Teaching "White Privilege" Is Destructive and Divisive

Ask a Scholar: Is “White Privilege” a Good Way to Teach about Race?

By Carol Iannone

Dear Ask a Scholar,

Students at our daughter's school were invited to the White Privilege Conference. I would argue that this is a very divisive approach to teaching diversity in American Culture; it teaches victimization. Isn't there a better method to teach race and gender dynamics than this loaded gun?

Answered by Dr. Carol Iannone, independent scholar and editor-at-large of the NAS's journal Academic Questions. Dr. Iannone received her Ph.D. in English literature from SUNY, Stony Brook, and has written widely on cultural and intellectual issues. She has served on the faculty of the Gallitan School of New York University and was the 2009 recipient of the National Association of Scholars’ Barry R. Gross Memorial Award.

The White Privilege Conference has been held annually for twelve years, and is sponsored by a consortium of institutions of philanthropy and higher education in the Minneapolis area. This year's conference was held at the Sheraton Bloomington in Minneapolis from April 13-16.

Read more. 

"Multiculturalism is the racism of the anti-racists." --Pascal Bruckner

"Tears of the White Man: The Tyranny of Guilt"

Pascal Bruckner, May 3, 2011

7:00 PM

University of Minnesota
1210 Heller Hall
West Bank

 

The subject line of the e-mail, a quotation from an upcoming speaker, probably got your attention. It's quite taboo to say anything ill of the concept of multiculturalism. Nonetheless, it's a subject worth discussing in an intellectually honest and rigorous manner.

 

To do so, the Minnesota Association of Scholars is bringing in Pascal Bruckner from France on Tuesday, May 3. Intellectual Takeout is proud to co-sponsor the event.

 

Pascal Bruckner is Maître de Confèrences at the Institut des Études Politiques in Paris.His extended essays include Tears of the White Man: Compassion as Contempt (English version 1987) and The Tyranny of Guilt (2010). His many books also include novels - Lunes de Fiel was made into a movie by Roman Polanski, and The Divine Child was translated into English in 1994.

 

Since the 1970s he and other ‘New Philosophers’ have challenged the Marxist assumptions so long taken for granted by French intellectuals. Most recently, he has opposed the outcry against US efforts to extradite Roman Polanski, and defended France’s ban on the burqa.

 

European intellectuals often blame colonialism for the travails that beset poor countries in parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Is this a frank acknowledgement of the burdens of history? Or a back-handed way of maintaining Europe’s centrality in world affairs? Pascal Bruckner’s answers to these questions have provoked a great deal of discussion.

 

The event is free. Here are the important details:

Who: Pascal Bruckner

When: Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Time: 7:00 p.m.

Cost: Free

Where: University of Minnesota, 1210 Heller Hall, West Bank

More Details: Click Here

 

The Australian Jim Wallace, Not the American Jim Wallis

Greens are attacking religious freedom

by Jim Wallace

THE move by the Greens to give territories as small as Norfolk Island the power to set legislative precedents on social issues such as euthanasia and gay marriage is an attempt by gay-green activists to render us all the same.

During more than 40 years of pursuing its objectives, the homosexual lobby has trumpeted its differences. "Queer" and "proud" were calls to include homosexual lifestyle in the diversity that is modern Australia.

But now the tactic has changed. Not only do they want to be the same as everyone else, they're not prepared to suffer diversity in anyone else, particularly if it is religiously inspired.

The latest target has been religious freedom. Admittedly they don't discriminate - anyone's religious freedom will do.

Churches are portrayed as wantonly discriminatory for refusing to employ someone who doesn't subscribe to their values. So might any corporation, particularly after the money spent on defining corporate values.

Read more.

_______________________________

I wish that Jim Wallis would have the understanding of Jim Wallace.

I’m glad Jim Wallace understands the strategy of “multiculturalism and diversity” that, when necessary, morphs to take on its new form of the Green Movement and Sustainability Movement. Actually, multiculturalists and diversiphiles always planned to render everyone the same; their social engineering has always been designed to make everyone in their own image. It’s their way of playing God. Multiculturalists have always had in view the imposition of a single culture, their own. Their whole agenda is cloaked in a ruse, “multi-culturalism” when it should be “uni-culturalism.” Diversocrats have always had as their agenda the expulsion of bona fide diversity and the socially engineered imposition of sameness, everything after their own likeness, which is their way of playing God. Again, their entire plan is disguised with deliberate equivocation, for “diversity” is their code word to make their agenda palatable to the ingenuous among us who fail to recognize the purposeful equivocation. Lamentably, the ingenuous among us includes most people. And the diversocrats’ design in exploiting “diversity” has been to render any argument with the rest of us, who have caught on to their agenda, a dispute passed off as a squabble over semantics or worse, a devilish opportunity to charge opponents of their agenda as opponents of real diversity—racism, bigotry, sexism, etc. Of course, the same is true with those who have chosen to identify their agendas “Green” and “Sustainability,” as though we who oppose their agenda crave filthy drinking water, desire toxic waste to foul the earth, want noxious fumes to fill the air we breath, eagerly wish for the earth to heat up to kill off millions of people, and long for the oceans to rise to drown out millions more. Being a conservationist, as I have been my whole life, is not acceptable to Greenies and Sustainabilocrats, for my conservationism is born out of my Christian faith which is antithetical to the innate paganism that energizes the Green Movement and Sustainability Movement.

A Quick Lesson on Multiculturalism

Multiculturalism Explained in 2:54, by Andrew Klavan.

Europe, Where Telling the Truth Can Land One In the Courts and Even in Prison

A free speech activist in Vienna, Austria has been charged with inciting religious hatred and faces a possible three-year prison sentence simply for criticizing Islam and Shariah law. She is guilty of nothing more than speaking up as has Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy, and David Cameron, Chancellor of Germany, President of France, and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, respectively, who have all commented publicly concerning the failures of multiculturalism.

First Merkel, Then Cameron, and Now Sarkozy

Last week the UK's Prime Minister Cameron joined Germany's Angel Merkel when he pointed out the tragic failure of the policy called "multiculturalism." Now, French President Nicholas Sarkozy joined the parade of sanity when he made the following proclamation Thursday:

Of course we must all respect differences, but we do not want… a society where communities coexist side by side. If you come to France, you accept to melt into a single community, which is the national community, and if you do not want to accept that, you cannot be welcome in France. The French national community cannot accept a change in its lifestyle, equality between men and women… freedom for little girls to go to school.

More here.

May multiculturalism and diversity die a thousand deaths. Lord, have mercy on us. Banish these scourges from us and restore sanity to all our leaders by constraining them to treat all human beings with the dignity owed to them as creatures made in your image and likeness.

