Diversity's Stigma

The Wall Street Journal ^ | May 14. 2003 | Jason Riley

[ontos-on]

A young news reporter is sacked after editors discover he's been writing fake stories. The embarrassed publication details the deception and issues an earnest apology to readers. Then the chattering classes descend for a news cycle of navel gazing.

If the perpetrator is Stephen Glass, the white fabulist fired five years ago from the New Republic magazine, he is just another ethically challenged youngster who made some very bad decisions in life. But if the perpetrator is Jayson Blair, the black fabulist who resigned two weeks ago from the New York Times, he is an example of affirmative action run amok.

[Burkeman1]

Thanks for posting a great piece.

[ontos-on]

Thanks to you.

I felt that this particular passage [below] was succinct and provided new knowledge (to me) and uncovers the logic as to why the colleges and professional schools do their dirty work in using race conscuious lowering of standards for the chosen beneficiaries. On top of that constitutional violation (when done by a state school), there is the culture of lying about what they actually do, in order to claim that they do something other than what they do (i.e., no quota system).

Just 29 of them were black. Of course, spreading 29 qualified blacks over two dozen or so elite law schools would result in some pretty paltry numbers for the color-conscious. So Michigan's solution is to lower the entry bar for blacks.

[Burkeman1]

"Affirmitive action" is nothing more than a quota and always has been since the Bakke decision. That has long been exposed. You see it with the competition among colleges and universities for black PHD's. There are only so many to go around and institutions of higher learning compete fiercely for black PHD's- offering them obscene salaries and perks. Cornell West is the best example of this. This guy is a half educated hack who had not published anything of value for years while at Harvard. The new President of Harvard, a year or so ago, criticized him mildly and he went bezerk and played the race card. I think eventually Princeton hired him away for some obscene amount of money only after the President of Harvard tried to prostrate himself before this half witted loser in a failed attempt to get him to stay.

[ontos-on]

It all started in the early 70's in the damn Nixon administration. They set the guidelines (federal regulations) for the education and employment federal equality laws. The women thing was a big part of this too. It goes unnoticed now, but the whole idea that a department would seek out a black or a woman rather than the best person of merit, is and has been an insidious element in our society over the past 35 years. It has had a very corrosive effect--in many ways.

Personally, in my field of philosophy, before I went into law, the hiring of PhDs in a scarce market in the 70's became an obvious and sick joke with the way that gender and pigmentation results became all important. I feel this sort of thing inserted a feeling of succumbing to the government and other corporate decrees and gave birth to the inability to openly tell the truth in the university--- and this was ramified in many directions to result in the "academy" that we have today. Thus one more knell in the death of academic freedom and free thought and honest speech. This is how the Marxist notion of "political correctness" got into the university. It wasn't always so.

We had a constitution. It just wasn't followed. See the doctrine of "disparate impact' in the Supreme Court cases in the 70's.

[Paul Atreides]

Though I am not defending Blair, those wonderful, caring, diversity-minded liberals at the NYT, who looked the other way for years, are hanging him out to dry. I seem to recall Bubba doing the same with some of his cabinet that "looked like America."

[redbaiter]

great article.

[Burkeman1]

The policy of affirmitive action that was created under the Bakke decision was so devoid of principle or real world application that it practically invited silence and secretiveness on the issue of race in academia and hiring. It became taboo. That in turn meant that even criticizing minority hires was taboo. A chill was sent all throughout the nation. Now- imagine how bad it must have been at a Liberal paper like the NYT's?

[Lancey Howard]

Great column.
Very well written and compelling.
Jason Riley has expertly articulated the kinds of things that people like Ward Connerly and Clarence Thomas and Walter Williams have been saying for years.

[Intolerant in NJ]

Note, too, that for Mr. Bollinger, who's now head of Columbia, diversity's benefits are a one way street. After all, he's surely not suggesting that Howard University, a historically black institution, should be shut down...brings to mind the dilemma a number of professions such as social work, law, and psychology worked themselves into by asserting that they wanted more blacks as practioners because only blacks could really understand the kinds of problems blacks experienced and thus work most effectively with them - but by extension, this implies that blacks couldn't work with maximum benefit with whites, and conversely whites couldn't be expected to work especially effectively with blacks. In fact by this reasoning it might even become an ethical problem if one accepted a client not of one's own race, since he/she would be entering into an arrangement not likely to produce the most beneficial outcomes for the client; strangely, none of the fields pushing for increased diversity using this rationale seem to have considered the ethical issue.....

[aristeides]

A really damning piece on Blair in today's Washington Post: Past Holds Little Explanation for The Meteoric Fall Of Jayson Blair . Don't judge the piece by its stupid headline.

[varon]

I seem to recall Bubba doing the same with some of his cabinet that "looked like America."

Agreed, however IMHO he was a bit top heavy on the UGLY criteria.