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Friends of Pickings, Stephan and Abby Thernstrom, write on the 60th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education.
In conventional liberal circles, there is never any good news about race. Thus, as the 60th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in the Brown v. Board of Education school-desegregation case nears, mainstream media outlets lately have been depicting American schools as resegregated.
Thus we read that in New York City “children trundle from segregated neighborhoods to segregated schools, living a hermetic reality,” the New York Times reports. The Los Angeles Times describes more Latino children increasingly attending segregated schools, while the segregation of black students is virtually unchanged from the early 1970s. That conclusion is drawn from the work of a research team led by UCLA professor Gary Orfield, the left’s go-to man on race and schooling. For decades Prof. Orfield has been successfully peddling a story of dashed hopes for school desegregation.
On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court declared in its unanimous Brown decision that state-imposed, single-race public schools violated the 14th Amendment. Separating children on the basis of race, the justices said, denied black pupils “equal educational opportunities” and hence deprived them of the “equal protection” of the laws, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote. The watershed decision marked the beginning of the end of the Jim Crow South, applying to more than 10 million children who were enrolled in color-coded schools in 21 states and the District of Columbia. They made up roughly 40% of the nation’s public-school students, and more than two-thirds of all African-American pupils.
Some commentators (thinking wishfully) hailed Brown as a historic vindication of Justice John Marshall Harlan’s magnificent dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson , the 1896 decision that upheld the constitutionality of state laws requiring racial segregation of public facilities. Justice Harlan, a lonely voice on the court, declared the Constitution to be “colorblind.” But the Brown court said nothing of the sort. It spoke only of segregation’s psychological harm to black children and did not bar all racial classifications, as the NAACP had hoped it would. Thus racial preferences in higher education, contracting and employment—often called affirmative action—have been periodically sanctioned by the court. …
Seth Mandel asks an important question. “What if college is making people stupid?”
International Monetary Fund director Christine Lagarde has become the latest commencement speaker to be chased off by American academia’s guardians of the eternally closed minds. After protests over Lagarde’s planned graduation speech at SmithCollege from professors and students, Lagarde bowed out, echoing Condoleezza Rice’s tactful statement about not wanting to derail the celebratory atmosphere of the day.
The Washington Post sums it up perfectly: “The commencement speaker purity bug has hit Smith College.” Calling it a “bug” is the right classification, for it is certainly both a defect and an apparently contagious infection that demonstrates the extent to which American universities are failing their students while pocketing the tuition money (about $45,000 in Smith’s case). …
… The question, then, is not whether American universities are producing ever more totalitarian-minded brats. Of course they are reinforcing such closed-mindedness; they are leftist institutions steeped in leftist values. This is a problem, and should be addressed. But the out-of-control speech police on college campuses, combined with the unwillingness to even listen to those who might disagree with them, raises the distinct possibility that colleges are producing brainless authoritarians.
What if college, in other words, is making the next generation stupid? Not uniformly, of course. There will always be exceptions, and there may even be a rebellion against what is increasingly making college the most expensive babysitting service in the modern world. But college administrators are now faced with the conundrum of students who pay them gobs of money to keep them uninformed and shielded from critical thinking. It’s a challenge administrators have to deal with–and the sooner, the better
Ruth Wisse, professor of Yiddish, has more.
… Assaults on intellectual and political freedom have been making headlines. Pressure from faculty egged on by Muslim groups induced BrandeisUniversity last month not to grant Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the proponent of women’s rights under Islam, an intended honorary degree at its convocation. This was a replay of 1994, when Brandeis faculty demanded that trustees rescind their decision to award an honorary degree to Jeane Kirkpatrick, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. In each case, a faculty cabal joined by (let us charitably say) ignorant students promoted the value of repression over the values of America’s liberal democracy.
Opponents of free speech have lately chalked up many such victories: New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly prevented from speaking at Brown University in November; a lecture by Charles Murray canceled by Azusa Pacific University in April; Condoleezza Rice, former secretary of state and national-security adviser under the George W. Bush administration, harassed earlier this month into declining the invitation by Rutgers University to address this year’s convocation.
