Heather MacDonald - Campus Politics and the Liberal Arts

[Music] well good evening thank you that's the right response thank you very much for coming glad you got in uh one almost feels like we should be handing out gloves and parkers at the door for for for this kind of event that usually doesn't get quite this cold this time of year um it is november november still for crying out loud um you're here for the third talk in the bpalc's 2019-2020 series on campus politics and the liberal arts if i may though just before i introduce our speaker i'd like to impose on you just for a minute to make a quick plug for the fourth event which will be coming up next month in this same series and i'd also like to say a word or two about the the folks who organized the series which is the the bucknell project for american leadership and citizenship so first of all the next speaker this will be jason manning who is a sociologist at west virginia university as i said he'll be here in just a couple of weeks december 5th at 7 pm over in the gallery theater the title of his talk is campus conflict and moral culture professor manning is a cultural sociologist and he wants to scan outward a little bit from what's happening in campus conflicts specifically to try to find explanations in larger cultural shifts in the whole country so we hope to see at least some of you then now just a word on the bpalc there's there's been a significant amount of talk about the bplc on campus recently frankly relatively little of it accurately represents the spirit of the group as we in the group talk about it amongst ourselves so i just wanted to first of all say no we're actually not a sinister cabal of evil reactionary masterminds seeking to obtain nuclear weapons and destroy the world or anything along those lines if you're really eager to have such a thing at bucknell to courageously fight against i'm sorry to disappoint you but we're not that what we are is a working group of bucknell faculty students and alumni who are very concerned about the future of bucknell and in this we're on the same page as lots of other people in this institution including just to name a couple president john brofman who has spoken at length to the faculty in recent months about the very precarious situation going forward for all of higher education and also the vice president for enrollment management bill conley who wrote a very well researched piece in the chronicle of higher education recently with the worrying title the great enrollment crash students aren't showing up and it's only going to get worse now the reasons for the crisis period that bill connolly is talking about there and into which higher education is passed are very complex but it's clear to people here concerned with facts and reality that bucknell like virtually every other similar institution in the country must recognize that at least some of business as usual just won't cut it going forward the piece of bucknell's business as usual that the bpalc is particularly concerned with trying to address which is more or less the same business as usual at just about every other small liberal arts college in the country is that we have at bucknell a discourse about diversity that embraces seemingly every kind of that phenomenon except the kind that is about people having diverse ideas diverse politics and diverse world views there's a lot of research that shows how skewed colleges and universities have become on a whole range of important measures and issues there's also voluminous research showing how many negative effects accrue when you have groups of people working together on important matters which include in our case teaching young people who are concentrated around a very narrow ideological consensus group think is in such situations almost inevitable and there's lots of evidence that it is happening at bucknell and whether faculty administrators here at bucknell all get this other people including current students alums and prospective students and their parents certainly do i have indeed had exchanges virtually daily with such folks perhaps a dozen or so bucknell alums with whom i had not had previously any contact have reached out to me in just the last week based at least in part on what's been going on here in anticipation of miss mcdonald's visit so if bucknell wants to remain a place where parents can be assured that their children are going to be exposed to real debate and prepared for how to deal with real intellectual and political difference of perspective when they enter the workforce business as usual won't cut it outrage expressed in condemnation and unwillingness to engage in the hard scholarly work of civilly disagreeing and settling down to discuss and debate and work out common ground with those on the other side that just won't cut it encounter events frankly with kindness rocks and so-called picket lines designed to morally shame people interested just in hearing people do the work of a university and efforts even to blacklist those same people this too just won't just won't cut it it's not sustainable and in fact it's not good for anybody so the bplc is doing our part to make bucknell a place where real intellectual diversity and real viewpoint diversity are possible and not only where they're possible but where they flourish and where they are embraced by faculty and students in administration alike as a positive good and we all of us avidly and enthusiastically partake in the joy true exchange and learning that's possible only when we interact with people who do not think exactly what we think it won't be easy to get there and some of us will resist it but we're committed to it when robbie george and cornell west were here just under two years ago under the aegis of the bpalc they opened their discussion by thanking us at bucknell and thanking us in the bplc for inviting them and for believing in the same vision of true intellectual moral and spiritual shared investigation and dialogue and then they said keep it up we intended you just that and we hope you'll join us now to the speaker and thank you for your patience uh i'm not going to say all the stuff you can already know by googling heather mcdonald if you do that you'll see manhattan institute city journal national bestselling author all sorts of interesting stuff here's something you probably don't know and you won't find all that readily if you look her up online in a previous life she planned to get a phd in english and teach in a university and she was working on that degree in the prestigious complete program of yale university reading the canon of deconstruction and post-structuralism and studying with its leading american lights people like jeffrey hartman paul demand etc in time though she figured out that there was no there there in deconstruction and she turned to the study of law and eventually received a jd from stanford but she knows the academic world view that she criticized criticizes in her new book from the inside and she knows it in fact far far better than most of the people who have denounced that book without reading it so that's worth pointing out one last thing the most important blurb this is in my view at least for a college audience like this one was somehow left off the back cover of the book but it's on the web page of the book and i think we all of us have something to learn from it so i want to end with that that blurb is by an african-american writer named deborah dickerson she's an editor of mother jones which is not exactly your garden variety far-right journal and deborah dickerson is not exactly your garden-variety far-right alt-right writer either here's what miss dickerson says about heather mcdonald's work and about her latest book and i quote her this is again deborah dickerson mother jones you need to know heather mcdonald she'll mess with your mind and make you either up your political cultural game or admit you were wrong so please join me in welcoming heather mcdonald well thank you so much professor riley thank you to the bucknell program for american leadership and citizenship for the invitation to speak at bucknell it's an honor to be here and thank you to the bucknellian and don't cross the line for all the free publicity i couldn't possibly have paid for that on my own so i'm very grateful uh let me let me state some core principles every student at bucknell is among the most privileged individuals in human history and i use the term privilege in a positive sense why because you have at your fingertips the thing that faust sold his soul for knowledge to be sure some bucknell students come from more prosperous backgrounds than others it doesn't matter once you are here everything is available to you on an equal basis you were surrounded by libraries that would have driven the renaissance humanists mad with envy and desire you can read every book that has ever been written you have access to cutting-edge scientific libraries laboratories and they are all open to you so long as you put in the effort to learn you can pursue languages literature and history at will and yet despite unfettered access to intellectual riches students across the country are being taught to think of themselves as victims and to see bigotry where none exists now where are students getting these views from a pervasive ideology that has taken over university bureaucracies and much of the disciplines that ideology holds that the most important thing about a person is his gonads and melanin and the discrimination based on those characteristics is the defining feature of american society in particular and american colleges in general students routinely announce their victimhood before an appreciative audience of diversity deanlitz and vice provosts who use the occasion to expand their bureaucratic domain any student however who thinks of himself as oppressed on a college campus is in the grip of a terrible delusion that will encumber him for the rest of his life the reality is this there has never been an environment more tolerant towards history's traditionally marginalized groups than an american campus traits that can still lead to death and warfare in other countries are actively celebrated in academia yet rather than remind students of these truths administrators and many professors encourage students to see everything through the lens of oppression and identity politics freshman orientations regularly include sessions in white privilege where students are taught their place on the ruthlessly competitive totem pole of victimhood you are either in a highly sought after oppressed class or in the oppressor class if you are assigned the oppressor role you can escape this benighted status by becoming an ally allies are something we usually associate with war and indeed the thinking on college campuses today is that females and minority students are at risk of their lives on a college campus from circumambient racism and sexism at brown students occupied the president's office and demanded exemption from such ordinary academic expectations as studying for class and taking exams because they said they were so focused on quote staying alive at brown at yale a mob of minority students surrounded a highly respected sociologist and cursed and screamed at him for two hours because his wife had sent an email suggesting that students can choose their own halloween costumes free from the ministrations of yale's discrimination police among the shouts of shut the up and you are disgusting that were directed at this mild-mannered left-wing professor was a cry of were dying from one of the ranchers allegedly referring to the endangered status of yale's minority students the diversity apparatus is growing everywhere and it's driving up tuition costs bucknell recently created a new associate dean of admissions for multicultural recruitment on top of the existing associate dean for diversity equity inclusion the associate provost for diversity equity and inclusion the president's diversity council the intercultural equity and advocacy office and multicultural student services i'm going to propose something radical here this anti-bias effort is unnecessary bucknell like colleges everywhere is filled with liberal well-meaning faculty who want all their students to succeed they are not bigots they are paragons of goodwill who treat all students fairly every faculty search is one concerted effort to find minority and female candidates who have not already been snapped up by better endowed colleges so fervently do campus administrators across the country desire the presence of so-called students of color that they routinely employ racial preferences in admissions at this very moment foreign students across the world are studying night and day in the hope of winning the privilege of attending this college and others like it these foreign students many of them students of color believe that once here boundless life-changing opportunity surrounds them are they wrong would they be better off staying in their home countries course catalogs the country over brim with courses based on students allegedly oppressed identity narrowly defined by race sexual orientation and gender preference this self-regard results in obsessive attention to an ever-growing set of minutiae that trapped the unwary into committing imaginary sins the following passage from an article on the use of she her pronouns by cisgender gay men is emblematic alex who identifies as a non-binary trans femme sometimes feels uncomfortable with cis men using she her towards them i.e alex quote with girl she her they i.e alex say if i'm socializing with cis gay men and that's what they're using to describe each other and to describe me there's a little bit of dissonance there because i'm not really sure if they're using that to validate my gender or if it's being used as it's used with other cis gay men now my point here is not to approve or challenge the distinctions being alleged it is to point out the extraordinary narcissism of this discourse it is an educational dead end the purpose of education is to take students out of their narrow petty selves into worlds vastly larger than their own contrast alex's naval gazing with the west's humanist tradition which was founded on the all-consuming desire to engage with real difference the radical difference of the past the 14th century florentine poet francesco petrarch triggered the explosion of knowledge known