The Diversity Myth

by David O Sacks

  On March 13, 1991, the House oversight hearing publicly detailed the list of waste and abuse. Undaunted, the president reasserted his regime's innocence the next day, maintaining that “the hearing brought forth no evidence of wrongdoing at Stanford.”58 If “wrongdoing” were defined only in legal terms, Kennedy may have been correct. No intentional fraud could be proven. But for those operating under a more common sense definition of “wrongdoing,” the hearing was hardly a vindication for Stanford. “Every single taxpayer knows the real issue here,” proclaimed Representative Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), who earned a bachelor's degree in political science at Stanford in 1971 and whose mother works at Stanford's Green Library: “Billing the government for yachts and parties and baubles is wrong. Frittering away scarce government resources can't be justified under any circumstances and any interpretation of the rules.”59

  Kennedy's arrogant posture made him a particularly deserving target of recrimination. “The events today did not reflect well on the university or on you,” Dingell lectured Kennedy, “or upon those who appear with you.”60 Kennedy's failure to admit the slightest wrongdoing only magnified the hearing's fallout. The San Jose Mercury News captured an angry public's sentiment: “The list of questionable expenses has grown too long to be attributed simply to bookkeeping errors. What has emerged is a picture of a greedy institution that saw the federal government as a vast reservoir to be tapped. The university negotiated the highest ‘overhead’ reimbursement rate it could and then threw in every possible expense into the pool to justify that rate.”61

  These financial improprieties had been no worse than many of the other abuses at Stanford—from the sacking of Western Culture to speech codes and the vilification of nonconformists. Each was a result of enforced orthodoxy, each a reflection of the same unyielding arrogance. But the financial abuses captured the public imagination like nothing else had. In curricular debates and even in rules of conduct, the public was generally willing to defer to the judgment of academic experts. But the financial abuses were different, because they involved tangible items that were obviously extravagant, if not totally inappropriate. No special expertise was needed for taxpayers to determine that their money had been misspent; they wanted it back.

  Even many in the Stanford community began to suspect that things had gone badly off track. Observers on campus characterized Kennedy's appearance before the House as a disaster for the university.62 Stanford faculty also were alarmed: Stanford's damaged reputation, as a university that wasted money, might make research grants more difficult to obtain in the future. Even some of the campus leftists joined the rising chorus of dissent. Professor John Manley, in a letter to President Kennedy, declared: “What is Stanford's image under your leadership? It is that of a venal institution caught, red-handed, robbing the American people. It is that of a university that cares more about getting every last dollar than moral issues.”63

  The president scrambled to revitalize his image. Speaking in Los Angeles on March 23, 1991, he told alumni what they wanted to hear: “I take full responsibility for the management of the institution, and I am sorry to have let you down.”64 But the damage control was too little, too late. By the beginning of April, the president felt compelled to respond to rumors of his imminent termination: “I hope you know that I would never prolong my own stay in the Presidency against Stanford's best interest. But I have good support from the Board, from most of the University's friends—and, I believe, from most of my faculty colleagues.”65

  Kennedy had miscalculated for the last time. Although many trustees had been friends of Kennedy's, they suspected that the barrage of bad press would not end until his departure. Stanford's Napoleon had suffered his Waterloo. Under pressure from the Board, Kennedy announced his resignation on July 29, 1991, effective August 1992. In the following months, almost all the university's top financial officials followed suit. It is “very difficult,” Kennedy finally perceived, “for the person identified with a problem to be the spokesman for its solution.”66

  The Great Experimenters

  Like a company selling an inferior product, Stanford's administration hoped to compensate with advertising efforts. And because the quality of the educational product is far more difficult to measure than the quality of something like an automobile, such a public relations effort did represent a fairly viable short-term strategy. In the long term, however, the public relations gloss could not hide the continuing abuses. On the contrary, Stanford's problems were allowed to grow unchecked and became all the more noticeable.

  Indeed, as the multicultural revolution proceeded in the late 1980s and early 1990s and on-campus abuses mounted, Stanford's administration moved energetically to weaken the remaining checks on its authority. The most important such check consisted of the school's alumni. Up to that time, their primary source of information about the university had been the Stanford administration. Official university publications cultivated alumni with slick features about their alma mater, recalling fond memories of an institution that in truth no longer existed. But with the massive media focus on Stanford brought by the Western Culture debate and the indirect cost scandal, the administration's monopoly on information began to break down. This represented a tremendous problem for the administration: If alumni were to become aware of campus happenings, they might stop contributing money to the university. That would lead to accountability and force an immediate change.

  To combat rival sources of information, the administration placed more and more resources into putting a positive “spin” on campus happenings. Campus instructors, including Professor Rosaldo (see chapter 1) and Professor Jackson (see chapter 3), began to spend time off-campus, to “educate” alumni about how everybody else was “misinformed.” In the aftermath of the CIV debate, some of the new instructors were flown around the country to alumni gatherings, to rebut charges made in the Wall Street Journal and other major newspapers.