The Humanly Demeaning Policy of Engineered Diversity

A few years ago Christian Research Journal published one of my essays titled, “In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit of Diversity: Multiculturalism Goes to College.” The form of the essay on-line does not include a crucial sidebar which I post below the following introduction.

I write this entry and post the sidebar below because I was reminded of its significance during a recent conversation with a fellow  educator concerning misconceptions regarding “diversity.”

“Diversity” is a noun that once had a basic meaning: “the fact or quality of being diverse; different.” The word, of course, properly refers to the factual existence of real differences that occurs naturally throughout all creation, including among humans. However, throughout the past thirty years the word has been deliberately exploited by politicians, political activists, activist educators, journalists, religious and church leaders, and many others as they have imposed their own meaning onto the term, “diversity,” to advance a political agenda by social engineering and manipulation which entails artificially imposing a forced diversity of peoples upon the societies wherever they hold power and influence.

Who could possibly oppose “diversity”? Right? Diversiphiles, as Peter Wood identifies them, trade upon the slipperiness that they have imposed onto the term “diversity.” If diversiphiles exploit to their advantage equivocating uses of "diversity," they do the same with opposition to their agenda. They do not offer thoughtful responses to dispassionate, well-reasoned, well-documented, and well-argued  critiques of their diversity agenda, which is to manipulate artificially engineered “diversity.” Instead, they accuse critics who offer intelligent critical exposés of their agenda with a variety of false charges, even welcoming invidious accusations that critics of their agenda oppose the integration of diverse peoples and instead demand and preach some form of homogeneity even advocating racism and white supremacy.

The ingeniousness of the new coinage of the term “diversity” as shorthand for the diversiphiles’ agenda is that (1) it self-validates their new found virtue with a sense of moral superiority; (2) it provides a source of authority to suppress and to silence objections; and (3) it catches the ingenuous among us unawares by luring them to accept uncritically, to advance religiously, and to defend loyally the social engineering project. This social experient on human beings does not prize authentic diversity that already factually exists among humans but instead exploits people by treating them not as individual human beings but as members of a so-called “protected class” that requires preferential treatment in the form of “affirmative action” in order for people of those “protected classes” to find their way in life on a “level playing field.” It is just as Peter Wood so aptly observes.

Pursued as a social policy, diversity is a form of systematic injustice and it makes us accomplices to injustice. To treat people as objects, as though they are the residuum of their race, class, gender and other superficialities, and not as individuals who define themselves through their ideas and creative acts--that is injustice (Diversity: The Invention of a Concept, 47).

This political agenda that is being advanced powerfully allures with its speech code of virtuous-sounding political correctness. The agenda’s speech code surreptitiously infiltrates the lexicon of any religious belief system, and in the process it imperceptibly transmogrifies religious expressions and belief systems, including Christianity, to adjust to its values, virtues, and message. It seduces many to suppose that its suppression of ill-mannered speech with “political correctness” is of a piece with Christian virtue and compatible with the Christian gospel.

The issue at stake has never been and is not now whether we should welcome diverse peoples among us and embrace them as our equals, our peers, our friends, and our colleagues. Rather, the issue is on what principles we should do so. We should never welcome diverse peoples among us on the principles that diversocrats exploit, namely preferentialism and paternalism. For, anyone who advocates any form of paternalism or a policy of preferentialism for a so-called “protected class” is worthy of rebuke, for such a posture is contrary to a credible Christian profession. Why? It is because preferentialism is sin (James 2:9). Preferentialism demeans the human who is made in the image of God. The gospel of Jesus Christ obligates us to love and to kindness toward all regardless of differences, whether racial, social, or sexual.

At last, here is the promised sidebar.

Made in the Image and Likeness of God

Observant individuals may ask, “What are the dynamics that render members of a minority group in need of paternalistic assistance from the majority group?”

Shelby Steele astutely addresses this question in White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era (New York: Harper Collins, 2006). Steele incisively explains that advocates of multiculturalism (e.g., America’s whites, members of the majority group) endeavor by “affirmative action” to regain a sense of human dignity against a stigma of “white guilt” for slavery, for Jim Crow laws, for discrimination, and for racism. Steele demonstrates the seductive nature of “affirmative action.” It does not truly provide authentic assistance to minority individuals. Affirmative action puts recipients in a double bind. To receive the patronizing preferential favor one has to bow to paternalism and accept one’s inferiority and dependence upon members of the majority group. Affirmative action’s design is to provide a sense of redeemed humanity, of renewed virtue, and of restored dignity to members of the majority group who seek to purge themselves of “white guilt.” Its seductive power resides in the fact that while preferentially offering handouts based upon ethnicity or skin color it provides a sense of virtue. It is not virtue at all; it is paternalism and patronization. He writes:

So post sixties American liberalism preserves the old racist hierarchy of whites over blacks as virtue itself; and it grants all whites who identify with it a new superiority. In effect, it says you are morally superior to other whites and intellectually superior to blacks. The white liberal’s reward is this feeling that because he is heir to knowledge of the West, yet morally enlightened beyond the West’s former bigotry, he is really a ‘new man,’ a better man that the world has seen before” (White Guilt, 148).

Steele observes,

Because dissociation is a claim of superiority, it generates a kind of collective narcissism—an irrational yet utterly certain belief in the moral superiority of post sixties, dissociational liberalism. In this liberalism one does not argue by logic or principle; one argues by dissociation. Only in dissociation are authority, legitimacy, and power available. This grounding in dissociation, with its assertion of moral superiority, is what gives today’s liberalism its narcissistic quality (151).

As Christians, it seems proper that we should go beyond this explanation, good as it is. Preferentialism is prejudice dressed up as Christian virtue. To redeem themselves from the stigma of America’s past, Christian advocates of “affirmative action” seek deliverance from “white guilt” through dissociation from racism. They embrace the seductive notion that to treat individuals of “minority groups” with preferentialism based upon ethnicity or skin color is both permissible and virtuous, if not godly and Christian, so long as preferentialism is positive (favors “affirmative action”) and not negative (advocates “prejudice” or “discrimination”). People who embrace this view fail to recognize that preferentially favoring individuals based upon ethnicity or skin color, though seemingly positive and godly, is simply another form of prejudice (James 2:1-13). Preferentially favoring individuals based on ethnicity or skin color is as sinful as prejudicially discriminating against individuals based on ethnicity or skin color because partiality, whether taking the form of paternalism or prejudice, looks to superficial human qualities as the basis for favorable or unfavorable action toward others (cf. 2 Cor. 5:13-21). Preferentialism, no less than discrimination, entails paternalistic dehumanization of individuals by treating them as members of an approved group rather than as individuals made in the image and likeness of God.

