The Diversity Delusion

by Heather Mac Donald

  Grading on a curve is another vilified practice for those interested in building “inclusive” STEM classrooms. The only surprising aspect of that vilification is that it acknowledges one of the most self-defeating aspects of black and Hispanic culture: the stigma against “acting white.” Underrepresented minorities may “reject competitiveness as an academic motivator,” explains a 2015 UCLA report on the undergraduate academic-achievement gap. Instead, underrepresented minorities “draw strength in peer acceptance, nurturance, and cooperation.” Translation: Instead of pulling all-nighters studying for a linear algebra exam, they may be inclined to hang out in the Afro-Am or LatinX center. This rejection of academic competitiveness is a “coping mechanism,” says the UCLA report, that allows individuals to “devalue” things that threaten their sense of well-being, such as high academic expectations. A grading curve contributes to academic competition by objectively ranking students. As a result, URMs will be further alienated and will further withhold their academic efforts. The solution, according to diversity proponents, is to throw out the curve and grade students on whether they have achieved the expected learning outcomes. This sounds unobjectionable, but in practice a curve is the only reliable defense against raging grade inflation.

  An introductory chemistry course at UC Berkeley exemplifies “culturally sensitive pedagogy.” Its creators described the course in a January 2018 webinar for STEM teachers, sponsored by the University of California’s STEM Faculty Learning Community. A primary goal of the course, according to teachers Erin Palmer and Sabriya Rosemund, is to disrupt the “racialized and gendered construct of scientific brilliance,” which defines “good science” as getting all the right answers. The course maintains instead that “all students are scientifically brilliant.” Science is a practice of collective sense-making that calls forth “inclusive ways” of being brilliant. As applied, these principles mean that students work in groups arranging data cards in the proper sequence to represent chemical processes, among other tasks. Chemical terms of art are avoided wherever possible to accommodate students’ different academic backgrounds. The instructors hold the teams “accountable to group thinking”; a team can’t question an instructor unless it has arrived collectively at the question and poses it in “we” language.

  Progressive pedagogy has long embraced the idea that students should work exclusively in groups as a way to model collectivist democracy. This political agenda is simply a pretext for masking individual differences in achievement that might reinforce group stereotypes. Here, the rationale for group organization is that students are modeling “collective chemical practice.” The group design “makes space for students to recognize themselves as competent thinkers and doers of chemistry.” Are they competent thinkers and doers of chemistry? It’s hard to say. The course’s grading is idiosyncratic, and thus not comparable with other introductory chemistry courses. The final grade is based on homework (notoriously easy to crib), a final exam (which the teachers wish they could ditch), and an informal presentation to friends or family about the chemistry of compounds. Use of slang or a language other than English in this presentation is encouraged. One such effort featured a photo of the character Joey from the TV sitcom Friends dressed in several layers of unmatched clothes to suggest the relationship between positive and negative charges. The teachers have done no follow-up evaluation to see how students performed in their subsequent courses, nor have they determined whether the attrition rate of URMs is lower than in traditional chemistry classes. What they do know is that students showed a positive shift in believing that they were good at science. Scientific self-esteem is apparently now an academic goal.

  STEM industry leaders are fully on board the diversity juggernaut, having absorbed academic identity politics. The giant Silicon Valley companies offer gender- and race-exclusive mentoring programs and give special consideration to females and URMs in hiring and promotions. Managers go through the same costly implicit-bias training as faculty committees. The discrimination lawsuit filed by James Damore, the computer engineer fired by Google in August 2017 (see chapter 1), reveals a workplace culture at the Silicon Valley giant infused with academic victimology. Employees denounce the advocacy of gender- and race-blind policies as a “microaggression” and the product of “racism” and “misogyny.” Managers apologize for promoting males, even when females are being promoted at a higher rate. All-male research teams are mocked; employees self-righteously offer to protect Google’s oppressed females and underrepresented minorities from “blinkered, pig-ignorant” conservative opinion. A manager reprimands someone for pointing out that white males are actually underrepresented at Google compared with the general population. The manager informs the errant employee that caring about facts may seem to be a trait of engineers, but “being absolutely correct is inappropriate” when it comes to “discussions of race and justice.” Facts are especially inappropriate “in the context of the threat” faced by minorities and females at Google.6 Needless to say, no female or underrepresented minority faces a threat at Google.

