Posted on 07/15/2022 7:30:02 AM PDT by karpov
Today’s assault on intellectual excellence in the academy will eventually end. Hopefully, an investigation will then commence on its causes, and all the usual suspects will be rounded up. This tribunal will, however, likely ignore one key culprit: ordinary faculty—people like me—who complained about the assault, all while enthusiastically aiding it.
Yes, some criticized the Diversity and Inclusion obsession and condemned identity politics. But, out of sight and on the sly, we contributed to the university’s intellectual decline. We made this disaster worse than what even the “woke” mob accomplished.
The adage “no good deed goes unpunished” captures this culpability. In a nutshell—and here I will speak only for myself and those I knew personally from the late 1960s onward—I am referring to lowering academic standards for black students and faculty in order to promote racial progress, a Weltanschauung in which the path to racial equality lay through education and, ultimately, the act of recruiting as many black students as possible and ensuring that they graduated.
Much of what changed in my department of political science was obvious: more bureaucratic paperwork, additional departmental offerings on race and ethnicity, a neglecting of traditional political science subjects, and untold meetings that accomplished nothing. Less obvious was the extra time spent by faculty personally tutoring struggling minority students and recruiting affirmative-action candidates at professional meetings. It’s hard to estimate all the hours taken away from our teaching and research responsibilities as a result.
Almost nobody challenged the underlying logic of this make-the-numbers pathway. Everyone just knew that this was the route to equality and justice.
Nor was there any need for bureaucratic heavy-handedness or incentives.
(Excerpt) Read more at jamesgmartin.center ...
The intentions were never good.
Best intentions, my a$$...
The Nazis rationalized the Final Solution with good intentions. It’s a pretext for the perpetuation of unspeakable evil. I don’t buy it.
Too many “universities” now stifle free speech and honest inquiry. They have devolved into indoctrination centers. Time to defund.
Right off the bat, that's a helluvan assumption. If "good intentions" got academia into this unholy mess, what will get it out - bad intentions? Wokeness destroys any counter-theory to its insanity. It monopolizes the thinking of academics so no alternative can get through. So what will end it? It should be clear that there is no "fixing" this within the framework of shattered institutions.
“The adage “no good deed goes unpunished” captures this culpability. In a nutshell—and here I will speak only for myself and those I knew personally from the late 1960s onward—I am referring to lowering academic standards for black students and faculty in order to promote racial progress, a Weltanschauung in which the path to racial equality lay through education and, ultimately, the act of recruiting as many black students as possible and ensuring that they graduated.”
I lived through this, too. As for the institutions, there was a small cadre that knew exactly what they were doing, but the vast majority of faculty/admins were old style New Deal liberals who were naive. They simply believed that if they admitted students not suited to the rigors of their institutions those institutions would magically transform the students into academically high achievers. By the time they discovered that their magical thinking was, well, “magical”, it was too late. The radical left had a strong presence in the universities and a media willing to smear any questioning of affirmative action as “racist”. As for women and others, the principle that only invidious discrimination can account for differential outcomes that had been established during the early push to admit unqualified, low performing blacks opened the door to further dilution of standards. The last bastion of quality in the universities, STEM, has been under assault for years, and standards are falling. Universities need to be substantially defunded, but it won’t happen through any normal, rational political process.
There was a short-lived phrase hardly ever mentioned anymore.
“The soft bigotry of low expectations.”
Yeah, this contradicts a statement he later made in the article:
“Can this academic erosion be reversed? It seems unlikely.”
Personally, it appears that this “thinking” has become so pervasive and entrenched in Academia, that it is necessary for the current educational system (including K-12) to collapse and be rebuilt. How that will happen is anyone’s guess. It might only occur if our entire civilization collapses (or nearly so). Only then will all this nonsense be purged.
But, at the end of the day, if something can’t continue, it won’t.
But, as you imply, shattered institutions end, and others rise up to replace them.
Nothing human lasts forever.
What we have are today’s academic institutions teaching premodern paganism.
The rot began in the 1930s and 1940s with the influx of leftist Middle European academics, particularly in the liberal arts faculty.
The émigrés in the sciences faculties were probably just as liberal, but they did not have the same opportunity to spread their views.
Wow! And this from a professor at New York University.
Reading this extremely informative article would lead one to believe this professor is not long for his job. I hope not. It is so refreshing to see some actual truth flow from the academy.
Of course I think most of us know that Affirmative Action as a policy would take this path. It it doing blacks and other minorities no favor. For me, that has been obvious right from the get-go.
Some of us are going to be nuclear scientists and some will wash dishes for a living. That should have nothing to do with race. And there should be no free path for anyone. If you don’t want to wash dishes for a living nobody can stop you. Learn a skill that the marketplace needs and you will be out of the kitchen forever.
Many of the people in the academy know what’s going on but they want to keep their jobs. Years ago UC Berkeley dropped their requirements to increase the number of minorities. They had a huge increase in drop-out.a They returned to their earlier test score requirements and eliminated the high drop out rate.
Now that colleges are not requiring ACT or SAT scores there will be even more pressure on faculty to grade minorities differently. That further undermines the value of a degree for those students.
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