to the ongoing challenges that our nation continues to face in terms of diversity and inclusion, these students have presented important questions, made requests, and asked that we stop what we are doing to listen and respond,” …  “We have stopped, we are listening and we offer this letter in another effort to address those concerns.” …

MSU officials, in the Tuesday statement, noted that improving diversity and inclusion has been a top priority in recent years and said that commitment will continue with three overarching goals:

• Expand diversity programs

• Increase enrollment and retention of diverse students from “underrepresented” backgrounds

• Expand the pool of diverse faculty and staff

The president of MSU is not-ironically named Clifton Smart III.

Response to NYU Demands:

???

Response to Oberlin Demands: (PDF)

• Oberlin dining services promises “culturally sensitive menus” after demands for more traditional foods, including fried chicken, at Afrikan Heritage House, and for more indigenous versions of General Tso’s chicken and banh mi. Oberlin president finds 14 pages of other “demands and not suggestions” (e.g., eliminate Western-centered course requirements) even less palatable. In January, he announces he won’t respond to them.

Dammed if you do, dammed if you don’t: one of the complaints protesters lodged against UC Irvine:

a. In 2011, to begin the Cross Cultural Center’s 28th annual Martin Luther King Jr. symposium, UCI’s Hospitality and Dining services served fried chicken and waffles in “honor” of the event.

I don’t think there’s any agreement on whether serving fried chicken is “culturally sensitive” or “horribly racist”–which I find especially weird because everyone in the South, white and black, eats fried chicken. Also, BBQ is totally better than fried chicken.

Response to Princeton Demands:

Last week, the president of Princeton University agreed to implement or consider the demands of student protesters who had taken over his office, including providing black students a cultural space on the Ivy League campus and initiating discussions about “cultural competency” training. Christopher Eisgruber also agreed to open a debate about Woodrow Wilson’s legacy at Princeton. …

Cecilia Rouse, the dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, welcomes the discussion. Rouse agrees that changing a name would be an easy thing to do, and that much more difficult challenges remain, such as how to develop a curriculum that is less focused on Europe, how to have course readings that are more reflective of the world, and how to ensure that faculty are comfortable talking about race.

Response to Tufts U Demands:

???

Response to UCLA Demands:

After heads rolled over a Kanye-Western themed frat party at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), several adjustments to the UCLA campus climate have been made, including suspension of the social groups that hosted the party for alleged “racist undertones” of their event.  …

On October 22, UCLA’s vice chancellor Janina Montero responded … that she is open to many of the ASU’s demands, including exclusive funding for the ASU, revision of the school’s anti-discrimination policies, an “Afro-house” for black students, a student advisory board for campus diversity, increased enrollment of black students, and creation of a Black Student Leadership Task Force. She also said that the chancellor has collaborated with the LAUSD to build the Horace Mann UCLA Community School in South Los Angeles.

Response to U of Kentucky Demands:

Each time our student passes the images on his way to class or a movie or a speaker, this student — one of us — must confront humiliating images that bear witness to how we still fall short of being citizens together in what Dr. King called the “beloved community.” And countless other current students, faculty, staff, prospective students and their families, and other visitors to our campus, endure the same pain when they walk into one of our University’s signature and busiest venues. Moreover, this is often the first exposure people have to our campus, our culture, and our values.

This cannot continue. In spite of the artist’s admirable, finely honed skill that gave life to the mural, we cannot allow it to stand alone, unanswered by and unaccountable to the evolutionary trajectory of our human understanding and our human spirit.

Before:

After: 

Both photos Credit Mark Cornelison/Lexington Herald-Leader

Response to U of Missouri Demands:

• Charged with a sluggish response to racist incidents, Timothy M. Wolfe and R. Bowen Loftin, top University of Missouri officials, cave when football players threaten to strike, raising the specter of a forfeit penalty of more than $1 million.

Response to Yale U Demands:

Yale President Plans ‘Significant Changes’ In Response To Student Demands

Declaring that there is still much “unfinished work,” Yale University President Peter Salovey Tuesday offered a detailed response to student demands in the wake of rising racial tensions on campus.

Salovey, under intense pressure from the Yale community, proposed “a structure to build a more inclusive Yale” that would add faculty, multicultural training for staff, expanded resources for cultural centers, enhanced financial aid for low-income students and creation of a “prominent university center” to address issues of race, ethnicity and social identity. He said these are “the central issues of our era.”

“I have heard the expressions of those who do not feel fully included at Yale, many of whom have described experiences of isolation, and even of hostility, during their time here,” Salovey said.

It is just so HAAAARD to be a student at Yale. WAH.

Also:

• Erika Christakis quits teaching at Yale, citing lack of “civil dialogue and open inquiry” after a brouhaha over her criticism of university guidelines on culturally sensitive Halloween costumes. …

• Yale promises to devote $50 million in resources over five years for faculty members “who would enrich diversity” (currently 6 percent are underrepresented minorities). …

(In the interim, three portraits of Calhoun are removed from the college.)

At Yale, a stained-glass window depicting John C. Calhoun has been altered to remove the image of a chained slave. Credit Andrew Sullivan for The New York Times

Finally:

• Harvard and Princeton drop the title of “master” — term dating to medieval universities — for heads of residential colleges; Yale is mulling the same.

The award for shortest list of demands goes to Ithaca College:

The resignation of College President Tom Rochon or for him to be removed from his position.

The award for longest list goes to UVA, which, at 6259 words, was twice as long as the second-longest list, and included demands such as:

Posters in First-Year dorms and on Stall Seat Journals, and other educational, promotional tools should focus on prejudice and oppression, and should offer examples of implicit biases in student-to-student, faculty-to-student interactions. and student-to-Charlottesville resident interactions. Student-run University agencies such as The Honor Committee and The Student Council should prioritize the creation of initiatives aimed towards engaging the student body in conversations surrounding race and inclusivity as elements of our University ideals. …

Students of the University of Virginia must be knowledgeable and conscious about the history of racial oppression and discrimination in the current and historic U.Va. and Charlottesville communities. …

[A mandatory course on the history of UVA] …

Every course should strive to recognize minority perspectives and every department should make it a goal to offer multiple courses that include or focus on minority perspectives within their field each semester. For example, Biology could study genetics across minority communities, …

O RLY.

Well, at least I got a good laugh out of this one.

Cathedral Round-Up #9 (and One year blog-a-versary): Vote Early and Vote Often

Hey, everybody, EvolutionistX is now one year old. *Clinks glasses* Here’s to another year!

While you celebrate, please nominate your favorite posts for inclusion in the “favorite posts” section, or suggest a topic for future posts!

Carrying on with our monthly Cathedral Roundup:

Even a critic as skeptical as Edward Said succumbs to the temptation of university, academic employment: the university’s self-legitimations stand unchallenged. … This synthesis of internal and external factors is such that university-based intellectuals are guaranteed autonomy (“specific context”) in the name of the intellectual reduced to a social agent who agrees with Enlightenment–“investigation” becomes social improvement (“promoting human community.” –Sande Cohen, Academia and the Luster of Capital

I have obtained a copy of the Harvard U. Board of Overseers 2016 election pamphlet. In case you haven’t been following Ivy League politics, Ron Unz of Unz Review fame and some other folks have gotten themselves onto the ballot via petition. Somewhat amusingly, theirs is the “free stuff and ethnic animosity” campaign, banking on Asians being pissed that Harvard (and other schools) discriminates against them for doing too well on the SAT. This position is controversial because not-discriminating against Asians might mean taking fewer blacks and Hispanics who are currently being accepted on “soft” criteria rather than top SAT scores.

You have until May 20 to get your vote in (if you’re a Harvard alum and believe in voting,) so let’s see who’s running.

Eight of the candidates have been proposed by the Harvard Alumni Association Nominating Committee. Five candidates were nominated by petition, and are so identified. … The order of the candidates in each category is determined by lot.

The slate of candidates nominated by the Harvard Alumni Association is half male and half female; ethnically it is 3/4s white, with one black and one Asian candidate (based on black and white headshots). The nominated by petition slate is all male, 2/5s Asian and 3/5s white. (I’m not totally sure about Unz’s ethnicity, but I’m guessing white.)

We’ll start with the Alumni Association nominees.

Kent Walker:

… believes that the breadth of Harvard’s academic excellence uniquely positions it to have an influence far beyond its gates. … “I hope the University will continue its great tradition of integrating discoveries in science and technology, advances in the social sciences, and insights from the humanities to inspire change around the world.” … He has a special interest in global humanitarian and refugee programs. He is active with the International Rescue Committee and Save the Children, and he advises the Mercy Corps Social Venture Fund.”

Ketanji Jackson:

… is a federal judge who serves on the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. She was nominated for this lifetime position by President Barack Obama and confirmed by the U.S. Senate in 2013. As a judge, she has a particular interest in criminal justice and sentencing policy, having served a a vice chair and commissioner of the U.S. Sentencing Commission and as an assistant federal public defender in D.C.

Helena Foulkes:

“I would be honored to contribute whatever I can to Harvard’s immensely important role in improving the health and well-being of people around the world. And I’d value the chance to help encourage students, whatever their career paths, to focus on not just doing well but doing good.”

One of the side effects of spending much of your spare time trying to refine your writing abilities is that you become hyper-sensitive to minor glitches in other peoples’ writing that normal folks probably don’t even notice–like the 11 unnecessary words in Mrs. Foulkes’s two sentences.

John Moon:

…whose parents immigrated to the U.S. from Korea, experienced firsthand the benefits of education, and he views educational access as a key to opportunity for others.

(As opposed to everyone else in the country, who didn’t get educations?)