today as renaissance humanism with his discovery of libby's monumental history of rome and the letters of cicero but petrarch didn't just read the ancients he wanted to converse with them as well so he penned heartfelt letters in latin to virgil seneca horus and homer among others informing them of the fate of their writings and of rome itself after rebuking cicero for the vindictiveness revealed in his letters petrarch repented and wrote him again quote i fear that my last letter has offended you but i feel i know you as intimately as if i have always lived with you this burning desire to recover a lost culture propelled the renaissance humanists into remote castles and monasteries across europe to search for long-forgotten manuscripts the knowledge that many ancient texts were forever lost filled these scholars with despair nevertheless they exulted in their growing repossession of classical learning for which they felt in ralph waldo emerson's words a canine appetite in francois abele's exuberant gargantuar stories from the 1530s the giant gargantua sends off his son to study in paris joyfully conjuring up the languages greek latin hebrew chaldean and arabic that he expects him to master as well as the vast range of history law natural history and philosophy in short he concludes let me find you a perfect abyss of knowledge instead of this wild enthusiasm listen to a columbia university undergraduate grousing about colombia's beleaguered core curriculum quote who is this mozart this haydn these superior white men the core she said quote upholds the premises of white supremacy and racism no professor has ever defended our intellectual patrimony against such outbreaks of no nothingism without adding some pulling qualification about respect for diversity w.e.b du bois would have been stunned by the blinders of identity politics living during america's darkest period of hate du bois nevertheless heartbreakingly affirmed his affinity with all of western civilization quote i sit with shakespeare and he winces not across the color line i move arm in arm with balzac and dumas i summon aristotle and aurelius and what soul i will and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension frederick douglass likewise absorbed a color test for his reading at age 12 he discovered a collection of speeches by 18th century british orators every opportunity afforded me douglas wrote in his autobiography was spent in diligently perusing the collection which douglas called a quote rich treasure that gave tongue to thoughts which had frequently flashed through my soul and died away for want of utterance ralph ellison read marx freud t.s eliot pound gertrude stein and hemingway as a young man in mason county georgia books he said which quote seldom if ever mentioned negroes but which were to release him from whatever segregated idea i might have had of my human possibilities it requires real poverty of the imagination ellison concluded to think that self-understanding quote can come to a negro only through the example of other negroes were du bois douglas and ellison deluded if you believe the undergraduates from colleges across the country who have complained about having to read the western canon the answer is yes that is a remarkable judgment to make teaching students to view their inheritance through the trivializing lens of race gender and oppression is educational malpractice and it is changing the fabric of our world the drive to shut down ideas that challenge academic orthodoxies grows out of this preposterous conceit that students are at risk of their lives on college campuses this sensorious drive would also have perplexed our greatest civil rights crusaders who actually did face lethal hatred in 1860 a pro-slavery mob broke up an abolitionist meeting in boston held to commemorate the death of anti-slavery crusader john brown in response frederick douglass penned a pamphlet entitled a plea for free speech in boston slavery cannot tolerate free speech he wrote five years of its exercise would banish the auction block and break every chain in the south douglas understood that freedom of expression quote is the dread of tyrants it is the right which they first of all strike down end quote because it challenges authority martin luther king jr speaking in memphis the day before he was murdered called for the country to quote honor basic first amendment privileges understanding with douglas that those privileges protect minority rights against majority power the campus censors now hold the reins of power to define prescribable hate speech but do they really want to give that authority to oh i don't know donald trump finally campus identity politics have entered the stem fields which are under enormous pressure to hire by gender and race stem administrators now treat gender and race as scientific qualifications in faculty hiring searches across the country the most qualified candidates in physics astronomy chemistry and math are being sidelined in favor of so-called diverse applicants regardless of those applicants research record nationally diversity deans are tearing up shortlists for science hiring and demanding that those lists be reconfigured to contain above all more female candidates but being female is not an accomplishment and is certainly not one relevant to scientific achievements yet females in the hard sciences are now being preferred over their male colleagues hired earlier in their careers and with a thinner record of citations when an italian physicist at cern the european consortium for atomic physics pointed this out at a conference last year he was summarily fired his fate was adam braided by google's firing of computer engineer james damore in august 2017. damore's sin was to have penned a fact-based memo suggesting that the average career predilections of males and females helps explain why there is not 50 50 gender parity at google and other tech firms google's ceo echoed the language of academic victimology when he fired damore damore's memo he said made google's female workers feel quote unsafe and thus damore had to go when it comes to science china is ruthlessly meritocratic and doesn't give a damn about the so-called diversity of its labs we are putting our scientific edge at risk by introducing the irrelevancies of identity politics into scientific research we have bestowed on the faculty the greatest job in the world freed from the pressures of economic competition they are actually paid to spend their days wandering among the most sublime creations of mankind all we ask of them in return is that they sell their wares to ignorant undergraduates every fall insistent voices should rise from the academic department saying here is greatness and this is your best opportunity to absorb it here is aeschylus whose terrible choruses bear witness to catholic forces more unsettling than you can yet fathom here is mark twain habsburg vienna and the saint matthew passion here is the drama of western civilization out of whose constantly battling ideas evolved unprecedented individual freedom and unimagined scientific progress we must never blind ourselves to the grotesque violation of america's founding ideals that was slavery de jury and de facto