UC Berkeley and The Meaning of Diversity

Posted September 22, 2007

Columbia University announced this week that they were opening up the campus to for visiting Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

There was no reason to invite this guy — who is, after all, one of the most dangerous people on the planet. He is a deeply anti-Semitic holocaust-denier who funds terrorism throughout the Middle East. He has a great deal of American blood on his hands. He has little use for scientific inquiry or reason of the sort that Columbia upholds. Inviting him was dumb and shame on Columbia.

Now that he has an invitation however, withdrawing it is a mistake. I would not invite Hitler, nor would I retract the invitation if some misguided fool did so. I’d
let it happen not because I like the message (by that standard, I’d
have to bar a lot of the faculty). You keep a campus open for the same
reason you keep speech free: a university campus like a democracy thrives on the free exchange of ideas.
(OK, inviting our sworn enemies is imbecilic. We prefer people with
factual and scientifically valid ideas, but that’s what the listeners
get to judge). It is obnoxious to grant a podium to a guy with a vision
of women straight out of the 14th century who proudly funds military
attacks on US and Israel — but at this stage it is more obnoxious to
send him home. Let him speak and let others refute his vile beliefs.

In fact, I suspect that New Yorkers will have a thing or two to say
to a guy who celebrates the 9-11 attacks and gleefully executes
homosexuals in the public square. Of course it would be better if
Columbia did not bar ROTC recruiters from campus because they object to
Clinton’s laws on the treatment of gays in the military. This
tends to complicate our assertion that we are open to all ideas and
gives credence to those who observe that campuses are more open to
anti-American ideas than to pro-American ones.

Closer to home, Stanford faculty are protesting Don Rumsfeld appearing at a forum at Hoover and the University of California just rescinded an invitation
to Larry Summers
to speak on how it can compete more effectively with private
universities. Some faculty on the Davis campus, where Summers was to
speak, objected because of an inopportune comment he made while at
Harvard. Richard Blum, the multimillionaire Senator’s-husband and UC
Regent who has been pushing some helpful reforms at UC agreed to
rescind the invitation. This was cowardly — Blum knows better.

To be sure, Summers’ suggestion
that the small number of female scholars in the hard sciences might reflect innate
gender differences was ill-advised, even if in theory the subject could be a valid subject of scientific
inquiry. It was not a terribly thoughtful suggestion coming from the
President of Harvard -- especially since the kind of research Summers was suggesting has been done for decades. As Summers protégé and Berkeley economist Brad DeLong noted,

"Summers’ views on gender, genetics, and math achievement are almost certainly wrong, are unsupported, and should not be pushed forward by somebody who is twenty years beyond the stage of his career where you throw out lots of unfiltered ideas in the belief that what matters is the quality of your best one."

I
am overall a fan of Summers (article here) even if I accept that this is not a personality well-suited to leading a major university. There is no excuse, however, for not hearing the ideas of one of the brightest economists in a generation, a former Treasury Secretary, and former Harvard President on the topic of improving UC competitiveness.

This is especially true since the competitiveness of the University of California is a big
issue — and ought to be a big public issue in California. Universities affect our
political as well as our economic living
standards. High quality public universities are indispensable engines
of social, economic, and technological progress. The University of California is looked to worldwide as a model public university that has powered the growth of an important part of the United States.

My wife and I are both
UC grads. She teaches and serves as a dean at
Cal (and endorses not a single word of this post). We have many friends
on the faculty and we cheer happily Cal sports teams, especially against Stanford. Like
many
in these parts, we bleed blue and gold (and
are delighted that the football team is averaging 40 points a
game and beating Arizona State as I write).

But the University of California is at risk – and the problem has more to do with leadership than with money. UC has not produced leaders up to the task of guiding the institution. Bob
Dynes was a sorry excuse for a President and nobody is
sorry to see him retire. (Among many other things, Dynes made a terrible
choice for Chancellor at my alma mater, UC Santa Cruz, and,
having botched the selection, proceeded to watch his candidate flounder embarrassingly for two years. The
situation ended tragically when, thoroughly humiliated, she jumped off a
building and killed herself).

Bob Birgeneau, Chancellor of the Cal campus for the past three years,
is another Dynes appointee and a much better one. A friendly progressive Canadian who is well-regarded by Cal faculty, Birgeneau at least raises money (not a trivial skill: last week he announced a $113 million gift from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation –
the largest in campus history). Like most Chancellors since Clark Kerr, he will not confront the faculty
over things like the need to consolidate weak departments and the Byzantine hash of 50+ research units
that grow like weeds because there isn’t anyone in charge of
rationalizing them. Under Cal’s governance structure, faculty have an exceptionally strong voice. Birgeneau may be the zookeeper, but the animals,
largely undomesticated, have veto power and then some.

This is unnecessary and counterproductive. The presidents of our great universities were once extraordinarily
influential figures in American public and cultural life. They went on
to become national leaders like Woodrow Wilson, who left Princeton to
become governor of New Jersey. Universities attracted figures with global reputations
like Dwight Eisenhower, who ran Columbia when he was finished saving the world from
fascism (and would have doubtless had some choice thoughts about offering the prestige of Columbia to a fascist wannabe like Ahmadinejad). Other presidents played major national roles, like Harvard’s James
Bryant Conant who helped ramp up the Manhattan Project or Chicago’s
Robert Hutchens who pioneered modern Socratic teaching and founded the
briefly influential Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions.