  Symptomatic of the new stress on public relations was a nasty fight over the control and direction of Stanford's News Service, which publishes the Stanford Observer, a monthly alumni newsmagazine. Bob Beyers, a 28-year veteran who headed Stanford's News Service and was the recipient of many journalistic awards, was pushed to resign.67 According to Robert Freelen, then vice president for public affairs, the university was not served by a news bureau that reported campus failures. Although the administration admitted that Beyers “is regarded by virtually everyone…as an individual of extraordinary dedication, loyalty, and commitment,” it nevertheless condemned him for being “mired in a culture of independence” and for taking “a black-and-white, absolutist approach to questions about how the News Service should operate.”68 A “culture of independence” was not compatible with the culture of deference on which the great experiment hinged. Beyers resigned in January 1990 because the university was muzzling honest journalism in favor of “corporate”-style public relations.69

  Despite these efforts of university leaders to collectively bury their heads in the sand, the indirect cost debacle brought many unpleasant truths to the forefront. One of these self-evident truths is that universities like Stanford are a part of the “real world.” Stanford's utopian experiment was never a self-contained perpetual motion machine, but depended upon massive transfer payments from the rest of American society. Once these transfer payments ceased, the engine driving the multicultural machine began to run out of fuel. Stanford's experiment was a hothouse product dependent upon others to maintain its artificial environment. This lack of self-containment represented a significant flaw in President Kennedy's experiment. Because nobody outside America would be able to foot the bill for an American multicultural transformation (in the same manner outside funding maintained Stanford's momentum), Stanford University did not represent an accurate microcosm or experimental laboratory. A similar experiment—if it should be called that—could never be pulled off with nearly as much success in America as a whole. It would collapse for lack of funding at a far earlier stage
. But this was not the only, or even most important, problem Biddle's revelations raised.

  The fundamental mistake had involved the strange notion that such a “great experiment” could be conducted in the first place. Experimenters require freedom to exercise control over the experimental objects. In the natural sciences, such a distinction between the freedom of the “researcher” and the constraints placed on the “object of research” is possible, but in the human realm it collapses. The Great Experimenters are, by definition, a part of the multicultural community—that is, part of the very experiment they are conducting. Such an experiment, then, would seem to require a degree of control over the Great Experimenters similar to the control they exercise over everyone else. Since the Great Experimenters had to place themselves beyond such control, the resulting “experiment” was a fraud from the start.

  Plato's version of this conundrum took the form of a question, never asked by Aime Cesaire of CIV fame: “And who will guard the guardians?” If we need multicultural administrators to guard against bad people, how can we ensure that the multiculturalists will be good? The partial answer of the founding of our country involved a system of “checks and balances,” in which the various guardians check one another. If there are many guardians and none is too powerful, one or a few bad ones will not be able to do too much damage. The multicultural experiment, with its vanguard of Great Experimenters, who stood above the law and beyond review, constructed a political ordering radically antithetical to the American one.

  Unable to maintain the impartiality their experiment required, Stanford's multicultural leaders simply set themselves above the law or any other standards of decency—not to mention any of the rules they would have others follow. There would be no need to guard against the guardians if the guardians were infallible. A government of men began to replace a government of laws.

  But, of course, Stanford's high priests were very much fallible, and their veneer of infallibility eventually cracked. The consequent scandals were really quite inevitable, as the multicultural state came to resemble a despotic Third World regime not only in its fervent ideology, but also in the endemic corruption throughout its ranks:

  If the president of Stanford thought that the world was obliged to furnish him with a lavish lifestyle, then it is hardly surprising that his subordinates tried to make their own little fiefdoms yield such personal bounty as they could. A case in point involved the Stanford Bookstore, which holds a virtual monopoly on textbook sales to Stanford students. As a nonprofit organization, the bookstore operates a complex refund system, under which some of its profits are returned to customers in the form of rebates. But many of the bookstore's revenues never made it into the “profits” column in the first place, as the store's management obtained a number of benefits for itself, unheard of elsewhere in the college bookstore industry: a vacation home, a motor home, sailboat, Cadillacs, and sports cars.70 Bookstore profits also paid for $69,000 worth of improvements to the vacation home, including a hot tub and satellite dish. In another unusual arrangement, the bookstore leased the vacation home from two of its top employees, whose mortgage payments effectively were paid by the bookstore.

  Members of the bookstore's board of directors either did not know about these matters or did not care. Law professor Robert Weisberg “personally was unaware of the matters that were disclosed,” whereas history professor Peter Stansky, also a board member, considered the vacation home a “quite splendid” perquisite.71 For many in the Stanford community, these financial abuses hardly raised an eyebrow. “We've gotten a good chuckle out of it,” explained junior Heather Weaver, a member of the bookstore association (a group of 30 faculty, staff, and students responsible for selecting the board members). “There's a little resentment and some disgust, but it's the same old thing—another one of Stanford's little scandals.”72

  California's Deputy Attorney General James Schwartz did not consider these abuses quite as amusing. During the 1992–93 school year, he began investigating whether the bookstore's unorthodox spending violated its nonprofit status.73 Over the next year, the board sold the vacation home, terminated the car leases, and appointed directors with business expertise.74 In the meantime, however, the costs of the DA's investigation added another $900,000 to the bookstore's bills.75 Because of the store's virtual monopoly status, these costs were passed on to Stanford students, in the form of more expensive textbooks. The “joke” was on them.