“I would like to help ensure that Harvard remain a world-class educational and research institution that continues to lead globally. Equally important, Harvard should not only remain open to but actively seek out a diverse student body at the College and its graduate schools.”

Harvard is… already doing this. But I like to imagine he’s a stealth Free Harvard, Fair Harvard candidate.

Alejandro Magana:

“I hope to bring a continued international approach to the Board of Overseers, building on Havard’s status as a genuinely international institution, mindful that we continue to attract the most promising students and scholars from around the world and that we continue to encourage truly responsible global citizens.”

Damian Woetzel:

… former principal dancer with NYC Ballet, has combined his creative passion with his master’s in public administration from Harvard Kennedy School to become a leader, public advocate, and activist for the arts.

“The arts are an essential element in education at every level. At a time when universities face pressures to focus on specialized job skill, Harvard is committed to the full range of liberal arts education. As an Overseer, I would relish the opportunity to draw on my national work engaging the arts in society, to focus on Harvard as a leader and model for the value of arts in the university environment.”

He is the artistic director of the Vail International Dance Festival.

Karen Green:

“My experiences at Harvard literally transformed me.”

I hope she became a butterfly.

“Learning experiences inside and outside the classroom caused me to adopt a much larger worldview and fostered in me a love–not only for lifelong learning, but also for Harvard.”

Darn.

At least her goals are unobjectionable:

“I wold like to work to ensure that Harvard continues to attract the very best students, regardless of their economic circumstances, and remain accessible and affordable to students of modest means.”

P. Lansdale:

… has dedicated her social science career to enhancing the lives of children through teaching and mentoring, research, and translating research into policy and practice. Much of her work addresses family strengths that lead to children’s positive social and educational outcomes in the context of economic hardship. …

“I believe strongly in addressing equity and inclusion, and in building diverse communities that thrive while simultaneously exploring new knowledge and debating various perspectives.”

“simultaneously exploring new knowledge and debating various perspectives.”

Wow. For writing a sentence that terrible, she gets to be my least favorite.

On to the Free Harvard/Fair Harvard petition slate!

First we have Ralph Nader, who was a surprise to me:

“Even with restrictions on portions of its $38 billion endowment, Harvard is easily capable of ending net tuition at the undergraduate level and setting an example for other well-endowed Universities.” …

As an advocate, author and organizer, he has been responsible for starting many enduring civic groups, including Public Citizen, Center for Study of Responsive Law, Center for Auto Safety and the student public interest groups in many states.

He has been instrumental in the passage of numerous health, safety, water pollution, air pollution and product safety laws and agencies, along with the Occupational Health and Safety Act of 1970 and the historic Freedom of Information act of 1974.

(So how did Nader get involved in all of this?)

Stephen Hsu:

His research areas include quantum field theory, cosmology, and computational genomics. … “As a scientist, university administrator, and technology entrepreneur, I believe I have unique insight into the challenges facing modern research universities.”

Ron Unz:

“Its 38 BILLION endowment has transformed Harvard into one of the world’s largest hedge funds, with tax-exempt annual income twenty-five times greater than net college tuition revenue. Forcing families to pay tuition to a giant hedge fund is unconscionable.”

Unz is trying to play the moral highground card, but does it work? Sure, it seems wrong for Harvard to charge tuition from students who are much poorer than it is, but on the other hand, Harvard is a private institution, not a charity, and can do what it wants. Harvard’s house, Harvard’s rules.

Stuart Taylor:

“My recent work has explored the unnecessary secrecy and unfairness of the higher education admissions process, as well as the decline of of ideological diversity on faculties.” …

Taylor has coauthored two books… Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Fraud. [and] … Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It.

Lee Cheng:

“…I support affirmative action, but oppose discrimination. I believe that the University can only become truly diverse, and truly inclusive, by becoming completely transparent about admissions criteria and practices. More transparency has always improved and increased access for the underprivileged.”

… He is known for wiping out “patent trolls.” …

He is married and has 3 children… who will all be identified as ethnically Asian when they apply to college.

The pamphlet also gives us a breakdown of the occupations of the current Board of Overseers: 1 writer (NY Times); 1 lawyer; 4 government (mostly judges); 7 educators (mostly professors); 10 in business and finance; and 7 in non-profits that look a lot like the B&F positions.

Ethnic breakdown of current set based on b&w pictures: 20 white, 10 non-white–4 black, 1 Hispanic?, 3 east Asian, and 2 Indian. 14 men, 16 women.

To be honest, I don’t know how much power the Board of Overseers has to do anything, but the petition is an interesting attempt at a power grab, especially as it rides on the complaint, felt by at least some Asians, that one ethnic minority is being mistreated in order to favor other ethnic minorities.

I think the Republicans had been hoping (before Trump entered the primary race) to capture the Hispanic vote (which is why two of their primary candidates were Hispanics and a third is prominently married to a Hispanic,) in much the same way that the Democrats have captured the black vote. The problem with this strategy, obviously, is that not only is the Republican establishment having a really hard time out-competing the Democrats on “being welcome to Mexican immigrants,” but the rest of the Republican voters want nothing to do with such an agenda.

This leaves me to wonder if there is yet an opportunity for Republicans to ally with Asians (and Indians) who could be convinced that the Democrats are favoring blacks and Hispanics at their expense. Or will that, too, fall flat?

Quick thoughts on the “replication crisis” and calls to make the field more mathematically rigorous

If you aren’t familiar with the “replication crisis,” in social psychology, start here, here, and here.

I consider the courses I took in college on quantitative and qualitative methods the most important of my undergraduate years. I learned thereby a great many important things about how not to conduct an experiment and how to think about experimental methodology (not to mention statistics.)

If I were putting together a list of “general education” requirements I wanted all students to to take in order to declare them well-educated and ready to go out into the world, it’d be a course on Quantitative and Qualitative Methods. (Much like current “gen ed” and “distribution requirements,” the level of mathematical ability required would likely vary by field, though no one should be obtaining a college degree without some degree of numerical competence.)

But the real problem with the social science fields is not lack of rigorous statistical background, but overwhelming ideological conformity, enforced by the elders of the fields–advisers, hiring committees, textbook writers, journal editors, etc., who all believe in the same ideology and so have come to see their field as “proving” their ideology.

Ideology drives both the publication biases and the wishful thinking that underlie this crisis. For example, everyone in “Women’s studies” is a feminist who believes that “science” proves that women are oppressed because everyone they know has done studies “proving” it. You’re not going to find a lot of Women’s Studies professors aiming for tenure on the basis of their successful publication of a bunch of studies that failed to find any evidence of bias against women. Findings like that => no publication => no tenure. And besides, feminist professors see it as their moral duty to prove that discrimination exists, not to waste their time on studies that just happened not to be good enough to find the effect.

In the Social Sciences more generally, we get this “post modern” mish-mash of everything from Marxists to Freudians to folks who like Foucault and Said, where the goal is to mush up long-winded descriptions of otherwise simple phenomena into endless Chomsky Sentences.

(Just reading the Wikipedia pages on a variety of Social Science oriented topics reveals how very little real research or knowledge is generated in these fields, and how much is based on individual theorists’ personal views. It is often obvious that virtually anyone not long steeped in the academic literature of these fields would not come up with these theories, but with something far more mundane and sensible. Economists, for all their political bias, at least provide a counterpoint to many of these theories.)

Obviously different fields study different aspects of phenomena, but entire fields should not become reduced to trying to prove one political ideology or another. If they are, they should label themselves explicitly, rather than make a pretense of neutrality.

When ideology rather than correctness become the standard for publication (not to mention hiring and tenure,) the natural result is incorrectness.

More statistical knowledge is not, by itself, going to resolve the problem. The fields must first recognize that they have an ideological bias problem, and then work to remedy it by letting in and publishing work by researchers outside the social science ideological mainstream. It is very easy to think your ideas sound rigorous when you are only debating with people who already agree with you; it is much more difficult to defend your views against people who disagree, or come from very different intellectual backgrounds.

They could start with–hahahaha–letting in a Republican.

Cathedral Round Up #8: history edition

My dear friends, this month I happened, to my delight, upon A Chronology of Stanford University and its Founders (which is only 16 cents on Amazon.)

The really interesting parts are in the 1960s and early 70s, but for completeness’s sake, I have quoted interesting bits that both before and after.

Since this post is quote heavy, from here on out, assume that everything that is not in [brackets] is a quote (and the bold is all mine; I have abbreviated some obvious words, like “U” for “university.”)

[The Early Years]

May 10, 1869: Last Spike Ceremony: Central Pacific Railroad President Leland Stanford drives the gold spike ant Promontory, Utah, to connect ceremonially the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads, North America’s first transcontinental railroad.

October 1, 1891: The university opens as a coeducational institution charging no tuition, with 15 faculty. … At the end of the academic year (May 1892), the number of students has grown to 555… Female students initially make up about 20 percent of the student body, an unprecedented 25 percent majoring in sciences (compared to 4 percent nationally.) The student body is drawn from across the country, although two-thirds are from CA and much of the rest from Western and Midwestern states; 12 foreign students, largely from Japan and Canada, also attend.

[Today, it costs about $130,000 to get a degree from Stanford, (not counting room and board, which wasn’t free in 1891, either,) though there is, of course, financial aid.]

Early Academic Policies: … equally controversial is the university’s first effort at affirmative action: 147 “special” or probationary students–those applicants who did not meet minimum entrance requirements–make up nearly 25% f the first year’s student body. … Aimed at older, working students who did not have the opportunity to attend qualified highschools or afford tutoring, this category had been successfully, if more modestly, used at the U of C for “mature” students, usually over 21. … (The graduation rate of this first group of specials is 17%; by comparison, that of the class of 1895 is 54%.)