  The idea that females and underrepresented minorities are being discriminated against in STEM is demonstrably false. A physician-scientist at a top medical school describes the environment in which he works:

  The sheer effort that is expended in complete good faith at the graduate, post-graduate, and faculty level chasing after a declining population of minority applicants is astonishing. URMs are encouraged to apply, indeed begged to apply, to medical school and post-graduate medical training programs. Everyone at this level is trying incredibly hard to be fair, generous, forgiving, thoughtful, kind, and encouraging to these applicants. But if the pool of candidates is actually declining, no amount of effort, exhortation, or threat will achieve diversity. It’s one thing to do poorly on the MCAT; it’s another not even to bother taking it. The latter is now the bigger problem because the academy has already relaxed its standards and come up with all kinds of ways to explain away the need to do well on these tests.7

  When it comes to underrepresented minorities, math deficits show up at the earliest ages. It is only there where the achievement gap can be overcome, through more rigorous, structured classrooms and through a change in family culture to put a high premium on academic achievement. The institutional response to the achievement gap, however, is racial preferences. As we saw in chapter 3, those inaptly named preference “beneficiaries” drop out of their STEM studies at high rates. This experience of academic failure only exacerbates the anti-acting-white syndrome acknowledged in the UCLA study. You can read through report after report on achieving diversity in STEM, however, without coming across any acknowledgement of the academic skills gap. As for females, they, too, are the target of constant efforts to boost their representation in STEM environments. Yet we are to believe that highly educated heads of research teams are so benighted that they refuse to hire or promote scientists whose superior qualifications would increase the lab’s chance of a scientific breakthrough, just because those scientists are female. The diversity crusade rests on the belief that absent discrimination, every scientific field would show gender parity. That belief is ungrounded. Males outperform females at the highest reaches of mathematical reasoning (and are overrepresented at the lowest level of mathematical incompetence). Differences in math precocity between boys and girls show up as early as kindergarten. For decades, males in every ethnic group have scored higher than females in their same ethnic group on the math SAT. In 2016, the percentage of males scoring above 700 (on an 800-point scale) was nearly twice as large as the percentage of females in that range. There are 2.5 males in the United States in the top .01 percent of math ability for every female, according to a paper published in February 2018 in the journal Intelligence. But female high-scorers are more likely than male high-scorers to possess strong verbal skills as well, according to authors Jonathan Wai, Jaret Hodges, and Matthew Makel, giving them a greater range of career options. Traditionally, individuals who score well in bo
th the math and verbal domains are less likely to pursue a STEM career. Moreover, females on average are more interested in people-centered rather than abstract work, which helps explain why females account for 75 percent of health-care-related workers, but only 14 percent of engineering workers and 25 percent of computer workers. Nearly 82 percent of obstetrics and gynecology medical residents in 2016 were female. Is gynecology biased against males or are females selecting where they want to work?

  * * *

  The extraordinary accomplishments of Western science were achieved without regard to the complexions of its creators. Now we are to believe that scientific progress will stall unless we pay close attention to identity and try to engineer proportional representation in schools and laboratories. The truth is exactly the opposite: Lowering standards and diverting scientists’ energy into combating phantom sexism and racism is reckless in a highly competitive, ruthless, and unforgiving global marketplace. Driven by unapologetic meritocracy, China is catching up fast to the United States in science and technology. Identity politics in American science is a political self-indulgence that we cannot afford.

