It appears to be the case that the righteous indignation of powerful groups in academe that believe themselves entitled to special treatment cannot be salved with any number of mere apologies. Will buckets of money do the trick?
I refer, of course, to the situation at Harvard. President Larry Summers stirred up a nest of remarkably vicious hornets when he speculated months ago that the reason why there are relatively few women in the hard sciences might have something to do with biology and the career choices many women make. He should have known better. The received wisdom on campus is that all statistical imbalances of any sort must be explained by embedded discrimination. Just as Hans Eysenck found himself physically attacked and shouted down for suggesting that there might be a genetic link to intelligence, Summers found his very job in jeopardy as legions of feminist militants called for his scalp.
A number of topics are simply taboo on college campuses. One can freely suggest that the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 may have been a plot by the Bush administration, but one must never challenge cherished leftist notions about the pervasiveness of discrimination. Professors and administrators who forget that will face relentless hostility from academics who are supposedly committed to open inquiry. No perceived slight to an “oppressed group,” no matter how slight, inadvertent, or arguably true, can ever be let go. “Move on” was for Bill Clinton. For Larry Summers, it’s war drums around the clock. Campus malcontents know that they can magnify harmless gaffes into great levers to force changes they want. They never pass up the opportunity.
Numerous apologies for his statement have failed to appease his adversaries, so Summers has now committed Harvard to a $50 million program to “improve the climate for female faculty members there,” as The Chronicle of Higher Education put it in its May 27 story.
One part of Summers’ “here, won’t you please leave me alone now” campaign calls for the creation of a new administrative post, a vice provost for diversity and faculty development. To find a more useless sinecure, you’d probably have to look back to Czarist Russia.
Another component is the plan is to create a fund to recruit “professors who add to the university’s diversity through ‘target of opportunity’ appointments” (again quoting from The Chronicle story). Cathy Ann Trower, a research associate at the Harvard Project on Faculty Appointments liked that idea, but didn’t think it went far enough, saying that she thought it would be helpful to reward departments that added to the university’s diversity and maybe even to penalize those that did not.
What most intrigues me about this is the headline of the story: “Harvard Committees Suggest Steps to Help Women.” At most, the new “diversity” initiative will lead to high-paying Harvard positions for a small number of women—women who would otherwise have had good academic jobs at less- prestigious universities. If a few individuals are elevated to Harvard status, does that “help women” as a whole? The language suggests as much, and Americans so frequently hear similar expressions that equate individual progress with group progress that I suspect many automatically think that way. The entire “affirmative action” project is built on the assumption that preferential treatment for a few individual blacks, Latinos, etc. is the same thing as “black progress,” “Latino progress,” and so on.
This is an atavistic kind of thinking, like primitive tribes where a gain for any member of the tribe is treated as a gain for the tribe itself. It is no more a boon to “women” for Harvard to send itself into a tizzy to hire a few more female faculty members than it was a boon to “left-handers” when Phil Mickelson won the Masters last year. But golf enthusiasts, right- or left-handed, probably have more common sense than the Harvard administration.
The allure of preferential policies like Harvard’s is the facile assumption that aiding a few members of a group is the same as aiding the group itself. Such policies are little more than symbolic gestures designed to appease vocal interest groups with apparent concern about the bundle of grievances that animate them. Alas, there is no constituency to advocate against such policies on the grounds that they achieve little or no good at substantial cost.
George C. Leef is the executive director of the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy.