UDs’s old friend Rita Koganzon argues, in the New York Times, that colleges should stop coddling and controlling students, and instead start offering them an environment in which they need to be autonomous adults. Her colleague at UNC Chapel Hill, Jay Smith, launches an ad feminam attack in response, advising her in his last sentence to “look in the mirror.”
After all, Smith argues, Rita has herself been coddled by a conservative establishment (in the NC legislature and on the Chapel Hill board of trustees) which arranged a nice faculty position for her in a newly established conservative thought program on campus to which many faculty objected.
Though they would never admit it, the faculty of [this new program] benefited from affirmative action, but of the unjustifiable kind that works in reverse. Their candidacies for positions at UNC were made possible not by pure merit, which they may or may not possess, but by their membership in or adjacency to a well-funded conservative ecosystem saturated by euphemisms like “viewpoint diversity,” “civility” and “balance.” That ecosystem thrives on other built-in advantages. [The program’s] mission, like that of other similarly inspired centers across the country, is supported by the generosity of rich donors working to defend and disguise capitalism’s worst excesses, a gerrymandered GOP supermajority in our state and a university administration willing to accommodate the political goals of legislators and their minions on governing boards. [These] professors may well be the most protected people on our campus.
A far more intellectually honest direction of attack on autonomy at universities offered itself to Smith, and UD is surprised he didn’t take it. The university Rita is about to join permanently and luridly besmirched itself not thirteen years ago when a twenty year long fake courses/fake department/fake professors/dirty administrators scandal finally broke – hundreds of no-show student athletes were handed out As in non-existent courses engineered by corrupt professors and deans who were highly compensated by the university president and trustees, who themselves certainly knew all about the scheme, as did – one with equal certainty assumes – plenty of professors and – duh – students. “Investigators concluded that university employees were aware of the fraud and actively steered athletes and other struggling students to those courses.” It was “a clear and atrocious example of academic fraud.”
[T]he university’s accreditor, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools’ Commission on Colleges, … placed the university on a yearlong probation in 2015, ending in 2016, for violating seven accreditation standards, one of them being academic integrity. It was the strongest punishment the accreditor could deliver besides revoking accreditation entirely.
Because Smith’s university spectacularly betrayed the moral trust upon which the free and legitimate university rests, it lost its autonomy. In response to the scandal, the university initiated a policy whereby school officials will drop in unannounced at any time in any course to make sure professors are meeting their courses. Pretty humiliating, huh? Pretty nanny state, right? But Jay Smith’s school demonstrated its inability to be autonomous, and therefore all must be monitored.
And by the way – if Jay is worried about “capitalism’s worst excesses,” he can find those very close to home, in a university which continues to hand over huge amounts of its money to sports over academics, even though it’s easy to argue that if it had any integrity it would have shut down its athletics programs for a decent interval.
October 1st, 2024 at 3:39PM
To be fair, I don’t think we can be dueling if only one of us is fighting and the other has no idea who this guy is. It’s also not clear what he’s arguing – my NYT op-ed is wrong b/c my job was created without his input and I’m therefore unqualified for it? This is a non-sequitur, or two.
I do enjoy when people like this disparage the hiring of conservatives as affirmative action. Do they concede then that affirmative action in general is recruitment of the unqualified? That it is…bad?
October 1st, 2024 at 5:12PM
He tries to distinguish between bad and good affirmative action – or at least he gestures in the direction of such a distinction. But his first attack along these lines involves the absence of “pure merit” in your appointment, while the absence of pure merit is the essence of ALL affirmative action.
I think he’s implying that when it’s about wealthy stupid white people getting into Harvard (see Jared Kushner) it’s bad, and that’s more or less YOUR category at Chapel Hill because of your rich powerful conservative friends…? Do you think he’d move your category to at least a touch less than totally unjustifiable if he knew you were the child of struggling Jewish immigrants from the Soviet Union rather than one of Ralph Lauren’s kids who got in to Duke? Of course you and I wouldn’t put any weight on that fact about you; but Jay’s position seems to suggest that he would.
It’s like Yale accepting hardscrabble hillbilly JD Vance – that was almost certainly a form of affirmative action, no? Bad? Good?
October 2nd, 2024 at 9:41AM
I see the distinction he wants to make, but it remains ultimately a concession that all affirmative action is selection of the under-qualified, either for reasons we like or those we don’t. So his black colleagues are as under-qualified as I on this view, only he thinks lowering the standards on the basis of race is desirable or at least acceptable, while lowering them on the basis of political views or Kushner wealth is not. Fair enough! But now let him tell his black colleagues that he thinks they are under-qualified.
This op-ed seems mostly to vindicate the Board of Trustees’ view that the school that hired me was indeed necessary to correct longstanding and widespread bias against conservatives in academia held by leftist faculty like Smith. He doesn’t even consider the merits of the faculty hired by it; he dismisses them out of hand as unqualified because they are conservative or were hired by conservatives. He does not in fact know what the hiring process was, or how much “rigor” it demanded. It doesn’t much matter because we know that conservatives have no standards. What does this disparaging attitude suggest about his willingness to hire conservatives in his own department if he were given a say in the matter?
(Ironically, everyone hired by the school has achieved substantially more than he had when he was hired at UNC and would, purely on the merits, have beaten him out for his own job. But I suppose we can be charitable and say that standards have changed since 1991.)
October 2nd, 2024 at 10:11AM
Yes. And some of this goes to my Scathing Online Schoolmarm persona, because his tone and prose style give away more than he knows. They give away, as you suggest, sheer, untutored, prejudice.