May 31, 1899: …Jane Stanford limits the number of female students who may enroll at one time to 500. Women are entering American colleges in record numbers during the 1890s. Female enrollment at Stanford has risen from 25% of the student body to more than 40% in eight years, fueling public debate regarding the comparative purposes of women’s and men’s education. … The 500 limit is first reached in 1903…

[See May 11, 1933]

[There is an interesting dispute over academic freedom in the early 1900s that ends with a number of professors resigning and the beginnings of the tenure system.]

Spring, 1904: The growing number of Japanese students–five in 1891, 19 in 1900–results in establishment of a Japanese Student Association. … The first foreign student to complete a Stanford degree was Keinosuke Otaki of Tokyo, who graduated with a bachelor’s degree in zoology in 1894.

[I wish I could reproduce for you the photos of Jane Stanford posing with the sphinx and visiting alumni in Japan. (Alas, I cannot reproduce any of the photos for you.)]

February 5, 1908: A drunken student returns to Palo Alto from a Menlo Park saloon, enters the wrong house and, thought to be a burglar, is shot and killed. This prompts the Academic Council on Feb. 14 to unanimously adopt a resolution to ban liquor from Encina Hall, fraternity houses, and other student residences, and to expel students guilty of drunkenness. In Stanford’s first major student demonstration, several hundred students march to the house of the chairman of the Committee on Student Affairs…

March, 1909: Anti-liquor law passed… that forbids the sale of alcohol within a mile and a half of the boundaries of Stanford U and the U of C, after local citizens complain strongly of many students’ excessive drinking and their disorderly conduct. …. Little attention is paid to the law by student, saloon keepers, or city supervisors, and drinking in dorms and fraternities continues…

Fall, 1910: Mosher studies women’s sexuality: … Her 28 year research of 45 women remains unpublished until Prof Carl Degler features her results in his important 1973 article on Victorian women.

[Stanford abandons its founder’s vision]

Lewis M. Terman joins the Education Department, where he will develop the Stanford-Benet IQ Test. In 1916, Terman publishes The Measurement of Intelligence.

October 29, 1911: Herbert Hoover elected to Board of Trustees… He spends the following months studying g academic, financial, and administrative conditions at Stanford and in a long memorandum the following January warns that the university is lagging behind. Over the next two years, he fosters dramatic improvement in faculty salaries, both to attract eminent senior faculty and encourage current professors, recommends strengthening existing departments, instigates changes in the university’s financial management, and promotes a campus building boom.

May 23, 1913: David Starr Jordan steps down from the presidency and is named chancellor of the university by the Board of Trustees. The reassignment is the brain-child of Herbert Hoover. It allows Jordan, hesitant to retire, to honorably give up administrative responsibilities without diminution of salary.

October 13, 1915: Wilbur appointed third president… declines to wear academic robes as too elitist.

September, 1916: Fraternity reform: Twice as many students live in fraternities and sororities as in campus dormitories and off-campus housing. … members of Stanford’s 24 fraternities are consistently in the bottom third of scholarship lists (along with varsity football and baseball players, who are often fraternity members.)

May, 1917: War-time commencement… An estimated 90 faculty serve in the Palo Alto area and overseas in Red Cross work, famine relief, o military service. An initial enrollment of 250 students in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps unit, organized in September 1916, jumps to 850 by this spring semester and is ranked among the top 10 in the country.

June, 1918: … in 1921, President Wilbur reports that 3,393 Stanford men and women … served during the war in US and foreign service or war-related civilian posts, and that 77 were killed.

December, 1919: Future Nobel Laureate John Steinbeck… receives a “C” in freshman English. … He drops out in 192, re-enters as a journalism major in 1923, and drops out again in 1925.

January 1, 1920: Undergraduate tuition starts… $40 per quarter. Herbert Hoover, returning to national acclaim from his European food relief work, leads the board in pushing through this break with the founder’s intention of a tuition-free education, at the October 1919 meeting. … Students unable to pay are offered an alternative of seven-year interest-bearing notes. Mot of the tuition income is immediately passed along in across–the-board pay increases for the faculty. Two years later, tuition goes from $40 to $75 per quarter.

Summer, 1921: Lewis M. Terman begins his lifelong study of 1,528 gifted children. Terman began investigation so f gifted children in 1904 when he encountered the theory that exceptionally bright children might suffer  physical or mental illness or social maladjustment. The children chosen… have IQs ranging from 135 to 200. … The longest psychological study ever conducted, the project produces evidence that exceptionally intelligent children grow up to be more successful, better satisfied, and more productive than average people. However, the gifted eventually seem to have a many emotional difficulties as the rest of the population. The work continues, now in its ninth decade, under the direction of Albert Hastorf,… professor emeritus of psychology.

Fall, 1923: Beginnings of Western Civ: “Problems of Citizenship,” a course required for freshmen and taught by various faculty members as a team, is inaugurated… it is designed to examine the “fundamental political, social, and economic problems of the American people” In 1935 it will evolve into “History of Western Civilization.”

April, 1924: Beginning with fall quarter, all applicants will have to … achieve a satisfactory score on a supplement examination (“intelligence test”).

[Science and War]

August, 1926: Aeronautics Laboratory… Important aerodynamic research is carried out int he 1930s and into the war years. In summer 1939, Charles Lindbergh pays a secret visit to campus to inspect the research work…

September 17:  High-voltage laboratory is dedicated. … Ryan later helps solve the problem of transmitting large amounts of power from Hoover Dam to Los Angeles.

March 4, 1929: Hoover asks university President Ray Lyman Wilbur to join him as secretary of the interior; the trustees grant Wilbur a one-year of absence with pay.

October, 1930: Tuition is raised $25 to $100 per quarter.

October, 1932: Sheep sold: The Board of Athletic Control sells its 300 sheep… Billy McClintock, the Scotsman who herded the university’s sheep in Highland style for 30 years, is too ill to carry on. The athletic fields now will be clipped using lawn tractors.

May 11, 1933: 500 Limit removed … “For over 30 years the most outstanding handicap in the operation of Stanford University has been the limitation on women to 500…” By fall 1932, women account for only 14% of the total–a situation generating anger and ill will. … Every year since 1929, total enrollment–and tuition income–has fallen, even while qualified women are turned away. … Three hundred additional women enroll in fall 1933.

April 1, 1934: physicist Felix Block comes to Stanford from Switzerland. In the late 1930s, he begins research on “nuclear induction”… After WWII, Bloch and his Stanford colleague William W. Hansen devise ways to detect nuclear magnetic resonance. [Later renamed MRI]

March, 1937: Collaboration begins between the brothers Russell and Sigurd Varian and physics Prof. William W. Hansen that leads to the invention of the klystron microwave tube… The klystron tube makes airborne radar feasible and proves essential to Britain’s defense against threatened German invasion during WWII. Later, the klystron tube become a cornerstone for microwave research and an important device for the construction of various high-energy particle accelerators… including the two-mile Stanford Linear Accelerator.

April 7, 1937: Peace Day: In a later student survey, more than 92% at Stanford oppose armed assistance to France and England; however, 54% favor economic aid in the event of a war with the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis.

[Then there is a bunch of stuff about WWII, which is interesting but predictable. A bunch of students go to war, a bunch of professors do war-related research, and all of the Japanese students and professors are sent to internment camps. Many soldiers on campus.]

April 20, 1944: Sororities disbanded. … The ban has been approved by female students following complaints that sorority rush is undemocratic.

July 2, 1944: Because of the war, less than half those scheduled to receive degrees are on hand for commencement… Not a single graduate of the Medical School appears for the ceremony.

[The Cold War]

January, 1946: Peacetime registration figures break an all-time record when 4,464 students enroll winter quarter. Of those 1,382 are veterans using the GI Bill of Rights. Spring quarter enrollment rises to 5,028, including 1,950 veterans; enrollment soars fall quarter, when 7,244 students appear, including 4,047 veterans. President Tresidder reports that the vets display “a seriousness of purpose” and maintain higher scholarship records than the general average.

July 15, 1952: … a compact six-million-volt machine is developed on campus to shoot X-rays at deep-seated cancer tissue. … on Jan. 11, 1957, 2-year-old Gordon Isaacs, whose left-eye vision is threatened by retinoblastoma, a form of cancer, is the first patient to be treated successfully with the medical linear accelerator.

March, 1953: Computation Center launched: a high-speed electronic calculator is installed on campus. … The IBM Card Programmed Calculator, with auxiliary equipment for handling punched cards, will perform large computation jobs that take too long using desk calculating machines. It can store 16 words in its electromechanical memory… Stanford’s first real compute, an IBM 650, is installed in 1956. It holds 2,000 words in its drum memory’ in several years it is supplemented with a Burroughs 220. In 1963, the university acquires an IBM 7094 and Burroughs B5000.

August 22, 1955: McCarthyism hits Stanford: … a conservative syndicated radio commentator uses his nationwide broadcast to launch an attack on the university. His object is the impending appointment to the law faculty of Herbert Packer, recruited by law Dean Carl Spaeth to conduct a study of the testimony of important witnesses in judicial and legislative inquiries into communist activities in the US. … Facing threats of mass resignation by young law faculty members, President Sterling overrides vocal right-wing objections to Packer’s appointment… Packer… spend the next six years assembling and analyzing more than 200,000 pages of testimony from congressional investigations, administrative hearings, and court cases. His book… “a thoughtful, balanced study of the testimony given by a group of ex-communist witnesses…” As such “it failed to satisfy extremists of the right or left.”

February, 1956: Alexander Kerensky, briefly Premier of Russia before his gov’t was overthrown by the Bolsheviks in 1917, accepts a position as research associate at the Hoover Institution.