segregation a violation that made a mockery of america's alleged commitment to equality at this point however there is no risk of underestimating america's past cruelty and violence it is the focus of most humanities and social science courses but it is a tragic waste of opportunity to read the past only through the lens of oppression rather than opening oneself to a vast and rich tradition whose accomplishments outweigh its flaws however contemptible and whose flaws are more than matched by those of every other culture past and present ignorance of the intellectual trajectory that led to the rule of law and the west's unimaginable prosperity puts those achievements at risk but humanistic learning is also an end in itself it is simply better to have escaped one's narrow petty self and entered minds far more subtle and vast than one's own than never to have done so the renaissance philosopher marcilio ficino said that a man lives as many millennia as are embraced by his knowledge of history one could add a man lives as many different lives as are embraced by his encounters with literature music and all the humanities and arts these forms of expression allow us to see and feel things that we would otherwise never experience society on a 19th century russian feudal estate for example or the perfect crystalline brooks and mossy shades of pastoral poetry or the exquisite langer of a chopin nocturne these are four precious years to lose yourself in beauty complexity irony tragedy and grandeur for years to encounter history's greatest minds grappling with mankind's greatest dilemmas we should be down on our knees in gratitude for the sublimity that has been bequeathed us you will get the most out of this great college if you reject the tribalism of identity politics and let yourself roam free as individuals among ideas and eloquence thank you for your attention and i look forward your questions people with microphones on uh two the two sides of the room and folks would just put their hands up you want to ask questions uh we will we'll get around to that we're eager to entertain those questions for for a bit of time because we're we're still fairly early in the evening do you want to stay seat uh standing here okay um i just wanted to say thank you for speaking i was one of the students in the bucknellian who probably wrote in defense of your speech because i think it's very dangerous to have counter events and to suppress conservative voices um because that that's real on this campus so thank you for coming out um i just want to ask like the term like race like like from um a lot of students on this campus associate you with like racism or sexism so how do you how do you i guess how do we try to like um challenge the status quo without being called like a racist or sexist yeah that's a question i get on college campuses everywhere you will be called that that this is something you're gonna if if you challenge the dominant ideology of victimhood you will be called that uh and you just have to get used to it but what i would point out is simply empirically it is the case that there is no racism at bucknell there is not i'm sorry and for uh the adults on campus to encourage anybody in that ide in that misperception is wrong uh i am fully confident that every faculty member here is open-minded and as i say wants all of his or her students to succeed you point to me to any restrictions on classes any restrictions on who uses libraries as long as you put in the effort to learn at bucknell you can go as far as you want and the reality again is this bucknell like every other college is twisting itself into knots at every faculty hiring committee to try to find females and and uh phds of color to higher that is simply the reality uh and it is true in graduate admissions and undergraduate admissions as well so i i sympathize with the to be the target of name calling and i've you know it's it's one thing for an outsider to criticize it's another to live within a community and to have to figure out a way of daily uh modus operandi and and i i respect enormously those students who are advocating for a greater diversity of viewpoints and are trying to challenge the dominant ideology because i know how much courage that takes and i i was in college at a time that was much less politicized i graduated from college in 78 and as professor riley mentioned though i wasted a huge amount of my college career in uh blind ignorant obeisance to some very crazy literary theories um nevertheless identity politics had not hit multiculturalism had not hit feminism and not hit at least in the disciplines and the choice of books so i was allowed to read books without ever thinking to complain that as a female i was not reading enough other females instead i was allowed to read the greatest works in the english tradition and i don't care who wrote them all i care is are these works of utter brilliance and insight into the human condition and examples of a use of language that lifts me out of my daily drone-like ignorance today though you are in a very different situation it is hard not to have to take sides in politics the politics have entered the classroom uh with a vengeance and with a sense of utter sense of entitlement i don't think they belong there i don't as we're discussing earlier today at dinner i i would keep current affairs away as far as possible but but you guys are in the throes of it and um i don't know frankly how i would have where i would have ended up i was i probably i may have well ended up protesting me outside i was a a liberal by default so i don't know but anyway those of you who are trying to bring diverse opinions and perspectives congratulations and keep it up i just want to say thank you for being here thank you um so my question for you is sort of what what do you believe the future is to hold for college campuses like ours and others if there is to be no viewpoint diversity well they the real question is what's the future for american society because they are pumping out the america's elites and and we see in this presidential campaign that identity politics are dominant at least in one party and and i'm sure how long it's gonna be only in one party uh on college campuses there are certain ideas that are simply off limits the assumption is is that we have already answered all of the challenging questions that explain our world today there's only a certain set of explanations that are allowed uh especially when looking at social and economic realities if if one sees any uh disparity in outcome in today's world the only allowable explanation on a college campus and now throughout the media and through a lot of the political environment the only allowable explanation for that disparity is discrimination what is not allowed to be said is a set of alternative hypotheses which is that behind certain outcomes disparate outcomes may be differences in individual behavior individual preference culture and academic skills this again is something that comes up in the stem fields is it only allowable to say that the only possible explanation for the lack of 50 50 gender parity uh in the big tech firms or in in engineering departments is or computer science or math the only