  The prize for hypocrisy may go to Diana Conklin, the head of Stanford's Res Ed system. Conklin had acquired a reputation as a particularly vigilant promoter of the new morality—she had helped organize the grape boycott, punished fraternities for alcohol use, and drafted Stanford's restrictive “Controlled Substances and Alcohol Policy.” But on June 24, 1990, Conklin herself was caught red-handed: After using a vial of cocaine in her home, she called paramedics, who rushed her to the hospital, where she received treatment and a police citation.76 A municipal judge later placed Stanford's Res Ed leader into a drug counseling program.

  Conklin's story was bizarre: She claimed that she had found a vial of cocaine left in her closet years before and, feeling depressed, had used it on a momentary impulse.77 Stanford's senior administrators, however, could not bring themselves to say that Conklin had done anything wrong, or even ask whether her drug use might affect (or have affected) her professional duties in enforcing Stanford's drug and alcohol policy. Acting Dean of Student Affairs Norm Robinson declared that “what people do with their private lives is their own business.”78 Of course, a similar standard had not been applied to the many policies Conklin had promoted. If people could use cocaine in their private lives, then why could they not cut loose and drink grape juice or study the Bible? The university did not try to explain. Conklin retained her position; her sole punishment consisted of a token letter of reprimand.79

  Perhaps the most bizarre double standard involved Stanford's militant dean Keith Archuleta, the director of the Black Community Center. Archuleta had played a leading role in the Copeland's protest. But only several weeks later, it was revealed that Archuleta had for years invited young women, many of whom were black, to his residence for amateur photography sessions. The women were encouraged to change into various costumes in an adjacent room. While they were changing, Archuleta secretly filmed the women in various stages of undress—“kind of like a Peeping Tom,” according to District Attorney Margo Smith.80 In some tapes, he spliced together scenes of women undressing, often repeating a given scene several times in a row. Although some of the women suspected that the video camera was on (because of a red light), most trusted Archuleta when he assured them it was not so. A student who did not trust Archuleta's explanation reported the event to the police in May of 1992, and the dean's arrest quickly followed.81

  Even with all the evidence before them, Stanford's leaders refused to admit that Archuleta had abused his position of confidence. Dean of Student Affairs Michael Jackson expressed his sympathies for Archuleta, rather than the exploited women: “We are deeply distressed by this situation and regret that an employee who has made significant contributions to the university finds himself in such a position.”82 Not until several days later, when complaints by the filmed women did not stop and local publicity mounted, did Jackson deem Archuleta's conduct “totally unacceptable.” The only basis for self-criticism among the egalitarian elite, it seemed, was the same thing that made Kennedy's enrichment unacceptable—public outcry.

  By the early 1990s, there were no internal checks left. No Stanford University accountant complained about Kennedy's overhead billings, the bookstore's board acted only after the investigation by California's attorney general, and the administration calibrated its responses to the Conklin and Archuleta episodes in proportion to the level of public outcry. It is unclear whether anybody in authority at Stanford believed that the Great Experimenters actually could make great mistakes, and it did not matter. Out of fear or ignorance, no Stanford administrators stood against th
e multiculture.

  By placing themselves above their own rules, the Great Experimenters made self-examination almost impossible and self-criticism unthinkable. Indeed, as problems mounted, the scapegoat of choice became the outside world—the federal government, the American taxpayers, and, more generally, the entire society that had held Stanford's guardians to a higher standard than they had set for themselves. There was no better example than President Kennedy himself. Kennedy's commencement address to Stanford's class of 1992 marked his last major speech as Stanford's leader, and he used the opportunity to make clear that he had learned nothing from the indirect cost ordeal. After the hubris and fall, there was no hamartia or tragic insight, only the bathos of a daytime soap opera. Kennedy used the opportunity to lecture his audience on the need for personal responsibility:

  And that brings me to the section of this farewell that is headed “Parting Advice”; because there is an aspect of what you have done that will, if you can conserve it and use it, do more for our society than you can possibly imagine. It has to do with the capacity for taking responsibility, the disappearance of which is creating a tragic national vacuum.83

  Kennedy, apparently, viewed the flight from responsibility as a national problem:

  Public scapegoating in high places is now exhibit A of our national failure to take personal responsibility…. No mistake is irreversible, and nearly all stains wash out in time. But the hasty grab for the nearest excuse only makes the marks more permanent. Raise your hand, acknowledge the foul, and take the penalty.84