The post getting the most comments in January was one in which I quoted from a City Journal article by Heather MacDonald. As she is a conservative commentator, this almost guaranteed some disputation. Read it all here: Musical Charity
I will just add one point: Ethan Hein argued with me about the degree to which white males are excluded from university jobs. This article from City Journal offers some pretty solid evidence: No White Faculty Allowed
A recent internal investigation into faculty hiring at the University of Washington reveals the exhaustive efforts that universities make to discriminate against white job applicants. After the university’s Department of Psychology identified a white candidate as best qualified for a tenure-track professor position in early 2023, the department’s Diversity Advisory Committee pressured the hiring committee to re-rank candidates in accordance with the methodology laid out in an internal handbook titled “Promising Practices for Increasing Equity in Faculty Searches” so that a black woman would receive the job instead. This handbook, obtained by the National Association of Scholars, spells out how to exclude candidates of undesirable races and ensure that candidates of preferred races get hired.
The handbook sheds light on past discriminatory hiring practices in the psychology department. In the 2020–21 academic year, the department hired only BIPOC (black, indigenous, people of color) candidates for five tenure-track positions. Delighted by its success in excluding all white candidates, the department’s Diversity Advisory Committee commissioned the “Promising Practices” handbook as a case study documenting its past manipulation of the hiring process. The handbook served as a how-to manual in the 2022–2023 academic year, ensuring that a BIPOC candidate would be hired for the department’s only tenure-track professorship that year.
I recommend reading the whole thing. My view is that this is absurd, unjust, racist and about to be overturned. And the existence of a policy like this is one reason I am very glad to have left academia.
9 comments:
Hein’s entire comment modus operandi at the time seemed (here and elsewhere on the web) to be posting exclusively on social-justice themes in an attempt to bolster his own chances as a young academic in a tough marketplace. I would have simply banned him and moved on, not allowed him to play that game, but of course this is your blog.
Yes, his views are very much in line with those of the upper-level universities in both the US and Canada. At one point, when he became a bit hard to take, I thought of banning him, but decided against. It is very worthwhile to have someone around who is of a radically different view. And wouldn't it be nice if universities felt the same!
I can assure you that my commenting on random people's blogs has no effect on my professional prospects one way or another. I do it for love.
I'm also flattered to be considered "young", I'm 48.
Hey, you're younger than me.
I too was a leftist radical when young --although that was an economic perspective, a very different left from the cultural left and identity politics of today. Ironically I first discovered my conservative side in aesthetics as I drifted into older music as more perfect and pleasing to me. But really the labels don't help, certainly I don't identify as a "liberal" or "conservative" or "radical" anymore. Depending on the issue, I might be any of them, as seems appropriate to the situation. Exactly why I continue to go deeper into 16th and 17th century European music is beyond my ability to explain, it is a journey of the ear and heart together, guided by pleasure and satisfaction, not by any decision or reason.
Like you, my political beliefs are hard to categorize. That's because neither of us is an ideologue.
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