allowable explanation today is is gender bias i disagree i think there's far more robust explanations out there that have to do with the average career predilections of men and women i'm not talking about any individual i'm not talking about any individual female in this room who for all i know is going to be our next nobel physicist or or mathematician for some of the math prizes and but but but if you look at averages and distributions of certain psychological predilections of risk risk preference competition as well as high-end and very low-end math skills where males are the absolute clueless most clueless math dummies among us those that cannot add two and two are overwhelmingly male as well as those that are the absolute highest end of math advanced skills are also disproportionately male that comes into play as well that was something that the former president of harvard larry summers advanced as a hypothesis that got him fired from his job you are not allowed to say these things if it turns out that the the dominant explanation which is that racism and sexism and any number of phobias are wrong and our public policies are geared to solve that problem which is not the real reason for disparities then we're wasting a lot of money so the lack of viewpoint diversity on college campuses is not only not exposing students to a range of views but again it has enormous implications for public policy thank you it's also i mean if you the the basic ideas of free speech are in intellectual humility you know the sense of you don't you don't necessarily know everything and and maybe their consensus changes and one needs to constantly test one's own views against other competing views in the marketplace of ideas and that intellectual humility is what is absolutely absent in the desire or the claim of the right to shut down views that you don't agree with because the assumption is is that we've reached the truth and there's nothing more that needs to be said about these matters and that if you just look at the history of any civilization uh received wisdom changes constantly and uh it should it should change with as much input from people uh as possible without declaring certain perspectives a priori off limits i have a question over here heather oh yes so my question is where do we go from here since the faculty hiring and and tenure and promotion process is largely one of self-governance where in my observation it's becoming starting to show eerie similarities to the process by which greek organizations on campus choose their members as opposed to rigorous examination of records how do we break the cycle and and get to a more traditional view of higher education well you guys are the ones that are living this so you're in a sense more of an expert than i am i i it's very tough i've as i said earlier tonight i'm actually one of the solutions that has been advocated is um affirmative action for conservatives i'm against that i don't think that faculties should be hired based on political ideology and because preferences of any sort gender preferences which i'm sure i have been the so-called beneficiary of gender preferences all my life because at least starting in let's say the 90s when this became like a national obsession which i find insulting uh and and uh just recently i was asked to be on some uh fox news show and it was on income inequality and they said but we really want a female on the panel and i said basically to heck with you i mean and and it was it shows how much the identity politics trumps substantive knowledge because i do not purport and put myself forward as an expert on income inequality that is you know a very specialized field it's not me but they were desperate for a female so that became the main criterion which i met that's ridiculous so preferences stigmatize their beneficiaries inevitably there are many people within the preferred categories again whether it's gender or race who absolutely are competitive and would qualify in a gender blind or qual or colorblind system but they are stigmatized by virtue of being in a preferred class and they will never know it did i get promoted based on merit or not there's a law professor at yale uh stephen carter who wrote a book in the 1990s called reflections of an affirmative action baby and he was quite honest and said i've i've probably my career is due in some considerable measure to racial preferences and this was very disturbing to him because he didn't know you know was he measuring up to his peers so the idea that we're going to create the viewpoint diversity with preferences for conservatives i would uh reject because again those people hired under that sort of affirmative action preferential program will be stigmatized the assumption will always be you're here not because you were viewed as competitive but because you were the not because you were the best this is what stephen carter talks about it's not that you're the best in in carter's terms it's your that the best black and it'd be the same for conservatives or you're the best female it's not that you're the best academic it's you're the best conservative academic and you don't want to be in that position so one thing um i i don't know i i would just hope that we can start shaming the hiring committees not into looking for conservatives per se but in acknowledging their own fallibility and that there are traditions that are being ignored that have validity and that their own research will be the stronger for it if they can be challenged by other views i think alumni have to start pressuring their colleges to push back against the politician i don't think alumni should be giving money to their colleges sorry guys but i don't unless you can be absolutely sure that those colleges that your alma mater is committed to making sure that nobody graduates without having been exposed to the great works of western civilization and has been exposed to a variety of viewpoints other than that don't give your college another dime there's a hand back there hi um so i'm a senior i study biology um one thing i've been taught is to trust data and not rhetoric so i'm wondering what kind of data do you have specifically about hiring for faculty where the people who are being hired in your words the females and people of color phd candidates are somehow worse than the alternative well i i advise you to look up the paper i mentioned by alessandro strumia that did a very complicated analysis of the publishing records of uh females and males in theoretical physics and he found that females were being hired with much much thinner research records their number of citations was a fraction of the males who were hired they were hired much earlier in their careers there's been studies of of of simulated hiring chechi and williams did a study that showed that females are preferred by vast amounts in every stem field but economics i recently looked at the admissions data at cornell university this is for undergraduate admissions at the engineering school at cornell students applying to the undergraduate college declare where they are likely to want to end up majoring so you apply to the engineering school cornell engineering admits females at a 300 percent higher