  12

  SCANDAL ERUPTS OVER THE PROMOTION OF BOURGEOIS BEHAVIOR

  Were you planning to instruct your child about the value of hard work and civility? Not so fast! According to a recent uproar at the University of Pennsylvania and at the University of San Diego, advocacy of such bourgeois virtues is “hate speech.” The controversy, sparked by an op-ed written by two law professors, illustrates the rapidly shrinking boundaries of acceptable thought on college campuses and the use of racial victimology to police those boundaries. The diversity-obsessed administrators and faculty of both schools were a big part of the problem.

  On August 9, 2017, University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax and University of San Diego law professor Larry Alexander published an op-ed in The Philadelphia Inquirer calling for a revival of the bourgeois values that characterized mid-century American life, including child-rearing within marriage, hard work, self-discipline on and off the job, and respect for authority. The late 1960s took aim at the bourgeois ethic, they say, encouraging an “antiauthoritarian, adolescent, wish-fulfillment ideal [of] sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll that was unworthy of, and unworkable for, a mature, prosperous adult society.”

  Today, the consequences of that cultural revolution are all around us: lagging education levels, the lowest male workforce participation rate since the Great Depression, opioid abuse, and high illegitimacy rates. Wax and Alexander catalog the self-defeating behaviors that leave too many Americans idle, addicted, or in prison: “the single-parent, antisocial habits, prevalent among some working-class whites; the anti-‘acting white’ rap culture of inner-city blacks; the anti-assimilation ideas gaining ground among some Hispanic immigrants.”

  Throwing caution to the winds, Wax and Alexander challenge the core tenet of multiculturalism: “All cultures are not equal,” they write. “Or at least they are not equal in preparing people to be productive in an advanced economy.” Unless America’s elites again promote personal responsibility and other bourgeois virtues, the country’s economic and social problems will only worsen, they conclude.

  The University of Pennsylvania’s student newspaper, The Daily Pennsylvanian, spotted a scandal in the making. The day after the op-ed was published, it came out with a story headlined “‘Not All Cultures Are Created Equal’ Says Penn Law Professor in Op-Ed.” Naturally, the paper placed Wax and Alexander’s op-ed in the context of Wax’s other affronts to left-wing dogma. It quoted a Middlebury College sociology professor who claimed that Middlebury’s “students of color were being attacked and felt attacked” by a lecture that Wax gave at Middlebury College in 2013 on black family breakdown. It noted that Penn’s Black Law Students Association had criticized her for a Wall Street Journal op-ed in 2005 on black self-help. But the centerpiece of the Daily Pennsylvanian story was its interview with Wax.

  Initially trained as a neurologist at Harvard Medical School, Wax (whom I consider a friend) possesses fearsome intelligence and debating skills. True to form, she stuck by her thesis. “I don’t shrink from the word, ‘superior’” with regard to Anglo-Protestant cultural norms, she told the paper. “Everyone wants to come to the countries that exemplify” these values. “Everyone wants to go to countries ruled by white Europeans.” (This statement responded to the reporter’s question about “white European” countries.) Western governments have undoubtedly committed crimes, she said, but it would be a mistake to reject what is good in those countries because of their historical flaws.

  The fuse was lit. The rules of the game were the following: ignore what Wax and Alexander had actually said; avoid providing any counterevidence; and play the race card to the hilt as a substitute for engaging with their arguments. First out of the gate was the Penn graduate students’ union, GET-UP. On August 11, a day after the Daily Pennsylvanian article, GET-UP issued a “Statement about Wax Op-Ed,” condemning the “presence of toxic racist, sexist, homophobic attitudes on campus.” The “superiority of one race over others is not an academic debate we have in the 21st century,” GET-UP wrote. “It is racism masquerading as science.”

  But the Wax-Alexander op-ed and the Wax interview said nothing about racial superiority (much less about sex or homosexuality). It argued for a set of behavioral norms that are available to all peoples but that had found their strongest expression over the course of a particular culture. As The Daily Pennsylvanian itself acknowledged, Wax had emphasized to them that she was not implying the superiority of whites. “Bourgeois values aren’t just for white people,” she had said. “The irony is: Bourgeois values can help minorities get ahead.” No matter. Time to roll out the racial victimology. “The kind of hate Wax espouses is an everyday part of many students’ lives at Penn, and we can and must fight against it,” GET-UP thundered in its peroration. “For every incident like this that gains press and publicity, we must recognize that there are countless [others that] go unmarked and unchecked.”