May: Construction is under way on a radio telescope… it consist of 32 parabolic antennas–10-foot diameter aluminum dishes–to study the sun’s surface and map its temperatures, which it does daily for 11 years after it is completed in 1959.

November 1: Shockley wins Nobel Prize

Spring, 1957:The Interfraternity Council unanimously passes a resolution opposing racial and religious discrimination clauses contained in the national charters of 13 of their 24 parent organizations.

November: At the Hoover Institution, wire and lead seals are broken on 16 wooden boxes stored for 31 years. Inside are the Paris embassy office files of the Russian czar’s  imperial secret police. Basil Maklakoff, last pre-communist ambassador to France, signed a statement that he had burned the files. Instead he hid them and in 1926 shipped them to the Hoover War Library.

May 14, 1959: To the surprise and delight of Stanford scientists, President Dwight Eisenhower announces at a gathering of the nation’s top scientists and industrialists in NYC that he supports Stanford’s proposal to build the world’s largest and most powerful atom smasher. [the SLAC]

August 4: Stanford announces that a 150-foot dish antenna–to be the nation’s largest radio telescope–will be built… the huge parabolic reflector “ear “plus the powerful radio transmitter to be built next to it, is designed to detect nuclear bomb blasts in the atmosphere.

[The 60s begin]

January 7, 1960: Nuclear reactor unveiled … In 1974, the operation is shut down and fuel rods removed. … It is dismantled in 1988.

April 1: President Sterling presides at the opening of the Stanford Center for Japanese Studies in Tokyo.

November 16: Russian-born professor of economics, Paul A. Baran, an avowed Marxist, causes quite a stir when, after at three-week visit to Cuba, he tells students and press at Cubberly Auditorium that “Castro is one of the great men of this century.” Hostile alumni letters soon pour in, threatening to stop donations unless Baran is fired. President Sterling responds… “Professor Baran does not speak for Stanford University. … A university is, and must be, hospitable to differing points of view, just as a free society has the obligation of respecting a man’s right to speak.”

March 6, 1961: Fraternities fight religious, racial discrimination: ATO has its charter rescinded by the national because it pledges four men of Jewish faith. … in 1963, Sigma Nu, frustrated in its two-year effort to end discriminatory racial clauses at the national level, vote unanimously to become a local fraternity, Beta Chi. In April 1965, Sigma Chi is suspended for one year by its national organization after pledging a black student. In November 1966, the Stanford chapter votes unanimously to sever ties with its national… In 1967, Kappa Sigma is suspended by its national, two years after it pledges a black student.

[Interestingly, I have not noticed any account of the first black student at Stanford. Given that Mr. Stanford stumped for Abraham Lincoln and included women and Japanese in the opening class, I suspect Stanford was always open to blacks, though there may not have been many in the area in 1890s.]

September, 1962: John McCarthy, who coined the term “artificial intelligence” to describe his efforts to make computers simulate human thought processes, joins the faculty… He soon creates the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

April 1, 1963: Black and yellow civil defense signs are posted on campus identifying basement areas that are newly stocked as nuclear fallout shelters. This act, inspired by the Soviet missile crisis in Cuba, touches off the first major postwar political protest on campus, including a peaceful 24-hour vigil outside President Sterling’s home and office.

May 6: University Trustees reject gift offers from two individuals who stipulate that their use would be later designated or approved by directors of the Winds of Freedom Foundation, a conservative group that wants to “underwrite the work of distinguished faculty members who are not enamored of socialism.” In February 1964, trustees reject $35,000 offered by the foundation for a visiting professor in either economics or political science from a list of candidates it would provide. … Organized as a nonprofit CA corporation in July 1962, the foundation notes in its literature that its “prime purpose… is to aggregate funds for gift to Stanford.” … Trustees say they will not surrender authority for solicitation and acceptance of gifts and termination of their use.

Summer: A Stanford-in-Washington summer internship program is launched… In the next three years, more than 100 students land summer positions in congressional offices and federal agencies.

Fall: … Allard Lowenstein, former assistant dean of men, and a dozen students travel to Mississippi at their own expense to help local blacks stage a mock election. Among the students are Dennis Sweeney,  leader of a new campus political organization called the Student Congress…  Ten Stanford faculty and 40 student volunteers, the largest group from any university, spend summer 1964 in Mississippi helping blacks register to vote. Sweeney nearly escapes death when the “freedom house” he occupies in McComb is bombed on June 21. A draft resister, he later becomes a paranoid schizophrenic. On May 14, 1980, he murders Lowenstein in his New York Office.

[November 22nd, 1963: Kennedy assassinated]

April 23, 1964 In the fist of two campus speeches, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. asks an overflow crowds at Memorial Auditorium for help: “In the Mississippi power structure, justice has no meaning… Civil rights issues cannot be resolved from within the state’ help must come from the outside.”

November 30: President Sterling appoints a faculty-administration committee on educational opportunities for disadvantaged minorities to explore ways the university could be useful in promoting opportunities for African Americans and other minority groups.

February 12, 1965: Anti-Vietnam protest: Faculty and students express opposition to American involvement in Vietnam, beginning with a combined faculty-student rally of 400.

April: In Loco Parentis fading: Full confidence in the “maturity and good judgment” of coeds prompts the university to liberalize social regulations for women.

December: The Stanford Sexual Rights Forum registers as a voluntary student organization, the earliest known student group nationally to advocate civil rights for homosexuals.

January 31, 1966: Vietnam protesters at a noon rally call for a university-wide strike, but only a small number of professors cancel classes. In the evening, more than 700 stage a torchlight parade from Cubberly Auditorium to downtown Palo Alto. In April, 135 donors volunteer to donate blood “in physical and moral support” of the Vietnam War effort.

April: Prof. Hugh McDevitt and his group discover that genes responsible for regulating immune response to infection are clustered together on one chromosome in mice and are linked to those responsible for destroying tissue grafts.

May 19-21: President’s Office sit-in: What start as a protest against university involvement in Selective Service testing that could affect student draft deferments, broadens into a challenge against faculty and administrative decision-making. Fifteen students begin a three-day occupation of the reception area in the President’s Office. Thirty-six students later are charged with violating the Fundamental Standard and are placed on probation for a year.

January, 1967: Women demand off-campus option: Challenging the university’s practice of in loco parentis, approximately 350 women students delay payment of room and board bills as a demand for the option of junior and senior women to live off campus.

January: Coeducational housing begins on campus. … Experts predict that coed housing will transform the traditional dating-mating game, as men and women begin to regard each other more like brothers and sisters.

January 12: Student body President David Harris, a veteran civil rights worker and outspoken critic of the Vietnam War and the draft, tells a rally of 400 that he will go to jail rather than accept military service.

April 13: About 400 attend an anti-war rally sponsored by students for a Democratic Society, after which 150 march to the Stanford research Institute to protest weapons and chemical warfare research. …

November 1: Students protest CIA, Vietnam…. temporarily blocking access to Encina Hall’s west wing, where interviews are scheduled. The university starts judicial against against 10 demonstrators. Two weeks later, 2,000 conduct an all0night vigil for peace…

April 2, 1968: Blacks, Mexican-Americans, and other minority students should have priority in obtaining financial aid, an interim committee report… recommends.  … The committee reports that recruitment efforts in recent years have produced an increase in applications from African-Americans: 154 applied for the freshman class entering in 1968, compared to six for the class entering in 1960. [71 are admitted in 68, compared to 3 in 60.]

April 5: An overflowing crowd of 2,400 attends a noon service in Memorial Church for civil rights leader MLK Jr. … 400 attend a BSU-sponsored rally during which an American flag is burned. … more than 2,000 members of the Palo Alto and East Palo Alto communities stage a silent walk from downtown PA to the steps of the Quad…

April 8: Blacks demand increased enrollment … The demands include proportional representation of minority groups in the freshman class of 1969-70  and a role for black students in decisions on minority recruiting and admissions. … Provost Lyman and President Sterling issue a statement committing the U to try to double minority enrollment … by 1970 … The U will start a pilot admission program for at least 10 minority student who do not meet present admissions standards. During an April 9 session, … a group of faculty and administrators say the U will hire an admissions officer concerned with minority student recruitment, conduct a  fundraising drive for expanded financial aid for minority students, and encourage recruitment of minority faculty and staff members.

April 11: BSU leaders emerge from a two-hour meeting with administrators declaring, “They have met our demands.” … “Race relations in America are so serious that every institution must do whatever it can to help,” Lyman says, “Ours is the one society on the face of the earth where a reconciliation of the races can take place on a sufficiently large scale to teach its lessons to the world.” Faculty and staff establish a MLK Memorial fund three days after the assassination. By the end of May, it is at $50,000…

May 6: Protest against student suspensions

May 7: Arson destroys ROTC building… This is the second fire at the building; it was damaged by arson in March.

May 8: [Committee decides not to suspend students for protesting against the CIA.]

May 16: Students oppose sit-ins.

July 5: Arson destroys the office of President Sterling… causes an estimated $300,000 in damage.

July 8: The Population Bomb is published.

August 19: Kenneth Pitzer appointed president… Student body president Denis Hayes expresses “grave reservations” about Pitzer’s appointment, but later says it would, “in effect destroy this university” to try to stop it. He says he is convinced “a president can be educated by the students.”

November: The Mexican-American Student Confederation at Stanford “strongly requests” that the university admit 100 new Mexican-American students… Enrollment… currently stands at 57. With an intensive five-state recruitment program, the results for fall 1969 pass the goal when 75 freshmen, 20 transfer students, and 30 to 40 graduate students bring the campus Chicano total to nearly 200.

January, 1969: African and Afro-American Studies launched.

