“the downsides of affirmative action”
Yes, this subject is verboten in academic circles. It is not to be questioned—on penalty of losing your job and perhaps your career. May God bless this brave woman for having the courage to speak the truth.
I worked in the Bell System back in the early 70s when Affirmative Action first came to the private sector thanks to an agreement between the DoJ and AT&T. While co-workers and I were discussing the future given all these new “non-quota” quota rules, one old timer opined, “No matter how you shake it, the cream will always come to the top.” We agreed, but didn’t see at the time that in order for that to come to pass, we had to stop the shaking.
Questioning certain aspects of political correctness in academia is treated almost as badly as questioning the Quran in Pakistan.
Whatever one’s opinion on the respective scientific merits of human biological diversity or uniformity, it is surely beyond contention that the latter assumption, alone, is tolerated. Even if progressive-universalistic beliefs about human nature are true, they are not held because they are true, or arrived at through any process that passes the laugh test for critical scientific rationality. They are received as religious tenets, with all of the passionate intensity that characterizes essential items of faith, and to question them is not a matter of scientific inaccuracy, but of what we now call political incorrectness, and once knew as heresy.from The Dark Enlightenment
To sustain this transcendent moral posture in relation to racism is no more rational than subscription to the doctrine of original sin, of which it is, in any case, the unmistakable modern substitute. The difference, of course, is that ‘original sin’ is a traditional doctrine, subscribed to by an embattled social cohort, significantly under-represented among public intellectuals and media figures, deeply unfashionable in the dominant world culture, and widely criticized – if not derided – without any immediate assumption that the critic is advocating murder, theft, or adultery. To question the status of racism as the supreme and defining social sin, on the other hand, is to court universal condemnation from social elites, and to arouse suspicions of thought crimes that range from pro-slavery apologetics to genocide fantasies. Racism is pure or absolute evil, whose proper sphere is the infinite and the eternal, or the incendiary sinful depths of the hyper-protestant soul, rather than the mundane confines of civil interaction, social scientific realism, or efficient and proportional legality. The dissymmetry of affect, sanction, and raw social power attending old heresies and their replacements, once noticed, is a nagging indicator. A new sect reigns, and it is not even especially well hidden.