—A. B. Caneday

Kindergarten Kommunism Kops

Because America's governing officials have been actually fallen for the foolish notion that scanning airplane passengers by looking for potential terrorists by way of profiling is inherently racist, they have refused to implement the effective security program made famous by El Al and have insisted upon using the really dumb Kindergarten Kommunism style approach to airline security. Instead of spending public tax dollars efficiently with minimal intrusion into individual's privacy, TSA officials, otherwise known to me as Kindergarten Kommunism Kops, under the supervision of Big Sis Janet Napolitano of the Department of Homeland Security (newspeak terminology), subject American citizens to Kindergarten Kommunism, the kindergarten teacher's philosophy of punishing everyone for the misbehavior of one. 

Out of stupidity and for fear of being charged with and sued for profiling for real terrorists, instead they terrorize everyone equally by subjecting us all alike to invasive federal government searches as we stand in line waiting for TSA officers, recipients of one of Amerika's largest Public Works Programs (or Pogrom, if you prefer), to wield their tyrannical power over us. These Kindergarten Kommunism Kops, of course, are hardly to blame, for they, like the low level members of the SS, are just doing their jobs as ordered by those above them. Their job is to distribute misery equally to everyone by subjugating everyone alike to suspicion of criminality, to invasive searches and pat-downs, to the loss of liberty, and to being herded like cattle Jews through their extravagantly expensive show of force that is little more than a placebo designed to appease the consciences of our governing officials and to reassure the gullible among us that they are actually effectively protecting us from terrorists.

I traveled last week to Atlanta, Georgia. Fortunately, in Atlanta I did not encounter the Strip-Search Beast operated by the Kindergarten Kommunism Kops. I saw the Beast, but the report I heard was that they decided not to implement the Beast because of the public outcry. If I were traveling this Wednesday, I would eagerly participate in the protest against the KKK Beast and compel a KKK officer to pat me down in search of those notoriously evasive weapons that I allegedly carry on my person and which again, allegedly I have so surreptitiously concealed.

NAS President, Peter Wood, Speaks at NWC

It was truly refreshing to have Peter Wood, President of the National Association of Scholars (of which I have been a member for several years), speak at Northwestern College, Saint Paul, Minnesota as a guest lecturer in the Faith & Thought Lecture Series  this past Tuesday evening, November 9, 2010 in Nazareth Chapel.

Peter Wood, formerly Provost of King's College (NYC), is author of highly acclaimed Diversity: The Invention of a Concept, which was reflected well in his lecture.

His lecture was titled, "What's Wrong with Diversity? The Reckless Career of a Mistaken Ideal." This is the issue captured and expressed so well in his first book and which is an issue frequently addressed by Peter Wood and the NAS staff with here.

Here is just a token quote from his lecture:

Since I am on sabbatical I have virtually no opportunity to get any sense of how Peter Wood's lecture was received. My only sense derives from two sessions I attended, the Tuesday evening lecture and a Wednesday morning Q&A session. Both sessions should have been attended far better. Among those who were present, I sensed a mixed response. I was glad to see that the campus diversiphiles or diversicrats were present for both sessions. Of course, their work is implicitly under assault by virtually everything that Peter Wood had to say, so, it would be surprising if they had any response other than rather critical. They posed questions, and their questions, though kindly expressed, reflected their commitments, as one might expect.

Diversity authorizes double standards in admissions and hiring, breeds a campus culture of hypocrisy, mismatches students to educational opportunities, fosters ethnic resentments, elevates group identity over individual achievement, and trivializes the curriculum. Of course, those punishments were something that had to be accepted in the spirit of atoning for the original sin of racism.

You may want to read Peter Wood's recent article, "From Diversity to Sustainability: How Campus Ideology is Born."

Peter Wood, NAS President, to Speak at Northwestern College

Peter Wood, President of the National Association of Scholars (of which I have been a member for several years), will be speaking at Northwestern College, Saint Paul, Minnesota as a guest lecturer in the Faith & Thought Lecture Series. The event will be held on November 9, 2010 at 7:30 p.m. in the beautiful Nazareth Chapel.

Peter Wood, formerly Provost of King's College (NYC), is author of highly acclaimed Diversity: The Invention of a Concept, and of A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Today.

Members of NAS, especially in Wisconsin and Minnesota, please consider this an invitation to hear our national president. His lecture is titled, "What's Wrong with Diversity? The Reckless Career of a Mistaken Ideal." This is  the issue captured and expressed so well in his first book and which is an issue frequently addressed by Peter Wood and the NAS staff with here.

Update: 09/24/2010

"Will you promote diversity?" Well. That depends on what you mean by "diversity," now doesn't it?

Here is an excerpt from "Will You Promote Diversity? Virginia Tech Tests Faculty Candidates’ Commitment"
by Peter Wood and Ashley Thorne

Administrative careers based on recycling this old fad, unfortunately, have real consequences. They end up diverting large amounts of time and money to a pursuit that is at best academically irrelevant and more often destructive. “Diversity” is a doctrine that virtually never delivers what it promises. It promises an intellectually enlivened campus; it promises mutual respect among identity groups; it promises open-mindedness; it promises an abiding spirit of fairness. But it delivers dull and sometimes fearful conformity. It restricts the topics people can discuss. It fosters low-level resentment, self-doubt, and a victim-mindset. It erodes self-confidence and breeds a testy defensiveness among both its supposed beneficiaries and its advocates. It lowers academic standards from the admissions office to the classroom. And it makes the American college campus synonymous with a hypocritical unfairness: an unfairness sensed by nearly everyone, but that few dare to articulate.

What to do when your own career is inexorably tied to promoting an ideology that sounds nice in the abstract but that has proven over three decades of implementation not to work as advertised? Their all-too-typical answer is to blame the faculty and to blame the students for their lamentable lack of zeal in embracing the beautiful ideals of diversity. If only we could get the faculty to really really really embrace diversity, it would work. It would have to! If these diversiphiles sometimes sound like disappointed cultists who can’t figure out why the flying saucer didn’t arrive on schedule, well. . . .

Read the whole engaging article.

The Authoritarian Roots of Corporate [and Educational Institution] Diversity Training

Find a PDF copy of "The Authoritarian Roots of Corporate Diversity Training" here or here. It's an excellent and enlightening read. Carl Horowitz, the author, introduces readers to the origins of a human experiment exercise widely used in "diversity training sessions."
The pull-quotes are superb reading, even if you can't take time to read the whole document. Save the PDF for future use and reference.

Diversity training, even when imposed with a smiling face, tends to resemble a sadistic elementary-school group exercise. There’s a good reason for this: That’s exactly how it began nearly 40 years ago and operated until the Eighties, when the pillars of corporate governance began to be convinced of its necessity. More than anyone else, we have a retired rural Midwest school teacher, Jane Elliott, to thank for this state of affairs.

Here are a few pull-quotes.