These were individuals not easily swayed by fads or subject to
intellectual cowardice. One can only imagine what they would make of
the modern university president — a person in the thrall of a campus
religion called "diversity" that determines the correctness and
acceptability of ideas with the confidence and breadth of Sharia or medieval
Biblical law. The rhetoric of "diversity" overrides almost all other
considerations, arguments, and goals — even when diversity has nothing
to do with educating our smartest, most talented, and hardest working
young people.

Birgeneau is a modest man with a lovely wife who
seems to retain his Canadian socialist values — meaning he tries to be
a good guy and pull for the underdog. Problem is, the results produced
by Canadian socialist values here aren’t much better than they are in
Canada. Especially when he genuflects before the goddess of diversity
and announces that the major focus of his administration will be to
subvert Proposition 209, a measure passed by the citizens of California
that restricts the ability of the University to consider race in
admissions or hiring.

In making diversity his signature priority, the chancellor tied himself in a series of knots. Specifically,

As an employee of the State of California he is unwise to defy a referendum recently passed by 55% of the voting citizenry (who see
fit to pay him more than we pay our governor). Canadians have a long
history of subjugating democratic preferences to government and cultural elites — but Californians don’t. We treasure our right of referendum to the extreme. A chancellor who declares that "quite a small percentage of
the population" would have made Prop 209 come out differently will be viewed by taxpayers as delusional. In elections and surveys California voters consistently prefer
decisions based on merit, not tribe — even when measurements of merit
are not perfect. In short, this ain’t Canada.

Our good chancellor then announced that the
crying need of the Berkeley campus was for more Native-American,
Hispanic, and African-American students. The most
recent Berkeley enrollment I could find shows a student body that is 3% black, 9.5% Hispanic, and
0.4% Native American, about 45% Asian-American and 33% white, with the
balance not saying. (The state is 7% black, 33% Hispanic, 11% Asian
Americans, and 45% white.). The chancellor might as well have held a
press conference and announced: "Berkeley has
four times too many Asian students. My #1 priority is to override the
will of California taxpayers, kick out a bunch of Chinese, Indian, and
Korean kids with high test scores, and admit folks who didn’t do quite
as well in school". To be consistent, he will also have to complain about the shortage
of whites on campus — a group that is significantly underrepresented.
Indeed, Berkeley enrolls women significantly in excess of their numbers in the population,
so are we to conclude that the consequence of this campaign for diversity will be to admit more white men? Somehow I can’t picture
Robert Hutchens painting himself into a corner quite this quickly.

Amusingly, certain parts of California history are now off limits to the Chancellor, given his "strategic priority". He will not want to discuss 19th century California, a time when the Golden State led the
nation in anti-Chinese legislation or the mid 20th century, when we
forced Japanese Californians into internment camps. Acknowledging
racism against Asians is a bit awkward at the moment, since they now have the
highest high school graduation rates in the state. Blacks and Hispanics
have the lowest (indeed around here if you want to know how good a
school is, just count the share of Asian kids in attendance. It is a
highly reliable indicator and one frequently discussed by black and
Hispanic families who care about the quality of their kid’s education).
For the chancellor to acknowledge that a
history of vicious oppression need not prevent people from becoming
outstanding academic achievers not only undermines the logic of
affirmative action but suggests a vein of social research worthy of
James Bryant Conant (who introduced aptitude tests into
Harvard’s undergraduate admissions system so that students would be
chosen for their intellectual promise and merit, rather than their
social connections.)

One wonders whether the chancellor will visit enough classrooms to notice that race is increasingly a weak way to describe California students. It is by no means irrelevant, but California Asians and Hispanics now marry "out" between 25-50% of the time. The
college student closest to our family is a 21 year old medical student at UCSF. She is British but speaks Spanish because
she lived for years in Puerto Rico. She is black with an Oxford accent and a Vietnamese boy friend. Try capturing that on a form. My wife’s
students are often a mix of Chinese, Hispanic, Cambodian, etc. Many either cannot indicate a race on state forms or simply refuse to do so.

Cal-style diversity ignores the one form of diversity that should matter most to campus
life. A college campus, above all places in American life, is meant to be a cauldron of intellectual and ideological diversity that produces a healthy ferment of competing ideas and values.

On this dimension, UC Berkeley is a scandal. An academic study of the campus faculty
recently confirmed what it dryly termed the "one-party campus
conjecture". "For UC-Berkeley" it concluded, "we found an overall
Democrat:Republican ratio of 9.9:1" and declared Republicans an "endangered species" on campus. Statewide, registered Democrats now make up 42.5% of all potential voters and Republicans 34.2%. Translation: in the real world, there are 25% more Democrats than Republicans; on campus there are ten times more.

Where, precisely, is the clash of ideas and values that is training
our engineers, scientists, designers, and market makers of the future? Most faculty are ideological sheep who preach diversity but practice conformity while
defending their need for lifetime tenure to protect a right to dissent
they exercise mainly in defense of their own privilege.

Talent, creativity, initiative, academic excellence, and hard work
come in a huge variety of packages. But universities increasingly
judge the packaging, not the demonstrated capacity for creativity,
leadership, or academic excellence. Worse, having preached the value of
diverse packaging, they impose a stifling ideological conformity. The result not only has nothing to do with education — it has nothing to do with diversity.

Parts of this post appeared earlier.