Most painful to me was the Harvard scene several years ago when the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies, celebrating its 50th anniversary, accepted a donation in honor of its former head tutor Martin Peretz, whose contributions to the university include the chair in Yiddish I have been privileged to hold. His enemies on campus generated a “party against Marty” that forced him to walk a gauntlet of jeering students for having allegedly offended Islam, while putting others on notice that they had best not be perceived guilty of association with him.
Universities have not only failed to stand up to those who limit debate, they have played a part in encouraging them. The modish commitment to so-called diversity replaces the ideal of guaranteed equal treatment of individuals with guaranteed group preferences in hiring and curricular offerings.
Females and members of visible minorities are given handicaps (as in golf). Courses are devised to inculcate in students the core lesson that (in the words of one recent graduate, writing online at the Huffington Post) “harmful structural inequalities persist on the basis of class, race, sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity in the U.S.” On too many campuses, as in a funhouse mirror, ideological commitment to diversity has brought about its opposite: ideological hegemony, which is much more harmful to the life of the mind than the alleged structural inequalities that social engineering set out to correct. …
Continuing the theme, Thomas Sowell writes on kampus kangaroo kourts.
There seems to be a full-court press on to get colleges to “do something” about rape on campus.
But there seems to be remarkably little attention paid to two crucial facts: (1) rape is a crime and (2) colleges are not qualified to be law-enforcement institutions.
Why are rapists not reported to the police and prosecuted in a court of law?
Apparently this is because of some college women who say that they were raped and are dissatisfied with a legal system that does not automatically take their word for it against the word of someone who has been accused and denies the charge.
There seem to be a dangerously large number of people who think that the law exists to give them whatever they want — even when that means denying other people the same rights that they claim for themselves.
Nowhere is this self-centered attitude more common than on college campuses. And nowhere are such attitudes more encouraged than by the Obama administration’s Justice Department, which is threatening colleges that don’t handle rape issues the politically correct way — that is, by presuming the accused to be guilty and not letting Constitutional safeguards get in the way.
Anything that fits the “war on women” theme is seen as smart politics in an election year. The last thing Attorney General Eric Holder’s Justice Department is interested in is justice.
The track record of academics in other kinds of cases is not the least bit encouraging as regards the likelihood of impartial justice. Even on many of our most prestigious college campuses, who gets punished for saying the wrong thing and who gets away with mob actions depends on which groups are in vogue and which are not. …
The mis-education of the past thirty years has produced what Eliot Cohen calls the “selfie-taking, hashtagging teenage administration.”
… Often, members of the Obama administration speak and, worse, think and act, like a bunch of teenagers. When officials roll their eyes at Vladimir Putin‘s seizure of Crimea with the line that this is “19th-century behavior,” the tone is not that different from a disdainful remark about a hairstyle being “so 1980s.” When administration members find themselves judged not on utopian aspirations or the purity of their motives—from offering “hope and change” to stopping global warming—but on their actual accomplishments, they turn sulky. As teenagers will, they throw a few taunts (the president last month said the GOP was offering economic policies that amount to a “stinkburger” or a “meanwich”) and stomp off, refusing to exchange a civil word with those of opposing views.
In a searing memoir published in January, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates describes with disdain the trash talk about the Bush administration that characterized meetings in the Obama White House. Like self-obsessed teenagers, the staffers and their superiors seemed to forget that there were other people in the room who might take offense, or merely see the world differently. Teenagers expect to be judged by intentions and promise instead of by accomplishment, and their style can be encouraged by irresponsible adults (see: the Nobel Prize committee) who give awards for perkiness and promise rather than achievement.
If the United States today looks weak, hesitant and in retreat, it is in part because its leaders and their staff do not carry themselves like adults. They may be charming, bright and attractive; they may have the best of intentions; but they do not look serious. They act as though Twitter and clenched teeth or a pout could stop invasions or rescue kidnapped children in Nigeria. They do not sound as if, when saying that some outrage is “unacceptable” or that a dictator “must go,” that they represent a government capable of doing something substantial—and, if necessary, violent—if its expectations are not met. And when reality, as it so often does, gets in the way—when, for example, the Syrian regime begins dousing its opponents with chlorine gas, as it has in recent weeks, despite solemn deals and red lines—the administration ignores it, hoping, as teenagers often do, that if they do not acknowledge a screw-up no one else will notice. …