Do CEOs really believe the diversity claptrap or do they put on a happy face to avoid legal and other problems? Either way, they are acting in a manner contrary to the best interests of their companies, shareholders and the public at large.

Jane Elliott herself, ironically, knows her training methods carry an ugly power. She once told an interviewer, “It was just horrifying how quickly they became what I told them they were.”

Elliott’s exercises originally began, literally, as child abuse. They have evolved to reducing adults to the level of abused children—fearful, whimpering and apologetic for nonexistent offenses.

Anyone who still has one's critical faculties, after having endured the berating and belittling accusations of racism by diversiphiles in "diversity training" sessions who simply presume guilt of racism by all who bear light skin coloration, surely will resonate with this assessment of "diversity training" that employs the methods of Jane Elliott. "Who is Jane Elliott?" you may ask. Well, I asked the same question. Jane Elliott was an elementary school teacher in Riceville, Iowa in the 1960s. Perhaps more influential than anyone else, she adapted what was then called "sensitivity training" into "diversity training," which has become a cash cow for herself and for other diversiphiles. Jane Elliott is the one who concocted what has come to be known as the "blue eyes/brown eyes exercise." In 1968, after Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination, Elliott divided her third-grade class into blue-eyed and brown-eyed groups and then proceeded to demean the one group and praise the other with such assertions as,

Blue-eyed people are better than brown-eyed people. Oh yes they are! Blue-eyed people are smarter than brown-eyed people. Is your dad brown-eyed? One day you came to school and you told us that he kicked you. Do you think a blue-eyed father would kick his son? . . . This is a fact. Blue-eyed people are better than brown-eyed people. . . . The blue-eyed people get five extra minutes of recess while the brown-eyed people have to stay in. The brown-eyed people do not get to use the drinking fountain. You have to use the paper cups. You brown-eyed people are not to play with the blue-eyed people on the playground, because you are not as good as blue-eyed people. The brown-eyed people today will wear collars so that we call tell from a distance what color your eyes are. . . .  You begin to notice today that we have spent a great deal of time waiting for brown-eyed people. . . . Who goes first for lunch today? Blue-eyed people. No brown-eyed people go back for seconds. Blue-eyed people may go back for seconds. Brown-eyed people do not.

The following day, Elliott reversed the roles of the children in her human experiment.

Yesterday, I told you that brown-eyed people aren't as good as blue-eyed people. That wasn't true. I lied to you yesterday. The truth is that brown-eyed people are better than blued-eyed people. . . . The brown-eyed people get an extra five minutes of recess. You blue-eyed people are not allowed to be on the playground equipment at any time. You blue-eyed people are not to play with the brown-eyed people. Brown-eyed people are better than blue-eyed people. They're smarter than blue-eyed people. And if you don't believe it, look at Brian. Do blue-eyed people know how to sit in a chair? Very sad! Very, very sad! . . . Brown-eyed people learn fast. Boy, do brown-eyed people learn fast! . . . Blue-eyed people are wasteful.

Watch the video below. Elliott's human experiment incited hostilities between children, including a fight on the playground during recess.

Except for the fact that what Elliott launched on that day in 1968 has become mainstream practice in America's schools and corporations, today, such hostile and divisive human experimentation would be condemned as "child abuse." As shown within a larger quote, Elliott, herself, admits, "I think you could damage a child with this exercise very, very easily." But alas! Instead of averting the potential damage, Jane Elliott has mainstreamed her human experiment exercise. For this she is highly praised by all who have been duped to embrace her human experimentation that actually authorizes and exploits insulting, demeaning, degrading, disgusting, and divisive behavior purposefully to incite hostilities in order to effectuate the experiment. Watch the video provided below and see abuse of individuals in action, abuse of both children and adults.

This exercise entails far more than role-playing. What goes on in these human experimentation sessions is not confined to these sessions. Group identity political power emerges from these sessions, for, despite protests to the contrary, these human experimentations sessions embolden many individuals who find their identity with alleged oppressed groups, now protected classes, carry their voiced grievances out of the sessions to inflict them regularly against anyone who dares to object to the immoral nature of the experiment or points out its counterproductive effects. Individuals who register any objection against the methods and divisive consequences of "diversity training" sessions quickly discover that the human experiment session never ends precisely because it is far more than an experiment or exercise. It is a "brainwashing session," a "re-education session." The animus exhibited against objectors during these sessions persists interminably, or at least until the objector finally succumbs to re-education, sometimes even costing individuals their employment.

Where division, hostility, and racial animosity did not formerly exist, whenever any variety of the "blue-eyed/brown-eyed"  human experiment is imposed, following such sessions, real divisions, hostilities, and racial animosities now exist. Diversiphiles incite hostilities against anyone who dares to disagree not only with their imposed experiments but also with the imposition of their ideology and practices that biases their thinking so that they impose an experiment that breeds the very divisions they allegedly intend to avert. That they do not recognize the unintended consequences renders them diversiphiles.

Reasonable people surely ought to recognize the damage, destruction, and grave injury Elliott's human experimentation has upon human relations in general and upon inter-racial human relations in particular. Elliott herself admits that on that day in 1968, "I watched what had been marvelous, cooperative, wonderful, thoughtful children turn into nasty, vicious, discriminating little third-graders in the space of fifteen minutes."

Carl Horowitz rightly concludes,

This, in a nutshell, is the essence of totalitarianism in all contexts—warfare against happy, confident people in the hopes of transforming them into timid “almost-people.” The question therefore should arise: If Elliott is fully aware of such consequences, why has she continuously pursued them for nearly four decades? And why have corporations, supposedly repositories of money and power, meekly acceded to her demands and those of her proxy allies? Diversity enthusiasts, despite their occasional feints toward reasonableness, are fanatic in their goal of rooting out racial bias. In that, they have learned well the lessons of their original mentor.

Near the close of the video Elliott admits,

I think the necessity for this exercise is a crime. No, I don't want to see it used more widely. I want to see the necessity for it wiped out. And I think that if educators were determined, that we could be very instrumental in wiping out the necessity for this exercise. But I want to see something used. I'd like to see this exercise used with all teachers, all administrators, but certainly not with all students, unless, unless it's done by people who are doing it for the right reasons and in the right way. I think you could damage a child with this exercise very, very easily. And I would never suggest that everybody should use it.

If any college professor were to accost verbally college students the way Jane Elliott verbally accosts her third-grade students, as seen repeatedly in the video below, such a professor ought to be fired promptly.

The following includes actual video of Elliott's human experiment imposed on her third-grade class the third time around.

Tyranny on America's Private College Campus, Part 2

Professor Paquette Responds

In April, Hamilton College American history professor Robert Paquette published an NAS article describing how the campus left insulates itself and bullies dissenters. As evidence, he cited the case of his former colleague Chris Hill, a libertarian teacher/scholar who was eliminated early from consideration for a tenure-track position.