January 14: Students invade Trustee Meeting… demanding that Stanford “halt all economic and military operation and projects concerned with Southeast Asia.”

January 29: Conservatives disrupt radicals

February 11: ROTC credit dropped … by a 3-2 majority, [students] favor ROTC on campus… In April the full faculty votes 403 to 356 to end ROTC academic credit … because appointment of teachers and course content are not subject to usual university controls.

April 3: April 3rd Movement born: at a mass meeting… students formulate demand to end classified research and war–related research on campus, stopping chemical-biological warfare and counter-insurgency studies at the SRI…

April 9: Protesters close electronics lab: Several hundred A3M protesters occupy the Applied Electronic s Laboratory… disrupting its operations for nine days.  On April 14, 100 students … stage a counter-demonstration…

April 30: Protesters occupy Encina Hall… around 1 am they scuffle with 30 conservative students who are blocking the door, but about 200 break into the building… Faculty observes say they see numerous incidents of students removing file. University payroll records are ransacked. Provost Lyman summons sheriff’s deputies…

May 13: Trustees sever ties with Stanford Research Institute

October 15: … more than 8,000 take part in the Vietnam Moratorium, calling for an immediate end to the war.

October 30: Budget problems… The biggest single factor slowing the U’s fiscal growth is the decline in federally sponsored research.

November 11: Board of Trustees expands… The change follows recommendation that the board should be more representative of society–professionally, politically, geographically and in age distribution.

March 30, 1970: limited credit for ROTC

April: Crowds of students, including many highschoolers, resort to violence to protest the continued presence of ROTC on campus. A crowd of about 300 roams the campus night after night in early April, smashing windows. …

April 24: Several hours after the Old Union sit-in ends, arson … destroys the life work of several prominent scholars, including Prof. M. N. Srinivas, India’s leading social scientist, who loses 22 years’ worth of research material about caste systems in India.

[Noooooooooo.]

April 29: Cambodia invasion protested… a day-long sit-in at the Old Union erupts into a rock-throwing, club-wielding battle between several hundred students and more than 250 police.

April 30: ROTC, Cambodia protest… demonstrators demanding immediate elimination of ROTC battle police… Property damage for the moth is estimated at $100,000, with 73 injuries in the past two nights.

May 1: Campus turmoil… hundreds of protesters block entrances to Encina Hall… three shotgun blasts are fired into the campus home of the Army ROTC commander. No one is hurt.

May 3: Nonviolent strike. … continues all week.

May 7: Senate ends ROTC credit.

May 18: … entrances to the Athletics/ROTC building continue to be blocked 10 hours a day. … a band of about 75 demonstrators moves swiftly across campus, tossing rocks through windows of the Athletics/ROTC building, aeronautics and astronautics, the Hoover Institution, and smaller buildings.

June 4: Faculty bars future ROTC enrollment

June 25: [President Pitzer gets the hell out of there.]

September: An intensive recruiting effort has led to enrollment of 23 native Americans in the freshman class. … By fall 1973, the number increases to 57 undergraduates and 22 grad students.

January, 1971: More than 200 students register for a new course on “Problems of Arms Control and Disarmament”

January 11: Henry Cabot Lodge speech disrupted

February 10: Students seize computation center… Photographers are banned from the building and a Viet Cong flag is posted overhead. … Assoc. Prof. Franklin calls for a “people’s war” in the face of an “occupation army” of police. … the 16 year old son of a professor is shot in the right thigh while standing near the headquarters of the Free Campus Movement (FCM). Earlier, eight FCM members who watched the Old Union rally were assaulted as they walked across White Plaza.

[I think FCM is a conservative organization.]

February 12: Assoc. Prof. Franklin suspended.

April 9: Hospital sit-in turns violent: Police end a 30-hour sit-in at the hospital administration offices, arresting 23 of more than 50 demonstrators who cause $100,000 damage protesting the firing of a black employee. Fewer than half those arrested are associated with the U.

April 12: Police search the Stanford Daily... it is the first known use of a search warrant in an American newspaper office. … During the 12 years following the Daily search, based on this precedent, police conduct at least 63 searches nationwide of journalists, lawyers, doctors, and psychotherapists who are not suspects.

April 21: Demands to end war

April 23: A bomb planted at the President’s Office explodes in the early morning hours, causing $25,000 damage to the roof, attic, and second floor. … Three days later, an arson fire guts the Juniper Lounge… frequently used for meeting by the BSU.

May: The Board of Trustees… urges General Motors to try to improve conditions for nonwhites n South Africa.

August 15: [Prof Philip Zimbardo’s “Prison Experiment”]

[I admit, I laughed at the juxtaposition of the Prison Experiment and all of the other craziness. It’s a pity no one’s replicated it on a calm campus.]

January 5, 1972: [Assoc. Prof] Franklin fired… Following the Advisory Board’s decision, Franklin holds a press conference, expressing hope there will be more violence on campus… His wife, Jane, stands at his side holding a carbine she says is unloaded. … After leaving Stanford, Franklin is appointed to the Rutgers faculty.

March 2: Indian Mascot discontinued. … Timm Williams, a Yurok from Northern CA, dances as the band mascot the U forces him to stop after it discontinues the Indian mascot in 1972.

[He had danced with he band for 20 years, but no details are given on the “forcing.”]

April 20: More antiwar protests… About 100 police repeatedly charge the group at El Camino and Embarcadero, arresting 205 who block traffic.

May 9: War protests… Former Assoc. Prof Franklin urges the crowds to “take the Old Union and the placement center… and move from there to shut down the university.”

June 7: A nighttime fire, thought by many to be arson, causes $1 million damage to Encina Hall, the U’s main administration building. … In the previous four years there had been at least 30 incidents of arson, attempted arson, bombing, or attempted bombing.

[August 15, 1973: America withdraws from Vietnam]

October 9: [Students build an observatory, and life fades back to normal.]

[1974: Center for Research on Women founded; name later changed to Institute for Research on Women and Gender.]

May 19, 1975: Three students and a Dutch research assistant are kidnapped … in Tanzania, Africa, where they have been working with anthropologist Jane Goodall. The kidnappers, insurgents from Zaire [now the DRC] … grab the group during the night and head across Lake Tanganyika to Zaire. They demand a ransom of $460,000, arms and ammunition, and the release of political prisoners from Tanzania. … Kabila later becomes president of the DRC and is assassinated in 2001.

June: Alexander Solzhenitsyn … accepts an appointment as an honorary fellow at the Hoover Institution.

October, 1976: Faculty women on the rise

May 9-10, 1977: South Africa protest

December: [Sororities return]

October, 1978: As part of the thaw in Chinese-American relation, six research scholar arrive on campus from the PRC… Several Stanford students go to China in ’79.

January, 1979: 25% of undergrads in the School of Engineering are women

November, 1980: Center for Chicano Research is created with history Prof. Albert Camarillo as its director.

December: A month after his election to the US Presidency, Ronald Reagan, an honorary fellow of the Hoover Institution, has named 21 Hoover scholars and Stanford professors to advisory committees.

Fall: [Feminist Studies launched]

February 24, 1983: Anthropology student dismissed… after an investigation of charges relating to Mosher’s field research on a Chinese commune in 1979-1980. Mosher claims his dismissal is in response to pressure from Chinese officials upset over his writing about forced abortions.

July: Stanford Blood Bank becomes the first in the nation to begin screening blood to prevent transmission of AIDS.

March 6, 1984: Gay liberation statues vandalized

April, 1985: Students ask the Board of Trustees to divest stock in companies doing business in South Africa. … two dozen students block their cars by lying in the road. … 206 faculty members petition trustees for total divestment. The U continues its policy of selective divestment.

February, 1986: Jewish studies

May, 1987: Cheerleaders make a comeback

March 31, 1988: … new freshman requirements in Culture, Ideas, and Values (CIV) … replaces the Western Culture requirement adopted in 1980, and requires freshmen to take courses that cover both European and non-European cultures.

May 25: U official adopt a policy calling for preservation and study of native American archaeological sites found on U lands.

September 23: Mice with human immune cells

October: Racial tensions lead to free speech debate

April 5, 1989: An 18-month study finds that… undergraduates still perceive racial tensions and feel social distance from each other. … the report urges adding 30 minority faculty over the next decade, doubling minority Ph.D. enrollment, doubling undergraduate courses focused on minorities, and establishing an ethnic studies requirement for graduation.

May 15: A broad coalition of student groups stages an eight-hour takeover of the President’s office, barricading themselves inside the building to demand faster progress on minority issues.

June: U officials announce they will return skeletal remains and associated artifacts of about 550 prehistoric native Americans from the Stanford Museum to Ohlone-Costanoan tribal representatives for reburial.

August 31: Hoover director retires; Hoover-Stanford relations improve: Campbell, director of the Hoover Institution for 29 years, retires, though not without a fight. In April 1988, he calls opponents on the faculty who were seeking to bring Hoover under tighter U control, “very left-wing and very undistinguished.” On may 10, 1988, the Board of Trustees present Campbell with what it calls a “generous” retirement package if he agrees to retire at 65.

September, 1990: Human Genome Project

May 23, 1991: Neurosurgeon charges sexism… She is elected chair of the Faculty Senate for the 1997-1998 academic year, and in 1998 is appointed chief of staff at the Stanford-affiliated Palo Alto Veterans Hospital.

December 12: First American website

December 8, 1992: The U agrees to extend benefits–including health plans–to employee’s long-term same-sex domestic partners.

August 25: Graduate Amy Biehl, 26, is killed in South Africa. She is the first American to die in the violence associated with the country’s transition from apartheid to democracy, a transition she has been studying on a Fullbright scholarship. Biehl, who is white, is ambushed by a group of youths while driving black friends home from a party in her honor.

