In the ’60s era civil rights struggles, progressives argued that no one should receive preferential employment based upon such immutable and inherited characteristics such as race. In the 21st century, some progressives are arguing that race ought to be preferentially considered, at least when it comes to selecting the professoriate for our most prestigious academic institution:
The first woman Dean of Harvard Law School had presided over an unprecedented expansion of the faculty — growing it by almost a half. She had hired 32 tenured and tenure-track academic faculty members (non-clinical, non-practice). But when we sat down to review the actual record, we were frankly shocked. Not only were there shockingly few people of color, there were very few women. Where were the people of color? Where were the women? Of these 32 tenured and tenure-track academic hires, only one was a minority. Of these 32, only seven were women. All this in the 21st Century.
The authors of this Salon article?
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- In the summer of 2008, (Angela Onwuachi-Willig) received an Obermann Interdisciplinary Grant to complete collaborative research with two sociologists at the University of Iowa, Professors Mary Campbell and Mary Noonan; their joint research explores the under-representation of minority—American Indian, Asian Pacific American, African American, and Latina/o— attorneys at both the associate and partnership levels of law firms within the United States.
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- Guy-Uriel E. Charles, Professor of Law and Director, Center on Law, Race, and Politics at Duke University School of Law. Professor Charles teaches and writes in the areas of constitutional law, civil procedure, election law, law and politics, and race.
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- A scholar of globalization and digitization, Anupam Chander is Professor of Law and Martin Luther King, Jr. Research Scholar at the University of California, Davis. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Chicago, Yale Law School, Stanford Law School and Cornell Law School.
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- Professor Fuentes-Rohwer’s scholarship focuses on the intersection of race and democratic theory, as reflected in the law of democracy in general and the Voting Rights Act in particular.
We are, in John Adams formulation, a “nation of laws, not men. The iconic statue representing justice is a blindfolded female figure carrying an unsheathed sword in one hand and a set of scales in the other – the symbolism is obvious: The law is designed to apply to each of us equally regardless of our skin color or ethnic background. That it does not always do so is irrefutable, but it ought to in a perfect world. A world towards which progressives theoretically progress. But just as the Communist state had to use every tool of state oppression to keep the people cowed and shivering before the state itself could “fall away,” so too do modern progressives use the tools of racial discrimination to ensure a more colorblind society.
Some day.
Salon’s fearsome foursome – three of whom have chosen to uniquely focus on race and racial representation, feign surprise that Kagan could not, in all her hiring, find the proper proportion of professors of color. If you see the world through the lens of race, hiring discrimination based on race seems eminently responsible. Conversely, Kagan is pilloried for failing to positively consider race. Ergo, perversely, Kagan – and not her race-obsessed critics – is the racist. Or at least is inauthentically progressive.
That appears to be Glenn Greenwald(s) complaint, and his contrast of Kagan’s reception to that given to Bush nominee Harriet Miers is delicious:
It’s ironic that the anti-Miers case was grounded in conservatives’ refusal to place too much faith and trust in their President’s judgment. Can anyone envision Democrats mounting a serious and sustained campaign against Obama’s Supreme Court nominee of the type mounted against Bush by conservatives, whom progressives like to accuse of blind leader/party loyalty?
Well, progressives like to accuse conservatives of all kinds of things that they themselves are guilty of: It’s called “projection.” Thus we have “tea baggers” unfairly labeled as racists while conservatives such as RNC Chairman Michael Steele and Ohio gubernatorial candidate Ken Blackwell are treated as race traitors and lampooned in ways that are objectively racist.
I’m no particular fan of Elena Kagan – her stand against military recruitment at Harvard seems strange: To the extent that the military is denied access to some of the nation’s finest legal minds the country is diminished, and in any case her argument should cut to Congress rather than the services: “Don’t ask/don’t tell” is federal law, not a military artifact. Her costless animosity to the military was considered “brave” in progressive circles, but in retrospect her courage could at least potentially be attributable to a prism of her own.
Or maybe not. When you’ve cut the one nation into sufficiently small and aggrieved interest group slices, all of them muscling around the public trough, it can be hard to keep track. But it’s certainly true that Kagan’s recent performance as Solicitor General has left much to be desired. Like Miers, Kagan has left behind a thin public record on important constitutional issues. What’s more, she has never served as an acting judge. As a SCOTUS nominee, and lacking evidence of actual (vice academic) jurisprudence, she is unimpressive. Perhaps, given the president’s own proclivities, this is the best that we can hope for.