A few weeks later, Hamilton's Dean of the Faculty Joseph Urgo wrote Paquette a letter reprimanding him, demanding that the article be removed from the NAS website, and denying Paquette the right to serve on faculty search committees.

National media took notice of the controversy this summer. Mark Bauerlein has a mult-part series at The Chronicle on questions surrounding the incident, and Scott Jaschik published "When Faculty Aren't Supposed to Talk" at Inside Higher Ed.

Yesterday Professor Robert Paquette responded to the controversy in a new article, "Dictatorships and Double Standards, Part II."

Tyranny on America's Private College Campus

Hamilton College to Prof. Paquette: Shut Up

A faculty member has landed in hot water for an article he published on the NAS website. In April, Hamilton College history professor Robert Paquette published “Dictatorships and Double Standards” on the National Association of Scholars website. A few weeks after the article appeared, Hamilton’s Dean of the Faculty Joseph Urgo wrote Paquette a letter reprimanding him, demanding that the article be removed from the NAS website, and denying Paquette the right to serve on faculty search committees.

This is the first instance we know of in which an academic official has sought to censor the NAS website—so naturally we are taking a keen interest in the proceedings. We have of course not removed Paquette’s article. (As a small act of defiance, we intend to link it frequently.) Paquette has also promised us a “Dictatorships and Double Standards, Part 2.”

We aren’t the only ones taking notice of Hamilton College’s heavy-handed response. Emory University professor Mark Bauerlein wrote about the letter in a Chronicle of Higher Education blog post (afternoon update: "An Episode at Hamilton, Part 2") and has promised more to come. Bauerlein cites Urgo’s ultimatum to Paquette whom he prohibited from serving on faculty search committees “until and unless your colleagues can convince the Dean’s office that you will adhere to College policies regarding faculty recruitment.”

Scott Jaschik took up the story in an article on Inside Higher Ed, “When Faculty Aren’t Supposed to Talk.” Jaschik asks, “But what is a breach [of confidence] and can a breach be punished?” He quotes Paquette saying that “information in my NAS piece was either obvious or a matter of public record long before I wrote the piece.”

Malleus Maleficarum

What’s all this about? Paquette’s article pretty much speaks for itself, but the short form is this: Paquette discusses the tyranny of intellectual majorities on campus who use “slash and burn” techniques to eliminate the representation of disfavored views. His case in point is the treatment of Christopher Hill, a junior faculty member in the history department at Hamilton who was sidelined at the very first stage of the search when a tenure track position opened up. Hill is a self-described libertarian and Paquette cited evidence that diversity preferences and suspicions about Hill’s political views played a role in that adverse decision.

Read the whole NAS article by Peter Wood.  

Below are the final two paragraphs from Robert Paquette's NAS article.

 

Dictatorships and Double Standards

Instead of trying to see the world better or more truly as it is by renouncing ideology, campus radicals claim that everyone has it, only theirs is superior to yours because it is enlisted in the service of the downtrodden. Ideologues, like ideologies, insulate themselves from testing. Try vigorously interrogating members of the diversity cartel in a departmental meeting as to why the standards by which they are judging a Professor Hill or some other poor chap appear not to have been applied in their own case or in previous cases involving ideological soul-mates. Pointing out the inconsistencies yielded by the slipperiness of situational ethics might just get you frog-marched to the dean’s office to face demands for “personnel action.” Your conveniently sensitive colleagues, after all, having worked endlessly on committees and at faculty meetings to install the apparatus of intimidation, can now charge you with having created with a sharp retort or pointed criticism “a hostile environment.” Self-censorship, let it be stressed, stretches on many college campuses from faculty, to staff, to students. The best and brightest conservative students in thinking about viable career options don’t forget what they saw on campus or what they endured in classrooms as undergraduates.

Colleges, even elite private liberal arts colleges, exist by a social contract invested by public faith. If the crises of our time worsen, the populist upsurge represented by the Tea Partiers may swell. Well might they begin to fix a penetrating gaze on the state of this country’s institutions of higher education. I, for one, would welcome sanitizing light.

Robert L. Paquette is Publius Virgilius Rogers professor of American history at Hamilton College and co-founder of the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization.

Intellectual Diversity or Nonsense?

Intellectual Diversity or Nonsense?

October 28, 2009 By Ashley Thorne

Two professors at Pennsylvania State University at Abington have published an intriguing article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required). They tell about a class they team-teach, "Religion in American Life and Thought," from two fairly divergent perspectives:

We could not be more different. Mel Seesholtz has a reputation for criticizing the dogma-based sociopolitical agenda of organized religion; Bryan Polk is the chaplain at Abington College. Mel is a James Joyce scholar; Bryan prefers to study Neolithic stone circles in England. Although we both teach English classes, Mel focuses on literature and courses on science, technology, and society; Bryan teaches religious studies and mythology. Mel is a laid-back facilitator of classroom discussions; Bryan is a more formal lecturer. Mel is a vegetarian (heading toward vegan); Bryan is a gourmet cook who enjoys virtually every kind of meat.

The professors describe how their teaching method - of listening to and learning from one another's views - captivates students' attention:

For instance, during a class discussion of the debate over the phrase "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, Mel suggested that the phrase turned the pledge into a public prayer. Bryan then opined that, for him, the problem was not with the word "God" but with the word "under," because it privileges faith systems that believe in a masculine, sky, warrior deity. The students immediately picked up the "aha" expression on Mel's face, and his "I never thought of it that way" restarted the dialogue with a different focus.

They boast, "Our classroom has become an arena for the free exchange of ideas in which everyone's opinion is welcomed and respected." A free exchange of ideas sounds wonderfully refreshing...but what about the second half of the sentence - "everyone's opinion is welcomed and respected"? Should everyone's opinion be welcomed and respected? Is that what intellectual diversity means? Hearing different arguments and making no judgments on the merits of any? Or should we, after hearing various sides of the issue, weigh each one's accuracy?

Read the whole article.

Affirmative Action for Ideas

Virginia Tech’s “Inclusive” Rodomontade
by Peter Wood

Yesterday, the president and the provost of Virginia Tech released an open letter to “the VT faculty, staff, and student community” enunciating their “commitment to inclusive diversity.”

The letter comes apparently as a public response to my article posted Sunday night, April 26, Virginia Tech, Round 2: Staging Diversity. The broader controversies are whether this public university should employ an ideological litmus test for promotion and tenure, and whether faculty members should be forced to adapt their syllabi, research, and all other university activities to advancing the goal of “diversity.” Broader still is the question of whether other colleges and universities across the United States will follow suit by adopting similar political tests for faculty members.