[The article does not mention that the “youths” who killed her where black.]

September 1: Condolezza Rice, 38, becomes provost, the first woman and fist African American to hold the No. 2 job.

October 6: [New sexual harassment policy.]

May 6, 1994: Chicana students hunger strike… [they call for] 1) a grape boycott on campus, 2) enhanced collaborations with East Palo Alto, and 3) add a Chicano studies program. … The Chicana hunger strike was largely triggered by the dismissal of Cecila Burciaga, the U’s highest-ranking Latina administrator. … they were told nothing could be done because it “was part of budget cutting in the office of Student Affairs.”

[See November, 1980, when the Center for Chicano Research was created.]

May 12: Asian American Students disrupt faculty Senate… “Asian American Studies now”

February 13, 1996: Food Research Institute to close. … FRI, which has 13 professors and 71 graduate students, was founded in 1921 by Herbert Hoover to study the world production, consumption and distribution of food. Once independent, it has a separate endowment of $12 million plus four endowed chairs. In recent year FRI ha focused on food and economic development issues in third world countries.

November 21: The Faculty Senate approves a new interdisciplinary program in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity.

[That’ll feed the starving masses of the world!]

May 4, 2000: An anonymous donor gives $20 million to help boost the university’s efforts at attracting and retaining women faculty and students in science and engineering.

[Hey, Stanford, you can hire me for your science faculty for free.]

December 12: Scientists at the Stanford Genome Technology Center complete the sequencing of the genome of the plant Arabidopsis thaliana… Their decoding marks the first time a plant genome has been completely sequenced.

Google “South Africa Protests Burning Portraits”

 

 

Where they burn portraits, they will burn people.

ETA: Now they’re burning down the buildings (h/t With the thoughts you’d be thinkin):

 

Cathedral Round-Up #7: Colonialism 2.0

The purpose of Cathedral Round-Up is to keep track of what our betters have in store for us. This month we are headed to Harvard (and for a side-excursion, Oxford,) to witness the progressive push to expand the notion of “refugees” to include virtually everyone not already living in the West; the sheer heart-breaking difficulties of being one of the world’s most privileged black people; and Cecil Rhodes‘s pro-Muslim legacy.

Jacqueline Bhabha brings us “When Water is Safer than Land,” repeating the common claim that “no one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land” that was so commonly bandied about in the wake of the drowning of 3 year old Alan Kurdi. Alan’s death is a tragedy, but his family was trying to leave Turkey, a peaceful, relatively prosperous nation, not a violence-riddled war zone.

I argued back in Newton’s Third Law of Politics that the official definition of “refugee” is already broad enough to encompass almost anyone the government wants it to; Professor Bhabha wants to do away with the concept of “refugee” entirely, in favor of “distress migrant”:

… news coverage and political attention have highlighted the irrationality and inefficiency of our outdated legal and administrative system of migration management—a system now manifestly premised on incoherent dichotomies and false assumptions.

The most fundamental dichotomy lies at the very root of modern migration law, separating bona fide “refugees” with a “well-founded fear of persecution” under the 1951 UN Convention on the Status of Refugees, from spontaneous “economic migrants” seeking to take advantage of greater prosperity and opportunity outside their home countries. The former are considered legitimate recipients of international protection, the latter unlawful border-crossers.

But for more than a decade, migration experts within the United Nations, in the immigration and justice ministries of many countries, and civil-society organizations such as the Women’s Refugee Commission, the International Rescue Committee, and Human Rights Watch, have acknowledged the artificiality of this dichotomy, given the reality of “mixed migration”—distress migration prompted by multiple, interconnected factors, including survival fears and economic desperation. …

Priority in these entry categories should be given to “distress migrants,” a category that should replace the now unworkable distinction between “legal” refugee and economic but “illegal” forced migrant.

In short, Bhabha thinks it’s unfair to prevent anyone who lives in a country that’s poorer than the West from migrating wherever they want to go. Migration to the West is a human right; wanting to control who enters your country is outdated and shows that you’re not a “team player”:

But such official resettlement is sustainable only if it is a joint endeavor, agreed upon by countries that are willing to host relocated refugees and share the responsibility for doing so with others in their region. The current intransigence of relatively prosperous EU member states such as France, the UK, Slovenia, Hungary, and the Czech Republic vitiates this sort of collective humanitarian endeavor and unreasonably leaves the protection “burden” only to the exemplary few (Germany and Sweden at present).

Germany broke EU rules by inviting in a few million migrants without the consent of the other member states, but Hungary is being totally meanie pants for insisting on this weird notion of “national sovereignty” instead of just lying back, spreading its borders, and thinking of Queen Victoria.

Maybe we should adopt a policy of always letting Germany do whatever it wants to its neighbors–would have saved us a lot of effort about 102 – 71 years ago.

Bhabha also notes that the current system rewards those who break the rules by migrating illegally–if you can just get to Europe, chances are you’ll be fine–while punishing those who try to obey the rules by filling out all of their paperwork and then sitting out the multi-year process just to get rejected. This is completely accurate.

Bhabha believes that “distress migration” to wealthy countries is inevitable and unstoppable, but has several recommendations for making the immigration system more humane and less likely to involve dead children:

1. Massively overhaul the immigration bureaucracy (this I actually agree with–bureaucratic systems tend to be awful.)
2. Let in all of the “distress migrants.”
3. Westerners should stop the wars in foreign countries (how, exactly?)
4. More funding for refugee camps in places like Turkey so people will stay there instead of migrating to Europe. (I don’t know what the conditions in Turkish refugee camps are like, but I bet they could be much nicer.)
5. Westerners need to make economic development happen in the third world so people will want to stay there, (because third worlders can’t run their own economies?)

It’s funny how people who think colonialism was evil simultaneously think Africans can’t feed their own children or run their own economies without white people stepping in.

Of course, given current fertility rates, the prospects for feeding all of Africa’s children without the rest of the world stepping in do look pretty grim:

Total Fertility Rate by Country (Wikimedia file)

Bhabha has left out the simplest, most humane solution: birth control.

Interestingly, Professor Jacqueline Bhabha is an English woman who obtained her last name via her husband, Homi K. Bhabha, son of an Indian Parsi family. The Parsis are interesting in their own right, but that is a matter for another day. Alas, I have not been able to figure out if Homi is the son of the similarly-named Indian nuclear physicist Homi J. Bhabha. (At the very least, if you meet a Bhabha, chances are he’s an exceptionally intelligent person.)

I have noticed that elites tend to be highly international people–born in one country, raised in another, married into a third. A highschool fiend hailed from four different countries; another attended an elite boarding school 15,000 miles away from her family. And they know each other–“Oh, you’re from Hong Kong? Do you know so-and-so? You do? What a coincidence!”

President Obama, son of a Kenyan and an American of mostly English extraction (who met while studying Russian in Hawaii,) lived for four years in Indonesia, and then ended up in Chicago.

Carlos Slim, largest shareholder of the New York Times and one of the richest men in the world, is a Mexican of Lebanese descent–“Slim” was “Salim” back when his father moved to Mexico.

And as Tolstoy notes, at the time of Napoleon’s invasion, the Russian ruling class spoke French, not Russian.

Homi K. Bhabha

According to the NY Times, getting Homi K. Bhabha, who taught in the Afro-American Studies department in 2001, was a major coup for Harvard. Sure, Indian-born Homi might not look like an expert on the experiences of African Americans, but his co-professors are enthusiastic about his work:

“”He’s manifestly one of the most distinguished cultural theorists of the postcolonial and diasporic experience in the world,’ said Lawrence Buell, the department chairman.”

Other professors point out that Homi’s “expertise” may be entirely high-falutin’ smoke and mirrors:

In 1998, Mr. Bhabha won second place (Judith Butler, a gender theorist at Berkeley, took the top prize) in the annual Bad Writing Contest sponsored by the journal Philosophy and Literature for this passage from an essay on mimicry: “If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to ‘normalize’ formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality.”

“Untouchables”

A developing theme in this series is the way that elite colleges use majority-white people with a small percentage of black ancestry to pad their diversity numbers. In Homi’s case, “whiteness” is debatable, but he is clearly an elite, light-skinned Indian of Persian (aka Aryan) descent, not one of India’s dark-skinned “untouchables,” Scheduled Castes, or Dalits.

The official logic of “diversity” and Affirmative Action is that universities should correct for past oppression and reflect the racial composition of the population they serve by correcting for the negative effects of racism and poverty on test scores. The logic runs that a poor kid growing up in Detroit with one parent in jail and the other busy working two jobs just to make ends meet is going to attend fewer SAT prep classes than rich kids attending TJ, and so his SAT scores may not reflect his true potential.

In practice, places like Harvard end up with a bunch of high-class elites like Homi who can ticky-box “diversity” but are not actually part of an oppressed minority. (A bunch of white “Hispanics” get in this way, too.)

Elites love diversity–so long as “diversity” means other elites. And they can’t understand why their proles insist on icky nationalism:

“Ewww. Get it away.”

Jacqueline Bhabha on Merkel:

Germany’s Angela Merkel has emerged as the surprising heroine of the humanitarian lobby, leveraging her country’s ever-present past and robust economy to welcome more than one million refugees and to stress the potential demographic dividend of a healthy, youthful workforce for an aging continent.

Yes, I’m sure Merkel is the kind of elite who just loves spending time with the huddled masses of the third world.

And on European fears:

The notion that the magnitude of refugee arrival, on the other hand, poses any sort of threat to Europe’s future prosperity is laughable. The Syrians arriving represent less than 1 percent of the population of the European Union (EU), the world’s richest continent. In Lebanon, an incomparably poorer polity, every fourth inhabitant is now a Syrian refugee, and yet even that war-torn country is not at the brink of collapse. The current flow of refugees poses no objective threat to the future or prosperity of Europe.