That and a chance to see Glenn Greenwald impotently bang his spoon on the high chair.
“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” – Chief Justice John Roberts
As long as people can obtain money and power from the race/diversity industry, you will have a race/diversity industry.
Starting to look like frakking Yugoslavia around here…..
The Soviet Navy once had a Zampolit on every ship. The Navy’s Diversity Diktat has jumped upon that and now has a “Diversity Officer” aboard every ship. Once a Zampolit, always a Zampolit.
We are in grave danger of becoming that which we once feared.
And to think us Cold Warriors used to laugh ourselves silly in the Intel courses when we heard how their politics came first….
We have met the enemy and it is…yep..you know the end of that one. I don’t laugh at this anymore.
Morgan Freeman on race (on 60 minutes with Mike Wallace):
Wallace: How are we going to get rid of racism…?
Freeman: Stop talking about it.
One of my favorite quotes. Mr. Freeman has long been a champion of common sense.
Ah Glenn Greenwald. Even a blind squirrell….
Tim, 100% right on.
To see where we are all headed in Greenwald’s world if we follow his and other “progressives” utopian racial vision one only need look at the current census form. The “racial” classification makes no anthropological, biological, genetic, or historical sense–but it DOES make a kind of low cunning politically expedient sense. At one time one of the most odious aspects of the South African regime of racial apartheid was the use of low-level bureaucrats to–on the basis of nothing more than a visual inspection–classify people as black, white, or “cape coloured.” The latter category consisting primarily of people of mixed-race and/or Indian descent. That one’s future prospects in life could depend on the arbitrary idiosyncratic visual once-over of a minor official–especially if one were on one end or the other of the “lightness-of-skin” scale for those of mixed-race–was once thought by “progressives” to be intolerable and a black mark of a pariah state. Yet we are quickly headed towards just that sort of society. How very sad.
Yet we are quickly headed towards just that sort of society.
If we allow it.
The “progressives” (and the term as used today originated with Georgy Malenkov in his paeans to Stalin) co-opt words and re-define them to suit their purpose, then frame their arguments in terms of false morality — that viewpoints are either Good or Evil, rather than being merely differing viewpoints — and phrase them so that the intellectually-lazy won’t bother to analyze either their definitions or their arguments, because they *sound* reasonable. Upon examination, both their definitions and their arguments are simply feel-good bullsh*t — and the “progressives” have a vested interested in keeping the intellectually-lazy contented in their laziness.
The problem with affirmative action is that it should have been a temporary solution to right a wrong, not a permanent ideal. At some point, it needs to end.
If you are trying to fly straight and you find yourself off course, you make a course correction (even an infantry guy can figure out this much). If you make your course correction permanent, you will end up flying in a circle and be right back where you started.
How about if we just appoint the most qualified person available, and leave race, creed, color, gender, out of the equation? Too simple?
You must be totally deranged, SFC D. We may have to ask Lex to ban you from the site permanently for using that kind of logic.
What? ZOMG — You expect qualifications? That’s not *fair*! What kind of EVIIIIIL MONST3R AR3 YOU?!?!?!’leben!!?!
Ban Him! We don’t need the left discovering such things and tainting thisd site with such perverted views. Next thing you know they’ll be accusing us of being conservatives or something.
SFC musta read Dr King’s speech from front to back…would be great if the Diversity crowd would also….
Now that there is some writing, Lex.
Agree. I was going to comment about that in my original comments, above, but didn’t want to detract from the point I was trying to make. This is the 2nd time in the last few days that Lex has cranked out some really quality in-depth posts from both a content AND style perspective.
Wasn’t it Maslow who said, “if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem you see is a nail?”
Marianne
Yup, Maslow it was. I think quote finished, “…you tend to see every problem as a nail.”
The quote.
%$#@! twitchy “Submit” thumb…
Jaques Maritain put it well: Your view of the world is more a measure of your mind than it is a measure of the world. Boy, Howdy.
My apologies for the entertaining kerfluffle I caused! It’s logic like that that keeps me from being known as MSG D…
This post makes an assumption that is faulty: it assumes that Harvard seeks to appoint the best available candidates to their posts. This is not the case. Harvard looks to replicate itself, not the nation, or the academy at large. Harvard is well-known as a university that provides professorships nearly exclusively to white men with degrees from other ivy league colleges that tenure almost exclusively white men.