The Virginia Tech situation is emblematic of a national problem. At its root is the success of the progressive left in this country in imposing its political agenda on institutions of higher education. The politicization of higher education has been underway for several decades but has often usually proceeded incrementally and with a degree of caution. The mood has changed in the last six months. With the election President Obama and a Congress dominated by the progressive left, the campus left has felt empowered to move to a more openly radical stance.

Virginia Tech is one example of this. With the urging of some administrators who have very thin academic credentials but a very vocal commitment to “diversity”—Virginia Tech’s Dean Sue Ott Rowlands exemplifies the category—the university has begun to swap out academic accomplishment and intellectual standards in favor of conformity to its ideological shibboleths. The hard-core agenda is hidden to some degree behind a scrim of obfuscation. Do people outside academe, for example, know what is meant by the term “inclusive excellence?”

Don’t bother reaching for the dictionary. It isn’t there. You have to command to the lingo of the multiculturalists to decipher it. “Inclusive excellence” is based on the idea that different social and cultural groups have their own standards for excellence that cannot be shared or in most cases even translated across group boundaries. The excellence pursued by white Americans is one thing; that pursued by African-Americans another. The excellence pursued by women is one thing; that pursued by men is another. Under the doctrine of “inclusive excellence,” a university makes clear that it recognizes and values the distinctive excellences of each and every campus group.

Well, not really. In practice it means having separate (and lower) expectations for some groups than others. A simple translation of “inclusive excellence is that it is affirmative action for ideas. Ideas that are too weak, too flawed, too unsupported to withstand critical inspection get a sharply discounted admission ticket under the reign of “inclusive excellence.” The doctrine clearly owes something to several decades of post-modernism and various other attempts to diminish respect for reason and rational inquiry.

Read the whole article.

Group Think on Campus

Recently I posted "The Classroom without Reason." Articles such as this and many others may be found regularly on the National Association of Scholars website. I have been a member of NAS for several years. The resources of NAS are plentiful and useful. Below is another.

FIRE and ACTA recently created a short video, “Think What We Think...Or Else: Thought Control on the American Campus,” to document the misdoings in the University of Delaware’s ideologically coercive residence life program. This is the first video documenting the Delaware “treatment” which NAS and FIRE successfully exposed in 2007 and 2008.

Appearing in interviews throughout the film are University of Delaware honors professor Jan Blits (president of the Delaware Association of Scholars), UD honors professor Linda Gottfredson (DAS secretary), FIRE’s Greg Lukianoff and Adam Kissel, and three UD students: Bill Rivers, Kelsey Lanan, and Alyssa Koser. At the end, Lukianoff pronounces, “You’ve just witnessed the most extensive and systematic attempt to mandate student belief that I’ve yet seen...In a free society, if you want to change people’s opinions, you need to rely on the power of your words and the persuasiveness of your arguments. In this case, the University relied instead on coercion, force, and threats.”

HT: NAS

Response to a Scurrilous Accusation

Thus far I have remained out of the controversy that has come upon the college where I teach in the Biblical & Theological Studies Department. If interested in the controversy, find a number of documents here. If you read the documents on that page, I urge you also to read documents that are linked. Be fair and even-handed in your reading of the material. Render your own judgments carefully, prudently, and thoughtfully. Do not rashly make judgments.

My intention is not to enter into the conflict that envelopes our college, so I am not about to affix a comment on the Christianity Today article, "Northwestern Tempest" where someone who is variously self-identified as Christianprof and Christianprof3 has posted comments that stand in need of correction. I leave the first three comments posted by Christianprof without responses. I offer the following response only to the last comment posted on the page, a comment posted by Christianprof3. Here is the portion of the comment to which I offer a reply.

I'm pointing to facts, not doctrine: NWC last year had 7% non-white full-time faculty, half the MN average; of 21 private colleges in MN, NWC ranks 16th, despite doubling its non-white faculty since 2003. Again, NWC is 18th of 21 MN colleges in hiring full-time women (35.7%; MN avg is 46%). None are in BTS [sic B&TS] at NWC. Is it possible to believe that only white men are qualified to work full-time on the main campus in the Bible department at NWC? Remember: BTS itself is the gatekeeper.

As I respond to these comments I will leave unaddressed the general make-up of our college. I will address only the make-up of our department, the Biblical & Theological Studies Department. My focus will be upon the latter portion of the comments: "None are in BTS at NWC. Is it possible to believe that only white men are qualified to work full-time on the main campus in the Bible department at NWC? Remember: BTS itself is the gatekeeper."

Recently I returned from attending three major professional conferences hosted by three professional societies for academicians who work in and teach in areas of biblical studies and Christian theology. For many years the three societies have coordinated their annual meetings to occur within the span of a week and within the same general vicinity, allowing for maximum attendance by those who choose to attempt to attend all three.

• The Evangelical Theological Society (ETS) met November 19-21 in Providence, Rhode Island.
• The Institute for Biblical Research (IBR) met November 21-22 in Boston, Massachusetts.
• The Society for Biblical Research (SBL) met November 21-25, also in Boston.

The three societies span a wide range with the ETS being the most distinctively evangelical, the IBR being evangelical but patterned more after the British evangelical model, and the SBL spanning the full range of biblical scholars--evangelical to liberal, Protestant to Catholic, Christian to Jew, etc. I have been a member of all three professional societies for the duration of my professional teaching career.

Let's consider Christianprof3's claims. Clearly Christianprof3 has inside information to which only an upper level administrator would have access. However much the statistics Christianprof3 cites may be troubling to any of you readers, what ought to be far more troubling is Christianprof3's abuse and exploitation of statistics to draw the wrongful, entirely unwarranted, and prejudicial conclusion in the form of a rhetorical question: "Is it possible to believe that only white men are qualified to work full-time on the main campus in the Bible department at NWC? Remember: BTS itself is the gatekeeper."

Christianprof3 has wrongfully concluded that the B&TS Department has purposefully excluded all others except white males when filling vacated professorial positions. Worse than that, Christianprof3 exploits a racially charged and racially coded word, "gatekeeper," to construct a poorly fabricated subterfuge for retreat into plausible deniability if charged with race-baiting or sex-baiting by any perceptive reader. Let me state the matter plainly. Whoever Christianprof3 may be, the individual who wrote the comment exploits and manipulates statistics to draw the entirely prejudiced and scurrilous conclusion that the B&TS Department is filled with white males who are bigots, both with regard to sex and race, who have made for themselves a "white males only club." Unfortunately, Christianprof3 seems to have little understanding of the constituent participants within the guild of biblical studies, that the guild happily includes females and non-white males but that the vastly disproportionately smaller numbers of these individual members has nothing to do with a "gatekeeper" whose unspoken mission is to exclude women and minorities.