rate than male applicants so it's got a lot many many more male applicants than female applicants but because of these gender preferences they end up with about a 50 50 male female engineering class now when you look at math sats males score considerably higher on average on on math than females so the chance that these females who've been admitted with a 300 percent higher chance of admissions are showing are outperforming the males who were rejected on their the most objective measures possible which is the math s.a.t is very very slight so and there's data there's anecdotes again i have spoken with faculty at astrophysics electrical engineering in the university of california schools one electrical engineering department had come up with its three finalists this was after the 20 2008 recession finally they got the opportunity to hire somebody so they did all their searches they interviewed people they came up with their short list of three candidates and their dean said unacceptable go back do it over again because the three candidates were all male i don't know what their their ethnic or national origins were and this became a back and forth back and forth where so they brought in for interviewing a israeli female candidate who simply did not have the same scientific qualifications as the people that they had laboriously carefully and rigorously chosen and the dean would basically was standing his ground and kept demanding re-reruns of the vote finally this time he backed down but other times that doesn't happen there are diversity deans now within science departments that are exerting similar pressure the university of california davis in order to diversify its ranks in science has an interesting idea which is to take scientific faculty hiring outside of the departmental structure so it's not that the physics department or biology department evaluates the faculty candidates instead the evaluation is from a university-wide committee that includes the uc davis uh vice chancellor of equity diversity and inclusion a few deans here and there now i submit that that a non-depart the departmental hiring structure as my science friends have been to have told me is the last bowl work for meritocratic standards it is the people within the field who understand what the cutting edge work is and what the particular needs of that department are when you take those hiring decisions outside and give them to people with a diversity agenda again i'm not talking data here i'm talking about common sense and instinct something is going to change there is uh every scientific grant-making foundation now whether it's the national science foundation nih is making a priority of diversity mantles are now verboten do you guys know what mammals are okay well listen up because this is the wave of the future a mantle is an a panel composed of majority males and males mammals are now verboten the head of of nah francis collins has declared that he is no longer going to participate in any scientific gathering that has any mantles on it uc san diego proudly announced earlier this year that it was putting on a conference on microbes that had only female conferees now fanuls are not just okay they're glorious now do we know that those finalists were the most competitively qualified in the field given the pressure for gender diversity i don't know but i have my doubts because any time and thomas soule has shown this anytime you introduce an irrelevant characteristic to accomplishment like gender into a selection process that process inevitably gets watered down do you mind if i ask a quick follow-up same person okay so i'm just i'm kind of struggling here to to meet you on this so i know at least at bucknell and i i'll i'll say this as someone who's never hired a person in my life right you know at least about what i'm speaking at least at bucknell sorry oh okay i didn't hear what you said right um and i've never hired a person in my life i'll say that but i mean you're very successful at what you do it seems do you honestly believe that like like seeing people's measured publishments and stuff is the best indicator of whether to be a good instructor i just can't like i can't see that well i doubt it would be nice if bucknell was hiring based on instructors but most most departments these days in the sciences want to be contributors of new knowledge i don't i don't think that instruction comes up i mean a lot of schools now are paying lip service to classroom instruction but believe me the game is all about publishing record and whether you will advance the academic ranking of a scientific department so that's what they're looking for and of course i don't know any other measure that is more reliable it may not be perfect but science citation record is really universally used as one of the most important objective measures of the importance of a scientist's work whether it has been influential and has has advanced the body of knowledge okay total agreement excellent up wait a minute hi i'm just wondering um thank you for coming to speak i was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how you define feminism and if you would consider yourself a feminist well i'm i i've not thought about how i defined feminism i probably would not consider myself a feminist as currently practiced which is what looks to me to be ongoing resentment and a sense of victimhood i do not and i also i guess i reject again i don't regard my being female as an accomplishment i don't even regard it as particularly interesting i don't think it qualifies me for anything in particular beyond being able to conceive and bear children other than that it is not it is not something that i think is is usefully taken into account in most walks of life so to the extent that feminism today what i see and i'm speaking just uh off the top of my cuff here but i think this is relatively accurate i think you will if you give me some flexibility is committed to a vision of the west that sees patriarchy rape culture and oppression everywhere that is something i would definitely separate myself from i would like to see more feminists go to afghanistan or nepal where women are forced outside in huts when they're menstruating there was recently a big kerfuffle in another middle eastern country about whether you were allowed in in india into a hindu temple if you were menstruating where there is routine brutality female genital mutilation actual misogyny that would be useful but to the extent that feminists choose to stay here and and protest their alleged victimized status i i don't think they're they're going to where the problems really are some colleges have decided to get rid of sats sats can you speak up a little bit some colleges have decided to get rid of sats and gres and i was wondering what you think about that and also if you could talk about a little bit about the harvard admission case going on okay yeah the question is some colleges are getting rid of sats gres are making them optional um i think that this is a way to be able to have their cake and eat it too with regards to racial preferences it's the colleges are completely hypocritical and contradictory on this matter on the one hand when they're talking