  Fact-check: Wax had attacked no students. Her argument was against the 1960s countercultural revolution that had undermined the legitimacy of bourgeois values. Unanswered question: Were Wax and Alexander wrong that the virtues of self-restraint, deferred gratification, and future orientation are key for economic and personal progress, and that an anti-achievement, anti-authority culture of drug use and a detachment from the workforce is inimical to advancement? GET-UP had nothing to say about those key matters.

  The Daily Pennsylvanian followed up with another article on August 13: “Campus Is Abuzz over Penn Law Professor Amy Wax’s Controversial Op-Ed, Which Called for a Return of ‘Bourgeois’ Cultural Values.” The August 13 article quoted liberally from the GET-UP statement and added some sarcastic tweets by an assistant professor of educational linguistics at the education school.

  Feisty as ever, Wax emailed the paper: “If this is the best Penn professors and grad students can do, our culture really is in trouble.”

  Missing so far from the reaction was a call for speech restrictions and more diversity infrastructure. The IDEAL Council, “representing marginalized graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania through the Graduate and Professional Student Assembly,” corrected the omission with its August 17 “Open Letter to the University of Pennsylvania Regarding Hate Speech in Our Community.” Wax and Alexander’s Inquirer op-ed “pivoted on the denigration of a number of racial and socioeconomic groups,” which “will not be surprising to many students of color, especially those in the law school who have had to take a course with Wax,” IDEAL claimed. “Her racist and homophobic statements are well-documented both on and off campus.”

  IDEAL and GET-UP both ignored the fact that Wax and Alexander criticize white underclass behavior, a silence necessary to clear the deck for full-throated racial victimology. Far from mistreating “students of color,” Wax has received a law school teaching award from Penn’s law students and a second university-wide teachi
ng award, conferred by faculty committee. If she oppressed “students of color,” the faculty presumably would have heard about it.

  A glad cry must have gone out among IDEAL manifesto writers when they discovered that Wax had taught at the University of Virginia law school until 2001. Voilà! Irrefutable proof of bigotry! “Prior to teaching at Penn, Wax was a professor at the University of Virginia Law School,” the manifesto gloats. “On August 12th, White supremacists marched through the University of Virginia carrying torches, chanting ‘You will not replace us,’ and yelling racial and anti-Semitic slurs.”

  The causality speaks for itself, but in case the reader needs help, IDEAL explains that white supremacy “can find its intellectual home in the kind of falsely ‘objective’ rhetoric in Amy Wax’s statement, which positions (white) bourgeois culture as not only objectively superior, but also under incursion from lesser cultures and races.” “[F]alsely ‘objective’” presumably means: “based on facts that one is unable to rebut.” Nothing in the Wax-Alexander op-ed claimed that white culture was under incursion from lesser races. The 1960s attack on bourgeois culture came most forcefully from American “academics, writers, artists, actors, and journalists,” they write, “who relished liberation from conventional constraints.”

  Having established Wax’s connection to the “metastasizing KKK chapters of Pennsylvania,” IDEAL got down to brass tacks: demands for a “formal policy for censuring hate speech and a schedule of community-based consequences for discriminatory acts against marginalized groups.”

  Finally, of course, came the demand for booty and bureaucracy: a “formal, centralized Diversity & Inclusion office with staff that are charged directly with … providing resources for students experiencing marginalized [sic] or discrimination at Penn.” Never mind that Penn has been cranking out “Action Plans for Faculty Diversity and Excellence,” “Faculty Inclusion Reports,” “Gender Equity Reports,” and “Minority Equity Progress Reports” for two decades.