The fact of the matter is that the thousands of individuals who attend the three conferences that I have identified above give a clear portrayal of the field of potential candidates for faculty appointments at colleges and universities across America in departments of Religion and of Biblical & Theological Studies. Who attends these three conferences? Undergraduates students, graduate students, pastors, and academics who research and who teach of undergraduate and graduate institutions, ranging from small colleges to universities and from small denominational seminaries to large interdenominational seminaries. Females and males attend all three conferences. Whites and non-whites attend. Individuals from the U.S. and from around the world attend.

Males significantly outnumber females at all three conferences. White males outnumber both females and non-whites by considerable proportions. Do "gatekeepers" prevent women and non-whites from entering SBL? Of course not! As a matter of fact women and non-whites receive preferential treatment in SBL. SBL even has a special web page for women, Status of Women in the Profession Committee. Actually, women receive preferential treatment such as a complimentary breakfast. (Any free food is very helpful for academics who have quite limited professional expense accounts.) Likewise, SBL is thoroughly devoted to "multiculturalism and diversity" as is evident in the title of this link, Underrepresented Racial and Ethnic Minorities in the Profession Committee. As with females, non-whites receive preferential handling and treatment.

Indeed, of the three societies, even though SBL, the most broadly based of the three societies, spends the most money and energy toward developing female and non-white professors in biblical studies, the proportions of women and non-whites to men and to white members, respectively, in the society are quite disproportionate and constant. Is this the fault of white males? Are white males standing at the gate, blocking non-whites and females from entering into the society? Given the presuppositions and assumptions of Christianprof3, it must be so. But, of course, such a notion could hardly be more ludicrous. Within SBL, as in American society, deference clearly goes to females and non-whites. Even so, their numbers remain disproportionately small in relation to white males. Clearly, neither sexism nor racism account for this. Rather, other factors, particularly career choices determine the disparate proportionas.

As one sits in meeting rooms during the IBR conference one sees both females and non-whites. Yet, the disproportions are greater than in the SBL. Why? It is not as anyone such as Christianprof3 might presume. No "gatekeeper" excludes women or non-whites. IBR has a doctrinal basis for membership; SBL does not. Add a doctrinal basis to any society, and that alone becomes restrictive, not, of course, on the basis of race or sex but on the basis of shared beliefs. Thus, IBR is much smaller than is SBL. Because SBL has no doctrinal basis for membership, Christians and Jews are members, liberals and conservatives are members, believers and non-believers are members, etc. Not so with IBR, for affirmation of faith and endorsement of the Christian doctrinal basis are requisite for membership in IBR. This excludes vast numbers of those who are members of SBL. One other requisite for full membership in IBR is having a PhD in biblical studies. This renders IBR much smaller than ETS. Other levels of membership are available in IBR to those who do not possess the requisite PhD.

As with SBL female members of IBR also receive deferential promotion. Though males far outnumber females in IBR, males give deference to females among. Regularly women are asked to present papers to the society. I do not have at hand the statistics to show the numbers of either females or non-whites who are members of IBR, nor are the exact numbers crucial to make any warranted point. It is a fact of life that males dominate the area of biblical studies, not by force but by personal choices that males and females make. It is also a fact of life that whites, both female and male, dominate the area of biblical studies, again, not by force by by personal choices that whites, whether male or female, make in comparison to non-whites in American institutions of higher education.

What about the Evangelical Theological Society? Does a "gatekeeper" stand at the entrance to block women and non-whites from becoming members? Of course not! Yet, one might observe that as with attendance of the IBR meetings, proportionately fewer women and fewer non-whites attend the ETS annual conference than attend the SBL meetings. Why is this? Keep in mind that SBL, IBR, and ETS are all voluntary associations or societies. Individuals voluntarily join. Each society has its respective academic standards. Unlike SBL, IBR and ETS both require endorsement of its respective doctrinal basis for membership. As with the other societies, ETS offers various levels of membership in the society. Academically speaking, ETS has the lowest standard for full membership. One must attain the equivalent of the ThM (Master of Theology Degree). For IBR and SBL full membership requires a PhD in biblical studies--OT, NT, ancient biblical languages, or ancillary studies such as second temple literature. Though females and non-whites do enter into these fields of study, they are significantly outnumbered by white males, whether Jewish or Gentile, whether Jewish or Christian, whether Catholic or Protestant, whether Liberal or Evangelical, etc.

Consequently, while none of the three major societies have ever given any thought to posting "gatekeepers" to block women and non-whites from entering, far fewer women and non-whites enter into biblical and theological studies than do white males. Is this inherently racist or racialist? Multiculturalists insist that it is due to either racism or racialism, for they cannot fathom any other explanation, even though the explanation stares them in the face, namely, self-selection. Racism and sexism has nothing whatsoever to do with the statistics of membership in any of the three societies.

As a member of SBL, IBR, and ETS, I can say that we gladly welcome both females and non-whites into all three societies. Yet, facts are stubborn and relentless. Not one of the three societies is a "white men's" club. Not one of the three societies excludes women or non-whites. Not one of the three societies has adopted an intimidating posture that refuses to "welcome" women or non-whites. Such a notion is contrary to the truth. We could all wish that more women and non-whites would enter into the field of biblical and theological studies. We can even make significant efforts to see it happen, as has been done. Yet, for all the effots, such as those made by SBL and IBR, the fact is that women and non-whites remain vastly outnumbered by white males.

A stubborn and relentless fact is that neither women nor non-whites choose biblical studies and theology as careers at anything close to the same proportions as do white males. Why? Any number of factors undoubtedly play roles. However, the most obvious fact is that individuals make career choices, and females and non-whites in America do not choose academic careers in biblical and theological studies nearly as frequently as do white males. It is a fact of life even after societies such as SBL have targeted women and non-whites for recruitment into the fields of study.

Now let's turn our attention back to the focal point of Christianprof3's comments, namely the constituent full-time membership of the B&TS Department at our institution. Despite protests to the contrary, such as voiced by Christianprof3, neither the Chair of the B&TS Department nor any other member of the department at Northwestern College stands as "gatekeeper" to block entrance into the department by females or non-whites. Though Christianprof3 believes differently, prejudicial exploitation of statistics provides no support whatsoever. Quite apart from any racial or sexual bias entering in to faculty appointments in the B&TS Department at our college are factors that are far beyond the control of the department or any member of the department.

I have been a member of the B&TS Department for seventeen years. The pool of individuals from which our department may draw candidates for faculty appointments has remained quite constant. Throughout these seventeen years membership proportions of females and non-whites in SBL, IBR, and ETS have changed very little. To this day, relatively few females and even fewer non-whites, particularly blacks, pursue and obtain PhD degrees in theology or in biblical studies. Why? It is because they choose to pursue other degrees in much larger proportions. Consequently, the field of potential female and non-white candidates for any given faculty opening at our college or any other institution of higher learning is very slim.