about racial preferences they say that sats are useless worthless they don't predict anything when it comes to admitting white and asian students they inevitably calculate sat scores to the .001 percent and rank students accordingly making them optional means that students with high sats will submit them those that aren't won't they can maintain their college rankings which are based on the scores of their students and and be able to practice racial preferences with even a greater degree of opacity than is the norm the gres astronomy harvard has gotten rid of its astronomy physics gres because they have a disparate impact on females because females do not score as well on physics so get rid of get rid of the gre that solves the problem i advocate as objective a set of measures as possible for admissions my goal is to put every admissions officer out of a job because having recently written on the harvard admissions case and read the language out of the harvard official admissions uh materials it is absolutely nauseating and insulting the self-righteousness of these admissions officers and the types of judgments that they feel qualified to make about incoming students the questions they ask that they proudly publish for students to know things like you know how how rich and emotional life are you how mature are you how have you what sort of contribution will you make are you courageous are you a good person uh have you shown uh resilience would your dorm mates like to be a part of you these are absurd judgments of character for an adult to make about a 16 or 17 year old the admissions process now which is governed by these self-righteous preening artistes who think of themselves as forging this utopian community is now determining the shape of american childhood it is the reality that parents are determining what their child does from age three on in the hope of crafting a tantalizing college resume this is absurd there are there are pleasures of childhood which should be experienced on their own regardless of whether it will interest the admissions officer at bucknell or amherst and if you want to see what a childhood looked like before the helicopter parenting i i recommend to you menken's autobiography happy days which is just an absolutely delightful description of what it was like when children were allowed to have a realm of freedom to explore if you want a fictional version of it and one that is an absolute delight of ironic sardonic language i recommend penrod by booth park tarkington but right now it is just absurd that these college administrators are have so much influence about about american society so frankly i would go exclusively to objective measures like sats the harvard lawsuit to me is a and i wrote about this in the current new criterion it it it is an ex exposes the utter bankruptcy of the current constitutional jurisprudence about racial preferences it is a rhetoric that has come out of the supreme court to its utter shame it is filled with a whole set of logical contradictions the idea that a preference can just be a plus and not a negative no excuse me any preference is zero sum anytime you are admitting one student on the irrelevancies of gender or race you are not admitting a more competitive student who has not fit into those categories uh the idea that that uh holistic admissions that that race is just one little tipping factor in a very subtle calculation made by these admissions artistes no when you have preferences it is the determining factor harvard's black population undergraduate population is now 14 without racial preferences it would be point two-thirds of a percent so anybody who says that preferences at harvard are not determinative is just lying and harvard's preferences are less than than schools in in lower tiers so i would throw out the entire supreme court jurisprudence as for the claim in this particular case that harvard is discriminating against asian americans of course it is of course it is any school that is exercising racial preferences now is discriminating against asian americans get over it if you're not willing to defend that then you're you're lying to yourself because asians thanks to a culture that is supremely focused on academic achievement are whooping everybody else's ass and they are massively competitive and in order to raise to engineer the desired racial diversity you have to set and this is what goes on asians have to meet the highest possible academic qualifications to be even considered a asian male from a middle class background applying to harvard that whose academic index would give him a 25 admission if he were black with that same academic index would have a 90 chance of admission so test scores that are automatically disqualifying for asians are in many cases the esplanade studies showed this are automatic admit scores if you fall into the so-called underrepresented minority category so of course asians are discriminated against as they are my guess is at bucknell perhaps not but i can tell you they're certainly discriminated against in many many other colleges hi i um was just wondering if um you would be willing to speak about what you deem to be the campus rape be willing to elaborate on some of your thoughts about what you deem to be the campus rape myth and maybe you could maybe provide some statistics or just kind of your evidence to support that claim i would just be i think a lot of people on campus have been talking a lot about that and sure we'd all be willing to hear about that okay well the claim is is that there is a a very dangerous violent rape culture on many campuses and the uh sexual assault rates are enormous you know it started out one in four then it got a little little pulled back possibly one in five but you still see the one in four rate of sexual assault for females over the course of their career let's put that one in four number one in five number in perspective detroit has the highest violent crime rate in the country if you combine that's and that's combining all four of what is known as the index felonies this is what the fbi aggregates for violent felonies in its annual crime report known as the uniform crime report so that includes murder uh rape aggravated assault and robbery so detroit our most violent city four of the four violent felonies its annual violent crime rate is two percent its rape rate is less than you know it's it's it's way way less than uh one percent so we're talking here a sexual assault rate that is magnitudes higher than what we see in anything that has been uh determined by by police agencies that and is higher than what you've seen in say the sexual rape is a tool of war and african civil wars now if it were the case that to be a female on a college campus was to be the target and the victim the realized victim of this ongoing sexual violence i would hypothesize of the following set of responses that there would have been a movement to create single sex schools where females can study in safety years ago i would hypothesize that mothers would be demanding that colleges revise their admissions criteria to stop admitting all these rapists instead what you see year after year is the stampede of females to get into college gets