If you look, for instance, at Harvard’s anthropology program, you will see that the small number of women faculty (I think it is 6 out of 24–despite the fact that the best anthropology graduate programs in the world have been producing more women PhDs then men PhDs for years) includes only one tenured woman.
Harvard doesn’t tenure junior faculty. It is well known that an appointment to Harvard at the junior level is a 5-year post-doc. If you are a man with an ivy degree, you are likely to be picked up by a prestigious ivy league afterwards, if you are a woman, you can depend upon work at a high-level public university….even if you are better known than your male colleagues. If you look at the diversity of the Harvard anthropology program (which is typical of Harvard’s departments except for programs like African American studies and women’s studies), it is concentrated at the junior level–the level of professoriate they will be dismissing.
Harvard has made some high profile female and minority hires…like Kagan and like the promotion of Gilpin Faust high up in the administration. But to think that these women actually have autonomous decision-making powers to change the place would be silly.
Does diverse excellence exist in our academic pool? YES! Here I will refer to Berkeley’s graduate anthropological archaeology program. We are a public university who had limited funds and need our graduate students to be nationally in the most competitive pools so they can acquire outside funding in the form of doctoral fellowships from the National Science Foundation and Javits foundation (these are extremely competitive…offering three years of full funding and a generous living stipend.) These are not “diversity” fellowships.
My current six PhD advisees include one white woman, one black woman, and one black man on NSFs, and one white woman on a Javits (to put this into perspective, the year the African American man earned his NSF, only 7 were given to all of the field of archaeology in the country). For full disclosure, my other two students (a white man and white woman) entered the PhD program with MAs in hand, making them ineligible for NSF and Javits programs). I have more black students than normal in anthropology because of my field of study, but a 2:1 ratio of women to men is fairly typical in anthropology, and if anything, slightly more biased towards men than the norm. My program admits the top students in the pool based on gpa, letters of rec., writing sample and GREs…to get university competitive fellowships means that I can’t play favorites regarding gender,race, degree-granting institution, advisor, etc. It’s a straight up meritocracy, with my students competing for funding against all of the top students admitted to Berkeley for funding (3 of the six are on university fellowships) as well as competing against the nation’s best for national fellowships.
Each of these outstanding scholars turned down offers at Ivy league graduate programs to come to Berkeley because they were turned off by the exclusivity of those programs. Do I expect any of these students to be hired at Ivy league programs? No. Will they all go on to become outstanding tenured academics elsewhere? Yes.
I’ve used anthropology (which I know, no one cares about) as an example because I know that field most intimately, but the same processes and practices are at play in all academic fields, including law schools.
THere are a number of structural ways that places like Harvard and other ivies….and perhaps even places like the Naval Academy, whose attempts to diversify have been bemoaned here, reproduce their male and white hegemony generation after generation. These are sets of practices that have real impacts on the demographic profile of those hired. If you don’t like the terms “racism” or “sexism”, perhaps you would respond better to “structural inequalities” which also include things like exclusion of people based on class and other social identities like religion and ethnicity. Having gone to one of the “best” schools is one of those structural inequalities–very few people can afford to go to Harvard or Yale or Penn or Brown or Dartmouth or Chicago or Stanford…yet as long as these elitist institutions (which aren’t very good at undergraduate education BTW) continue to be seen as better than other academically equal or better schools, we continue to favor the promotion of a certain elite of society. (Do we really think so many political elite went to Harvard or Yale because they are INTELLIGENT? Or GOOD STUDENTS?).
Excellence can rise to the top in this country, and does…but not to the same proportion as the wealth of resources which exist to be utilized. And that is a loss to all of us.
As for the color composition of the authors of the study cited, it doesn’t seem strange to me that those who may have suffered an injustice themselves may comment on it or seek to understand how those injustices perpetuate themselves. This forum, appropriately, includes many debates about injustice suffered by the armed forces and her members–and I read these pages not just for the good writing, but to receive the perspectives and understandings of a community that I am not part of. Only by illuminating these things can we understand how they come to be.
I’m in agreement with you for the most part, but you totally neglected the fact that racial preferences are exactly the same as gender preferences and should be challenged in the same way.