Because every country wants to look like Lebanon?

Leaving aside the fact that not all of the migrants are from Syria–many of them are, ahem, “distress migrants” from Africa or Asia fleeing poverty, not ISIS–an argument that Europe can handle its current migration levels is not an argument that Europe can handle far more migrants.

Germany’s overall fertility rate is one of the lowest in the world–about 1.4 children per woman. (Slightly over 2 is necessary for population stability, neither growing nor shrinking.) This means that the population of Germany is shrinking.

As of 2014, 16.3 million of Germany’s 81.5 million people–20% of the population–were immigrants or the children of immigrants. In 2009, about 4.3 million Germans are Muslim–5.4% of the population–but due to much higher fertility rates, 9.1% of Germany’s children were Muslims.

A million migrants arrived in Germany in 2015, and more still arrive every day. Keep this up for a few years, and yes, a very large percent of the country will not be German anymore.

I know it’s unreasonable to expect Harvard professors to be able to do math, but we can:

If Germany has 81.5 million people, and about 18% of them are children, that’s 14.7 million children. Of those, 9.1%, or 1.3 million, are Muslim.

If Germany has about 4.3 million Muslims, and 1.3 million of them are children, then 3 million are adults.

Let’s suppose Germany accepts a modest 1 million refugees a year for just two more years, (for 3 million total,) and they have the same TFR as the folks already in Germany. Now 16% of German children are Muslim.

Keep it up for 9 years (10 million migrants,) and 24% of future voters are Muslim (and that’s not counting the shrinking native German population during this time.)

These are obviously extremely rough numbers, but they are not unreasonable.

If your goal is, “make Germany look more like Lebanon,” then that’s one way to do it. And perhaps the German people are perfectly happy accepting a million migrants a year. But let’s not banter about facile claims like “less than 1 percent” when advocating virtually limitless, long-term immigration policies in a world with over a billion people who would happily move to Germany (or virtually any other Western country) if they could.

Elites think that if elite migration is good for them, then the mass migration of unskilled, illiterate poor folks will be great for proles, and then are confused when the masses do not react with universal jubilation at the results:

source

source

source

The Daily Mail summarizes:
Alexandra Mezher, 22, fatally stabbed at migrant centre where she worked
Her family, who are originally from Lebanon, described her as ‘an angel’ …
A boy, 15, living at centre, arrested on suspicion of murder is from Somalia
Teenage killer was overpowered by other children living at the centre
Swedish police demand more cash to stem rising violence in the country

source

source

Italian police have arrested a Senegalese illegal immigrant who prosecutors believe killed Ashley Olsen, a U.S. woman who was found dead in her apartment in Florence last weekend.

“We have collected very serious evidence of his guilt,” Florence chief prosecutor Giuseppe Creazzo told reporters at a news conference on Thursday after the man was arrested and questioned in the early hours of the morning. …

She was strangled in the early hours of Friday, Creazzo said, but the autopsy revealed that she had two fractures to her skull — injuries that would also have proved fatal.

 

source

Mamadou Kamara, an 18-year-old from the Ivory Coast, allegedly slit the throat of Vincenzo Solano, 68, and then attacked his Spanish-born wife, Mercedes Ibanez, 70.

Ms Ibanez fell to her death from a second-floor balcony, during a robbery that turned violent. …

Mr Kamara was arrested after police searched his bag on Sunday as he returned to the migrant centre.

Inside they found a mobile telephone, a laptop computer, a video camera and a pair of trousers, allegedly belonging to Mr Solano, that were covered in blood.

source

source, translation

Of course, Professor Bhabha, living comfortably in Massachusetts, does not have to worry about being raped or murdered by “distress migrants” from Africa let in under the rhetoric that Turkey is not good enough for Syrian refugees.

But Professor Bhabha isn’t just advocating for increased African migration to Europe; she has also noticed that places like Mexico and Honduras have astronomically high murder rates, and therefore wants to let them into the US. Perhaps there is some magical quality to the soil in America that she thinks will make people suddenly be less murderous when they step over the border.

source

Prudencio Ramirez stands accused of killing his 18 year old girlfriend and her three year old son in Washington State, the Tri-City Herald reports.

Prosecutors say the victims were shot and then stuffed inside a burning car.

The coroner says it is likely the little boy was burned alive.

Or perhaps she is just an idiot.

Either way, expect to see a lot more people talking about “distress migration.”

********

Switching gears, our next article is My Harvard Education: Learning “what it means to be a walking disruption,” by Jenny Gathright, former editor of the Harvard Crimson and currently assisting Harvard Magazine’s editorial staff. She is also author of Existence as Resistance: Black Chronicles II and Hashtag #Solidarity.

Ms. Gathright starts with a quote from Ta-Nehisi Coates:

You are growing into consciousness, and my wish for you is that you feel no need to constrict yourself to make other people comfortable…The people who must believe they are white can never be your measuring stick. I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.

I know pretty much everyone spouts vacuous “be yourself” bullshit, but it’s still annoying–everyone has “constrict” themselves to make other comfortable. Just because you feel like farting while in a crowded elevator does not mean you do it; just because you feel like yelling at your cubicle-mate every time he starts humming does not mean you do it; just because you feel comfortable wearing a bathrobe and slippers does not mean you wear them to a job interview. Living among other humans–even in hunter gatherer tribes in the arctic!–means paying attention to social norms and controlling one’s impulses in order to act appropriately.

Anyone who thinks they are special enough to avoid normal human social norms is a fucking sociopath.

Second, “must believe they are white.” ??? What does that even mean?

White person: I don’t see race.
POC: OMG how racist of you to deny my blackness and your white privilege!
White person: Oh, okay. I guess I’m white.
POC: OMG, how racist of you to insist on believing that you’re white!

Continuing on, Ms. Gathright describes a conversation between a guy handing out apples in the cafeteria and her “house tutor” (“RA” in common speak.)

He is standing in front of me, and I am standing next to Jonathan, my lovely, gentle, kind Lowell House tutor.

That sounds awfully intimate.

Ms. Gathright is disturbed because Jeremy and apple-guy are happily talking to each other instead of to her.

Maybe I am just woman enough, just brown enough, to be rendered invisible. It might all be in my head, but isn’t that sometimes just enough to make a moment uncomfortable?

Things that are “all in your head” can indeed make moments uncomfortable, like when you hallucinate spiders crawling under your skin. But that doesn’t make them real.

Apple guy talks about apples:

He is talking about seeds and grafting, about history. Did you know that hard cider was the Founding Fathers’ primary method of hydration? Did you know that they were all drunk pretty much all the time? …

I am distracted. His historical factoids about hard cider have gotten me thinking about a drunken Thomas Jefferson wandering around Monticello, and this image makes me sick and scared in a way that the two men next to me will never understand. [bold mine]

If you are genuinely “sick and scared” from simply imagining someone getting tipsy on hard cider, you need psychological help. That is not normal. If you are not genuinely “sick and scared,” then you are a liar.

There is a distance between my body and the bodies this place was built for. I feel it every day in Lowell dining hall, when I look up at portraits of white men and wonder if they expected me to be here.

Well, the folks it was built for are probably all dead, so unless Ms. Gathright is sitting in a graveyard while writing, I guess this is technically true.

Ta-Nehisi Coates uses “body” where a normal person would write “souls,” because he’s an atheist. There are times when he pulls it off, and times when the effect is horribly awkward.

This is one of those awkward times.

The Lowell House dining hall is not as fancy as Harvard’s freshman dining hall, but the chandelier is a nice touch:

Lowell House Dining Hall, Harvard University

According to the History of Lowell House:

In the Dining Hall are portraits of President Lowell and his wife; his sister Amy Lowell (Pulitzer prize winning poet, and a lover of scandal credited with introducing D. H. Lawrence to America); his brother Percival Lowell (the astronomer who spearheaded the search for the planet Pluto); and his grandfather John Amory Lowell (a fellow of Harvard College for forty years).

Lowell House was built in 1930; Harvard Medical accepted its first black students way back in 1850:

1869: George Lewis Ruffin is the first black to earn a degree from Harvard Law School. In 1883 Ruffin became Massachusetts’ first African-American judge.

1869: Harvard awards its first degree in dentistry to an African American named Robert Tanner Freeman.

1870: Harvard College graduates its first black student, Richard Theodore Greener, who goes on to a career as an educator and lawyer. After graduating from Harvard, Greener becomes a faculty member at the University of South Carolina. He is the first known black to be hired to the faculty of a flagship state university.

1870: George F. Grant graduates with a degree of dentistry from Harvard. He later serves as its first black instructor at the dental school from 1878 to 1889.

1895: W.E.B. Du Bois earns his Ph.D. in history from Harvard, the first black to do so at Harvard.

1896: Booker T. Washington receives an honorary master’s degree from Harvard University.

1907: Alain LeRoy Locke of Harvard University becomes the first black Rhodes scholar.

1912: Carter G. Woodson becomes the second black in the U.S. to earn a doctorate in history. His Ph.D. is from Harvard. He goes on to found the Journal of Negro History in 1916 and inaugurates Negro History Week in 1926.

1921: Amherst College graduate Charles Hamilton Houston becomes the first black editor on the Harvard Law Review.

1933: Harvard Business School graduates its first black MBA student, H. Naylor Fitzhugh, the founder of Howard University’s marketing department.

In other words, at the time Lowell House was built, black students had been attending Harvard for decades. There is no “distance” between Ms. Gathright’s body and the bodies it was built for, because people like her were in the group it was built for. So, yes, I guarantee you that the folks in the portraits expected people like you to be there.