more and more intense females are now the majority of college students nationwide i would also assume that if these uh let's say the worst case scenario the frat parties are uh predictable and inevitable loci of of rape that females being the smart individuals that they are would stay away would practice justified and normal and commonsensical self-protection instead every weekend in places that have the big frat culture the females continue to come in i have asked campus rape administrators okay you believe that this is something that your students are experiencing this is the second most violent crime that any female can experience in her life short of murder i assume that your priority is first and foremost the safety of your female students there is one thing that has the highest chance of protecting students from any risk of campus sexual assault which is for females don't drink yourself blotto and don't get into bed with a guy you barely know do those two things and i can guarantee you you will not be the ex the recipient of what is called on campus campus rape and i ask campus rape administrators i assume that you're your priority is safety why don't you send out that message of prudence and and self-restraint because you have you as a female student have the power you can choose how you behave and the answer i inevitably get is well rape is never the victim's fault that's not the issue it's a question of can you take prophylactic behavior but the administrators are more interested in preserving the principle of male fault than in protecting females we don't say okay there's been burglaries on this particular block i'm not going to lock my doors because burglary is never the victim's fault no it is perfectly reasonable and commonsensical to try to take measures that will minimize the chance of crime putting up lights you know not not leaving your your personal data available or not leaving your your laptop on a table true it is not your fault if it gets stolen but it would be wiser to take those actions which you can take to minimize the chance so i am not willing to believe that the campus rape administrators seriously think that they are sitting atop an epidemic of campus rape uh if they are unwilling to send that message some other data the the mother of all campus rape surveys by mary koss a researcher at the university of arizona from 80 from the 1980s 86 ms magazine published it the problem with rape surveys up to that point is when you ask victims if they've been raped they tend to say no which is not a good answer if you're a campus rape investigator so caught what cost did was disaggregate the question into component parts which she then re-aggregated and came up with her one in four number but then when she went back and asked the people whom she had classified as rape victims have you been raped 73 percent said no i haven't so coss was violating a cardinal virtue of feminism which is believe the female she also found that 42 percent of the people she classified as rape victims went on to have sex again with their alleged rapist now again i submit that there is no more horrifying terrifying earth-shattering identity shattering experience than rape the idea that i would voluntarily have sex again with my rapist is is inconceivable but every survey that has been done since then whether it's the justice department or the now i don't know they're coming out every five years or so the aau studies find the same thing students don't report their experience to the authorities what they and the overwhelming reason that they don't report what the surveyors classify as campus rape is they say it was not serious enough to report rape the second most violent felony that exists that the alleged victims as classified by rape researchers say is not serious enough to report so yes i am a skeptic and i i would i would if this were happening i would see a transformation of the academic environment and instead all i see is the status quo there's a question so several states have contemplated legislation that would enable the compensation of college athletes so were that to ever become an ncaa policy how do you see that interacting with title ix like how would that interaction play out hmm interesting so you're suggesting that there would be equal pay amendments that the college athletes the female teams would have to be paid equally to the male football teams that are bringing in all the damn alumni donors dollars is that there's always like a subtext to a question so tell me you don't this is one of the insights of of uh german hermeneutics is that every question in heidegger presupposes an answer so give me a hint what do you think the answer is well i i don't believe what you just said should happen personally i don't think college athletes should be directly compensated in that way but were that to happen then i guess what is the justification of the defenders of title ix in not advocating for that policy as it seems a little bit ludicrous i see so you think they should be united with the and the athletes that are demanding pay i i don't know to me the i i'd have to think about that more frankly i'm i'm i'm not quite seeing this um i think for me the live issue today is the amazing situation where you have feminism willing to step aside for the trans moment every so often there's these clarifying moments where you see who's now how the the totem pole of victimhood is arranged and who's on who's the top dog victim and these days it's now the trans movement that has trumped everybody else and it is fascinating to me 15 years ago if you told me that biological males were setting athletic records in track and swimming for females that will never be beaten you know the the the male trans athletes that are competing as females are setting track records that no female is going to beat the fem i would have predicted 15 years ago the feminist would say get out of here this is just like males to come in and muscle in on our territory and yet again take take away you know something that females succeed in now by and large the feminists are mum with a few exceptions like martina navitrolova that have said this is crazy uh you know there are real biological differences in body mass and strength and in speed between males and females and to expect them to compete on equal terms is ridiculous but that's not happening and i have my ex hypothesis for why it's not and for what's ultimately driving the transmitter which i think is ultimately ignores to the benefit of feminism but at the moment it's a very curious thing as far as paying athletes generally and this is i know this is not your question but um i'm i'm i'm somewhat sympathetic to that because it's a very weird thing uh to see these alumni pouring in to the college athletes and uh some of the race differences are pretty odd so given the enormous amounts that colleges are deriving from these sports teams it kind of serves them right as far as i'm concerned to spread the wealth a little bit okay thank you very much for coming thank you [Music] you

Channel: Bucknell Leaders

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Length: 81min 18sec (4878 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 14 2021