Besides this factor what are some other factors that reduce the field of potential female and non-white candidates for faculty appointments at our college as they open?

One leading factor is the doctrinal statement that each and every faculty member, regardless the academic department, must heartily and unequivocally endorse annually. Our college's doctrinal basis is more restrictive than that of the Evangelical Theological Society. The doctrinal statement, thus, excludes vast numbers of acquaintances and friends, both male and female, white and non-white. Given our college's doctrinal statement, the make-up of full-time faculty members in the B&TS Department is consistent with colleges that have similar doctrinal statements.

Another leading factor is the salary offered. The field of potential female and non-white candidates is rendered even slimmer because institutions that are willing to pay much higher salaries than evangelical colleges and universities pay snag those available candidates, whether female or non-white.

Another significant factor that plays a role in whether institutions such as ours can successfully attract either females or non-whites into the B&TS Department is prestige. Why would female or non-white evangelical candidates purposefully choose to apply for a position at our institution when they can apply for positions at more prestigious evangelical colleges, such as Wheaton, Westmont, or Taylor?

Yet, one could ask a related question. Why would female or non-white candidates, even if evangelical, apply for positions at evangelical colleges and universities when they can apply at public or private institutions, including private liberal institutions, that are heavily endowed and are willing to pay huge salaries so that they can increase the numbers of their female and/or non-white faculty counts as they aggressively pursue diversity for diversity's sake? Such institutions offer powerfully attractive packages for females and non-whites, including reduced teaching loads, enhanced research opportunities, frequent sabbaticals, funded assistants, travel and research expense accounts, etc. It is extremely difficult for institutions like ours to compete for either female or non-white qualified candidates, given the high demand for them by colleges and universities that recruit them with highly competitive and attractive faculty appointments. I personally know individuals, both females and non-whites, who have taken positions at such institutions, purposely by-passing smaller private evangelical institutions, whether graduate or undergraduate.

Though I could continue, I must draw this to a close. Another factor that significantly reduces the field of potential female and non-white candidates for filling vacant faculty positions at our college and others like ours is the attractiveness of graduate schools over undergraduate institutions. Compare graduate schools to our college. Generally graduate schools offer potential faculty greater opportunities to teach within the narrow range of their academic and research strengths. They tend to provide more sabbaticals on much shorter rotations. Many award a term for sabbatical study after six teaching terms. Ours does so only after six teaching years, and then only if funds are available. Annually, our college awards on average around six sabbatical leaves. This is very poor given the six teaching year requirement and the size of the faculty. Graduate schools tend to provide higher salaries than colleges such as ours. Furthermore, they tend to support scholarship and research with greater funds for research assistants and for release time. All these and more factors have significantly reduced the number of potential candidates to fill vacant faculty slots in the B&TS Department at our college, whether the candidates are females, non-whites, or even white males.

When we do have openings and advertise widely--including within all three societies (SBL, IBR, ETS)--we have yet to receive any application from a non-white candidate and the one female applicant whom we did interview, proved to be unambiguously out of step with our college's doctrinal statement. Neither the current members of the B&TS Department nor those at any time throughout my tenure at our college drafted the doctrinal statement. This is not to suggest that the statement should be altered. Rather, the point is that the Board of Trustees and the administrators determine the contents of the doctrinal statement.

I have personally requested curriculum vitae from non-white candidates for potential vacancies in our B&TS Department. I know that other members of our department have done the same. Unfortunately, those I have invited have never followed through. I do not know the specific reasons. Any number of factors, including those that I have addressed, may have led them to choose not to apply. All of those of whom I speak are gainfully employed elsewhere, evidently more well-suited to their interests.

As our department looks to fill any possible new position with the most qualified and best suited candidate, the candidates always include all who apply, whether female, non-white, or white male. Christianprof3 is wrong, entirely wrong to pose the rhetorical question with the presumption that the B&TS Department at our college engages in sexism and racism. It is cowardly for Christianprof3 to hide behind the cloak of anonymity to launch his slanderous and scurrilous accusations. But, of course, darkness is the fitting place of origin for such vile and invidious accusations. It is slanderous and defamatory for Christianprof3 to declare, "Is it possible to believe that only white men are qualified to work full-time on the main campus in the Bible department at NWC? Remember: BTS itself is the gatekeeper." Christianprof3's rhetorical question and judgment are rash, foolish, scurrilous, and frankly, evil.

For an insightful essay that addresses the charge of sexism in the fields of science, engineering, and mathematics see "Feminizing Science: The Alchemy of Title IX" by Patricia Hausman. As Hausman well states, "Perceived is the operative word. What is perceived and what is real are often worlds apart."

Falsehood in Advertising

Colleges caught stacking publicity photos with minorities'Sometimes you see the same black kid in every picture'

A new report from the online magazine Inside Higher Ed reveals that a researcher has caught universities loading their publicity photographs with black students.

"Sometimes you see the same black kid in every picture," said George Dehne, who runs an admissions consulting firm and was quoted in the online report.

"We tell colleges that it's a mistake and they shouldn't do it, but we get overruled," he said.

The report said an Augsburg College sociologist worked with an undergraduate to review the viewbooks of hundreds of randomly selected four-year colleges and universities. Numbers and percentages on racially identifiable student photographs were collected, as well as the actual minority make-up of the student bodies.

"The findings: Black students make up an average of 7.9 percent of students at the colleges studied, but 12.4 percent of those in viewbooks. Asian students are also more likely to be found in viewbooks than on campus, making up 3.3 percent of real students on average and 5.1 percent of portrayed students," the report said.

"The researchers … feel less confident about figures for Latino students," the report said. The findings were presented recently at a meeting of the Midwest Sociological Society.

The researcher found "more than 75 percent of colleges appeared to over-represent black students in viewbooks."

The report noted that universities should have learned about such strategies already.

"In September of 2000, the University of Wisconsin at Madison and the University of Idaho were both embarrassed when they were forced to admit that they had doctored promotional photographs to make their campuses look diverse," the report said. "In both cases, non-white faces were added to real student photographs of all-white groups."

"At the universities involved, officials insisted that they meant well, but just about everyone agreed that Photoshop diversity isn't the real thing," the report said.

Timothy Pippert, an assistant professor of sociology at Augsburg and study leader, said the presence of blacks means diversity for many people.

"If you show African American students, people think that means your institution is diverse,” he told Inside Higher Ed. "They are defining diversity as that face."

He said schools apparently are trying to send a message that "this is a place where you'd be welcome."

But Dehne suggested the "presentation" of an inflated population of minorities could backfire.

"When kids come to campus, they look around for all those extra people and don't find them," he told the reporter.

Pippert said his research didn't address issues about the accuracy of representations of other segments of the student population, but one student assistant in the research project found the photographs chosen by universities for their promotions were "hot chicks and minorities."