You’d think she’d have Googled “when did Harvard start accepting black people” to find out if the folks in the portraits had black students before writing an article about how stressed out she was by her incorrect assumptions.

For goodness’s sake, this is Massachusetts.

But getting back to the article:

I am taking an economics class on libertarianism. I don’t consider myself a libertarian at all, so I took the class to challenge my thinking. …

One day, we are talking about the consequences of drug prohibition. Libertarians believe that the negative effects outweigh the positive effects. I’m sympathetic to the viewpoint, and I’m glad this policy debate is a topic of discussion. Professor Miron briefly lists “increased racial profiling” and the resulting “racial tensions” as a negative consequence of drug prohibition laws. He moves on—he has other slides to discuss, other lines of argument to explore. But I am stuck, still thinking about what it means for him to name “increased racial profiling” and “racial tensions” without naming Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Rekia Boyd, Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland…I want to stand up and scream about how the things he is talking about tear bodies apart. [bold mine]

Geez. Psycho, much?

Seriously, this woman can’t watch two people talk about apples without wanting to know why they aren’t talking to HER; she cant look at her posh, crystal chandeliered cafeteria without wondering what the people in the portraits would have thought of HER; she can’t listen to a lecture without wanting to scream that the professor didn’t talk about exactly the things SHE wants to talk about.

I want to be clear here: I’m not asking my professor to re-write his lecture. He is teaching a class that doesn’t center on my experience in every moment, and that’s okay. This isn’t necessarily about my professor or my classmates or my syllabus.

When you feel compelled to clarify that it’s okay if a class doesn’t center on, “MY experience in EVERY moment,” that is a sign that you are hilariously unaware of just how narcissistic you are.

I am talking to my friend. He has had a tough couple of days. He is telling me about a class on race and gender that he is taking. He is feeling the course material in his body, he says. The readings are causing him pain. … Section is causing me pain.

I think people actually do this thing where, by constantly reading/watching/thinking/talking about something horrible, they prompt their brains to release far more stress hormones than their physical situation actually warrants. This is because our brains can’t really tell the difference between “picture I saw on TV” and “thing I saw in real life,” and a person being murdered before your eyes in real life would be a very concerning thing indeed that you probably ought to do something about (fight or flight,) thus prompting a massive outpouring of hormones.

Feminists do this by reading sixteen blog posts in a row about rape; white nationalists do this by reading sixteen blog posts in a row about “white genocide”; housewives do this by reading about children who’ve been abducted and murdered; etc. I do this by researching human sacrifice in animist religions.

By the end, you feel awful.

There are was to deal with this: First, realize that your brain is producing hormones in response to a threat that is not actually physically present in the room with you. Second, calm down. I find meditation helps, or prayer if you’re religious. Third, recognize that this is not a healthy thing to do to yourself. Take breaks, don’t let yourself get sucked into reading 16 articles in a row, and most importantly, don’t do it at 4 AM, because that is a quick road to nightmaresville.

Ms. Gathright then discusses Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff’s Atlantic article, “The Coddling of the American Mind”:

I could critique their piece on several grounds. But one of the first things I thought when I read it was, “Where is this movement, and how did I miss it?” Because here is my truth: I don’t see a ton of liberal students trying to “scrub” Harvard’s campuses “clean” of offensive or uncomfortable ideas. Instead, I see all around me students, my friends, who are willing to be made uncomfortable by words and ideas all the time. I see students who willingly walk into classrooms that will make them, in the words of my friend, feel the course material in their bodies.

Oh, honey, don’t you understand that feeling bad is exactly how the SJWs want you to feel? You feel bad because you have already imbibed a political ideology that dictates how you react to the world. You are not “willing” to be made uncomfortable by words or ideas; you make these things make you uncomfortable.

There is a difference. Being willing to be uncomfortable means being willing to consider that someone else’s POV might be right.

When I read about cannibalism, I am uncomfortable, but I am not willing to consider that cannibalism is moral. When I speak with a friend about philosophy, I am willing to consider that they might be correct. If they question some deeply held assumption, I may be uncomfortable–but I am not going to have nightmares.

Some people go through this place without having to ask and answer hard questions about the spaces they occupy. I have had to constantly articulate and question my relationship with this institution: the way I fit into its history, and the way I feel in its classrooms.

Aww, it sure is hard being at Harvard. I mean, if you can’t feel insanely privileged while siting in a cafeteria with glittering chandeliers or attending classes taught by some of the most elite professors in the entire world, I don’t think anything will.

 

************

Oxford, Rhodes, and Syria

Hey, did you hear about the “Rhodes Must Fall” protests at Oxford?

Student campaigners have condemned an Oxford college for deciding to keep its statue of Cecil Rhodes, claiming the college has been influenced by a “dictatorship” of donors.

Rhodes, not quite bestriding a plinth.

Ella Jeffreys, a master’s student, told the Guardian: “We feel that the decision of Oriel College, due to the threat of withdrawing funding by alumni, shows that money talks over students. …

The campaign said in a statement: “Oriel has been rushed into this decision by the irresponsible threats of wealthy individuals. This is a decision for the short term. It is a decision made by authorities, not by students. It is a decision motivated by power not by principle.”

Welcome to real life. No one cares about you.

The statement said the decision lacked “legitimacy” and warned: “It is a decision that jeopardises trust between students and the institution.”

That’s okay. You’ll be gone in a few years. Oxford has been around for almost 1,000. They don’t need you:

Student activists said they would not be derailed by interventions such as those of Chris Patten, the chancellor of the university, who said in a recent interview that those involved with Rhodes Must Fall should “think about being educated elsewhere”.

At least someone has a spine.

I am personally uncomfortable with pulling down statues for the same reason that I am uncomfortable with burning books. There are times when a nation simply finds that it has an excess of statues of a former dictator, and people reasonably desire fewer of them, but England does not suffer an over-abundance of Rhodes statues.

Students called for a reckoning from the institution, and said their first demand was for Oxford to “acknowledge and confront its role in the ongoing physical and ideological violence of empire”. They want the university to apologise for its role and to offer more scholarships to black students from southern Africa.

Why? Did they help build Oxford? Did Oxford tear down their universities?

No.

Then Oxford owes them nothing.

They said they wanted to hear “the voices suffocated into silence by a Eurocentric academy”.

Then get the fuck out of Oxford. What, you can’t physically listen to people talk without a professor telling you to listen to them, first?

Simukai Chigudu, a postgraduate student in international development, said Oriel’s decision “throws into sharp relief that strong power donors have in shaping the college and underscores that it is not a free, open and democratic [process].

WHY THE HELL DID YOU THINK OXFORD WAS A DEMOCRACY? It is a college, not a country.

It turns out that the money threat was quite substantial:

Oxford University’s statue of Cecil Rhodes is to stay in place after furious donors threatened to withdraw gifts and bequests worth more than £100 million if it was taken down, The Daily Telegraph has learnt. … The governing body of Oriel College, which owns the statue, has ruled out its removal after being warned that £1.5m worth of donations have already been cancelled, and that it faces dire financial consequences if it bows to the Rhodes Must Fall student campaign.

100 million pounds is worth about 144 million dollars.

So I decided to see how Rhodes’s colonialist legacy is working out. According to Wikipedia, Cecil Rhodes created the Rhodes Scholarships, which pay for international students to come study at Oxford, in order to:

promote civic-minded leadership among “young colonists” with “moral force of character and instincts to lead,” for the purpose of ‘extending British rule throughout the world…the consolidation of the Empire, the restoration of Anglo-Saxon unity…” and the foundation of so great a Power as to render wars impossible and to promote the best interests of humanity.”

What kinds of students win such a scholarship? Luckily for us, Harvard Magazine has a helpful article on Harvard’s winners:

The Rhodes Trust has announced that five Harvard seniors have been awarded American Rhodes Scholarships this fall. Among them, one is vice president of the Harvard Islamic Society and co-founder of the Ivy League Muslim Council, a second is pursuing Islamic studies, and a third, the son of a Syrian immigrant, is studying global human-rights institutions. …

Alacha is “concentrating in Social Studies. For his senior thesis, he is studying global human rights institutions and examining their effect on local practices in Jordan. … He is the son of a Syrian immigrant and is interested in the movement for Islamic human rights.” Alacha plans to pursue an M.Phil. in modern Middle Eastern studies at Oxford.

Huckins is “concentrating in Neurobiology and Physics. …

Hyland “majors in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations (Islamic Studies). Her primary academic interest is the common intellectual heritage of medieval Islamic and Christian theologians. … She is a leader in community and campus work, especially addressing the problem of sexual assault. …

Lam is pursuing “a joint concentration in Neurobiology and Philosophy. He is interested in philosophical problems of free will, moral responsibility, and punishment, and has career interests in criminal justice reform. He is an active advocate of the effective altruism movement …

Shahawy “is pursuing a double major in History and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. He has devoted himself to working with marginalized communities to correct social injustices and improve access to opportunity, while also studying Islamic jurisprudence and global health and medicine. He worked with Los Angeles County inmates with the American Civil Liberties Union, as an intern in rural health clinics in Kenya with Vecna Technologies, and as an analyst with small-business lender Liwwa Inc. in Amman, Jordan. He has also conducted research on transplant surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital and on the causes of Saudi Arabia’s private sector labor shortage at the Harvard Center for International Development. Hassaan is the Vice President of the Harvard Islamic Society and Co-Founder of the Ivy League Muslim Council. He has volunteered at the Children’s Cancer Hospital in Cairo, Egypt and mentors prison inmates in Norfolk, Massachusetts.” Shahawy will pursue an M.Phil. in Islamic studies and history.

Welcome to the new colonialism.