Attack Of Left-Wing Campus Mobs, The Evils of DEI.

[Muda69]

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/attack-of-left-wing-campus-mobs/

Quote

This is blowing up Twitter:

Protesters followed Sen. Sinema into the bathroom at Arizona State University to confront her on Build Back Better and immigration pic.twitter.com/NDSmeu0h2M

— Jennifer Epstein (@jeneps) October 3, 2021

 

They chased a US Senator into a bathroom and kept harassing her. This is the kind of thing that amounts to an in-kind contribution to Republican candidates for Congress. Every one of these piss-ant Stalinists should be expelled from Arizona State. You watch, though: they won’t be. There aren’t many university presidents in this country who have the guts to stand up to a left-wing mob.

Maybe ASU’s president Michael Crow is different. E-mail him and urge him POLITELY to hold these thuggish student activists accountable for the harassment of a US Senator:

Certainly the president of MIT, Rafael Reif, is no profile in courage. University of Chicago geophysicist Dorian Abbot was invited to give the annual Carlson Lecture at MIT — but then the university disinvited him under pressure from left-wing activists. Prof. Robert George at Princeton broke the news this afternoon on Twitter:

Here is a link to the Newsweek piece co-authored by Prof. Abbot, and cited by Prof. George above. Excerpts:

American universities are undergoing a profound transformation that threatens to derail their primary mission: the production and dissemination of knowledge. The new regime is titled “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” or DEI, and is enforced by a large bureaucracy of administrators. Nearly every decision taken on campus, from admissions, to faculty hiring, to course content, to teaching methods, is made through the lens of DEI. This regime was imposed from the top and has never been adequately debated. In the current climate it cannot be openly debated: the emotions around DEI are so strong that self-censorship among dissenting faculty is nearly universal.

The words “diversity, equity and inclusion” sound just, and are often supported by well-intentioned people, but their effects are the opposite of noble sentiments. Most importantly, “equity” does not mean fair and equal treatment. DEI seeks to increase the representation of some groups through discrimination against members of other groups. The underlying premise of DEI is that any statistical difference between group representation on campus and national averages reflects systemic injustice and discrimination by the university itself. The magnitude of the distortions is significant: for some job searches discrimination rises to the level of implicitly or explicitly excluding applicants from certain groups.

DEI violates the ethical and legal principle of equal treatment. It entails treating people as members of a group rather than as individuals, repeating the mistake that made possible the atrocities of the 20th century. It requires being willing to tell an applicant “I will ignore your merits and qualifications and deny you admission because you belong to the wrong group, and I have defined a more important social objective that justifies doing so.” It treats persons as merely means to an end, giving primacy to a statistic over the individuality of a human being.

DEI compromises the university’s mission. The core business of the university is the search for truth. A university’s intellectual environment depends fundamentally on its commitment to hiring the most talented and best trained minds: any departure from this commitment must come at the expense of academic excellence, and ultimately will compromise the university’s contribution to society. This point is particularly urgent given that DEI considerations often reduce the pool of truly eligible candidates by a factor of two or more.

Read it all. Believing this, and saying it out loud, is considered so offensive that MIT disinvited Prof. Abbot from speaking there.

Folks, MIT is not East Wahoo A&M. If this is the kind of standard that reigns at one of America’s most elite colleges, we are in severe trouble. This is soft totalitarianism — and it won’t stay soft long if our institutions keep yielding to these monsters.

From the MIT website, information about how you can reach out to university president Rafael Reif and urge him to reinstate Prof. Abbot, and apologize. DO NOT BE ABUSIVE WHEN YOU WRITE! That is counterproductive at best.

 

UPDATE: Back in January, The Federalist reported on Prof. Abbot being under assault in the university itself for dissenting from the DEI policy. Excerpt:

Last year, Abbot served on a committee for a competitive postdoctoral fellowship, and on the hiring committee for the Geophysical Sciences department. Abbot reported in his videos that both of these committees made selection decisions based on sex and race. According to Abbot, a few common phrases he heard in these meetings were the following:

We need more X diversity in our department, not more Chinese…[b]ecause Z is a white male, he has no right to discuss certain issues…[and] [w]e should hire Y primarily because he or she will help us with our problem with X diversity.

Abbot also disclosed to the “Thinker” that when he was on the department’s hiring committee, he and the other committee members were told that the dean of the division would not consider a faculty candidate, regardless of ability, unless the person was a woman or an underrepresented minority.

Abbot provided the following quotation from an email he received while on the hiring committee: “…the only hires that will be considered are for women and/or under-represented groups.  I know we cannot legally say that for an advertisement, but it may affect how things play out if we move forward with interviews…”

This wasn’t an isolated incident. According to Abbot, Assistant Professor Graham Slater, who is a member of the EDI departmental committee, gave a seminar to the department, which included the following quotation: “If you are just hiring the best people, you’re part of the problem.”

Wow.  It's clear that in most universities it's what you are that is important, not who you are.  Very, very sad.   I'm counseling young people in my social circles to really consider trade/vocational schools instead of traditional universities where the woke have taken over.