The Document Dump from the White House happened after Dissident Prof had written her post last Friday. She saw notice of "New 'Diversity' Guidelines" on Phi Beta Cons first and then went back to read the directive from the departments of Justice and Education.
The Justice Department, as we all know, has been tooling along under Eric Holder, distributing justice blindly, never getting caught up in something like a gun-running scandal in Mexico or voter fraud and intimidation or hogtying police with excessive oversight. The Department of Education too is running smoothly, producing many qualified workers and brilliant scholars.
The Attorney General, who launched his tenure with a call to the nation to join together in an "honest discussion about race," lent his philosophical opinion again for the nation's benefit in the press release:
"Diverse learning environments promote development of analytical skills, dismantle stereotypes, and prepare students to succeed in an increasingly interconnected world. The guidance announced today will aid educational institutions in their efforts to provide true equality of opportunity and fully realize the promise of Brown v. Board of Education."
Education Secretary Arne Duncan concurred:
"Racial isolation remains far too common in America's classrooms today and it is increasing. This denies our children the experiences they need to succeed in a global economy, where employers, co-workers, and customers will be increasingly diverse. It also breeds educational inequity, which is inconsistent with America's core values."
The opinion of the two learned men matches those working in education who do not need such petty guides, like studies, statistics, or facts, to prove that diversity correlates with academic achievement.
In fact, diversity was already much in discussion at the Council of Graduate-School Administrators' annual meeting being held in dangerous country--Scottsdale, Arizona. Rebeca Rufty, an associate dean at North Carolina State University, during a session on diversity, expressed her fears of being in territory hostile to Hispanics, in spite of the fact that she is very light-skinned: "'It was with some trepidation that I came here,'" the dean revealed, "'Although I have pale skin, I brought all my papers with me just in case I get stopped for being Hispanic.'" Oh, the woes of admissions deans! In addition to the worries about the bad job market for Ph.D.'s in Technocultural Studies, deans have to travel to dangerous places where police hunt pale, Hispanic college deans! I certainly hope all the other deans salved her fears with a nice group hug and re-read the comforting words in the press release, "New Guidance Supports Voluntary Efforts to Promote Diversity and Reduce Racial Isolation in Education."
The National Association of Scholars issued their own press release regarding the helpful "guidance" from the Departments of Justice and Education, as they joined other groups in a friend-of-the-court brief. NAS president Peter Wood observed, "The new guidelines represent a sharp departure from previous federal policy and on several points are unlikely to withstand judicial scrutiny. They seem to sanction common university practices which circumvent the law."
But the law is a mere triviality when it comes to bureaucratic diversity. So are the feelings of diverse students, like a University of South Carolina student who had put up a Confederate flag. Administrators ordered the young black man to take it down, after students more sensitive to diversity issues had complained.
Another instance of racial discrimination occurred across the ocean when an Oxford University professor called a black chef Pangloss. Being the diligrent scholar she is, Dissident Prof was sent scurrying back to her Voltaire. She is still doing her scholarly investigation on Pangloss's geneology.
Lest readers fear that Dissident Prof has abandoned the academics in Occupy Wall Street, she reports that while it appears that even the Los Angeles socialist mayor has become fed up enough to order police to dismantle his city's tent encampment, the scholars on our campuses are just gearing up, applying for research funds to attend conferences where they will put their latest cutting-edge theories to good use in slicing and dicing up the significance of the Movement, from all disciplinary angles--political, gender, social justice, and aesthetics.
In the meantime, the best and brightest at Harvard, Boston College, and New York University did not wait for the peer review and just held a good old-fashioned teach-in at the Harvard Science Center. First on the agenda was to be a denouncement of Harvard economics professor Gregory Mankiw for teaching about free market principles in his class. Dissident Prof is disappointed that the relative merits of various five-year plans are not discussed in more collegial settings. There was a time when even Marxists showed gentlemanly form by holding show trials behind closed doors.
Many assume that the sciences are immune from such heated debates. Even epidemiologists, like James Enstrom, are expected to adhere to the strict standards of environental activists who hold sway over research activities in our universities.
Science, contrary to notions that it is about objective diligent research in such boring areas as finding cures for diseases or exploring space, is a field these days that provokes intriguing metaphysical debates. The American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting, an event called Can Science Explain Everything?, was held by MIT professor of nuclear science and engineering, Ian Hutchinson, who believed it can. He, of course, was debated by others. Given what she read about epidemiologist James Enstrom and economist Gregory Mankiw, Dissident Prof will have to ponder that one, as well as the merits of taking a class on rapper Jay-Z at Georgetown.
Still, some groups, like the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools, take surveys among boring employers and report that college graduates (even from Georgetown) lack job skills. This, of course, is the 1% talking, the greedy moguls who do not appreciate the talents of college graduates whom we've seen in past months displaying their learning in urban camp survival skills, tent-pitching, drumming, truth-to-power speech acts, consensus-building, street theater, public art, chanting, meditation, consciousness-raising, sign-making, and facility in math, particularly calculating percentages.
Though the tents may come down, the learning will not end for students. The more advanced-level students will be able to take a course on Occupy Wall Street--for credit!--in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University next semester.
Who wants to be a millionaire? You don't have to enter a game show to aquire 1% status. You just have to become a college president.
Who wants to have a meeting with President Obama? Some college leaders did get to have a closed-door meeting on college affordabilty with POTUS. It shouldn't cost over $50,000 to have access to the wonderful kind of classes NYU offers.
Interesting, though, that the leader of Hillsdale was not invited. Burt Folsom, one of the college's history professors, offered a post for the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. It's about the cover-up by the Roosevelt administration, as well as similarities to the current administration's neglect of the military in favor of counter-productive spending on social programs.
Another historian in the news is Newt Gingrich, this week's top contender for the Republican nomination for president.
Historian Maureen Dowd delves into his 1971 dissertation on colonialism in the Congo to conclude that his mind "is in love with itself," her opening salvo in a column titled "Out of Africa and Into Iowa."
Adam Hochschild, in the same esteemed organ, presented a somewhat more nuanced view. Gingrich, Hochschild complains, "surveys his subject in a highly pedantic way. . . . Footnotes, statistics and quotes from eminent authorities abound."
In favorable contrast, "Woodrow Wilson's Ph.D. dissertation boldly asserted that the founding fathers had gotten many things wrong, and advocated for this country something like the British parliamentary system."
Unlike the pedantic Gingrich tome, Wilson's dissertation was "argued over for decades." It garnered respect from scholars, even from those who disagreed with him for "his openness to changing his ideas."
"Mr. Gingrich may succeed in being elected president," concludes Mr. Hochschild, "but it is hard to imagine him, like Wilson after he left the White House, being elected president of the American Historical Association."
Indeed.
Dissident Prof wonders if Marc Lamont Hill, on the professor-pundit's seat at Fox News, fits the bill. Hill advertises himself as a "professor, author, speaker and public intellectual." He teaches hip-hop and its variants at Columbia Teachers College.
Dissident Prof wondered how his students ever take notes. But she did manage to catch these words as Professor Hill elaborated on his thesis about the lack of intellectual substance of conservatives and Republicans. He too referred to history and managed to repeat variations of the word in tongue-twisting speed, but then finally concluded, Republicans "don't like people who perform intellectuality."
Dissident Prof did find some intellectuality at the Center for American Progress and wrote about it for Townhall this week.
Dissident Prof thanks Mike Lutz and Bill Drennan for their financial contributions.
She hopes her readers will not despair over all the reports from the academic front: there is a cause and effect for everything, and all is for the best. To begin the weekend, she offers you some music appropriate for the events of the week: HERE.
