Diversity
April 22, 2019 — Steven Hayward
As has been obvious for some time now, “diversity” is an Orwellian term that means everyone looks different, but thinks the same. The enforced narrow conformity of the diversicrats cannot survive the real world for very long (college campuses, being insulated from reality, are another matter), and sure enough, it appears that James Damore, the software engineer fired from Google for doubleplusungoodwrongthink about diversity, will have to share his cell
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April 5, 2019 — Scott Johnson
In “Villainy at Villanova” I wrote about the Wall Street Journal column by Villanova Professors Colleen Sheehan and James Matthew Wilson as well as the response by the Villanova president and provost. The president and provost were big on the truth, unity, and love the new “diversity” questions in the student evaluation would bring to Villanova. Professors Sheehan and Wilson decried the enforced conformity they threatened. Sociology Professor Rory Kramer
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January 31, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
Heather Mac Donald has warned that identity politics, having engulfed the humanities and social sciences on American campuses, is now taking over the hard sciences. Here is an example: A friend sent me this application form for the Graduate Data Science Summer Program at the National Institutes of Health. Those accepted to the summer program “will spend the summer at the NIH learning how to use their computational skills to
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November 24, 2018 — Steven Hayward
With all of the holiday commotion I have neglected to put up notice here of my final visit to Yale for this semester, this Tuesday at 4:30, in the same location as before (WLH 207, 100 Wall Street). Sponsored by the William F. Buckley Program, I’ll be giving a lecture on the topic of equality. I’m going to begin with the droll opening line from Peter deVries’s novel The Prick
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September 19, 2018 — Steven Hayward
While everyone’s attention was on the Kavanaugh matter, and secondarily on the salacious details offered up by Stormy Daniels that shall not be repeated here, there was another big story reported today: Bert and Ernie are not gay! This bit of crucial news has even made USA Today, so you know it’s important! The makers of “Sesame Street” say Bert and Ernie, the classic feuding Muppets who appeared on the popular children’s
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July 16, 2018 — Steven Hayward
The New York Times has an online animated feature called “Trump Bites”—gee, there’s a lot of subtlety there—and today’s offering is “Trump and Putin: A Love Story.” I don’t think it is either talented or especially amusing. Here are a couple of still frames from it to give you the flavor of the thing: There’s just one problem with this cartoon. Wait for it! Can you guess? Why yes: It
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May 25, 2018 — John Hinderaker
Shocking because it comes from the editors of the Harvard Crimson, and because the diversity they call for is ideological. The context is the release of a report by Harvard’s Presidential Task Force on Inclusion and Belonging. The report, predictably, was all about race and gender. The Crimson’s editors write: [M]uch more work is needed in expanding the conversation and prioritizing ideological diversity on campus. Startlingly, just around 1.5 percent
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April 15, 2018 — John Hinderaker
I wrote recently that you can measure any two things, and in all likelihood they will be different. If you have an agenda, you can call this difference a “gap” or a “disparity” and demand remedial actions by government. Whether differences between demographic groups are deemed significant depends on politics, not logic. Thus, to take one of countless examples, no one protests the fact that Asian-Americans earn, on average, significantly
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November 22, 2017 — Steven Hayward
Remember our items about how Apple Corp. fired its black vice president of diversity for saying white people could actually be diverse, too? Well, guess what? The story gets even crazier. I’ll just let this pitch perfect report Michael Harriot from The Root tell it: I am not saying that God, the universe, Rihannayoncé or whoever you worship as a higher power is petty, but in one of the most
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November 18, 2017 — Paul Mirengoff
The qualifying rounds for the 2018 World Cup are finally complete. We now know the 32 teams that will compete. The list contains most of the usual suspects, but three will be missing in Russia: Italy, Holland, and the U.S. The absence of the U.S. (for the first time since 1986) is surprising only because the competition in North America is so weak. Our team is crap and doesn’t deserve
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October 26, 2017 — Steven Hayward
About 15 years back I happened to catch a live show by Jay Leno, who still toured now and then to do live comedy even while he was hosting The Tonight Show. And he opened by joking that he’d just appeared at the Foxwoods Casino in Connecticut, the large resort run by, and for the benefit of, the tiny Pequot Indian tribe. Leno joked, in a faux-Italian accent, that he
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September 24, 2017 — Steven Hayward
Are Asians an oppressed minority in America, or not? We know for a fact that elite universities are nowadays discriminating against Asian applicants in much the same way they discriminated against Jewish applicants decades ago. But didn’t a lot of Asians historically suffer the same kind of discrimination that Irish, Italian, and other immigrants nowadays considered part of the world of “white supremacy”? For example, there’s a little noticed passage
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September 18, 2017 — Steven Hayward
“Diversity” has become the touchstone of contemporary liberalism, rivaling even equality as its first principle, though of course the two can co-exist. Democrats have placed all their chips on diversity, seeing the rising coalition of minorities and elite white professionals as their ticket to political dominance at some point in the future (the Teixeira-Judis hypothesis). A lot of Trump’s white voters in the midwest are old and will start to
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August 12, 2017 — Steven Hayward
The Wall Street Journal ran an excerpt from Mark Lilla’s new book, The Once and Future Liberal, coming out on Tuesday that we mentioned here yesterday. Here’s a link to the whole piece if you are a WSJ subscriber, but if not here are two of the better paragraphs in it: As a teacher, I am increasingly struck by a difference between my conservative and progressive students. Contrary to the stereotype,
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February 28, 2017 — Paul Mirengoff
Pricewaterhouse Coopers insists that the initial awarding of Best Picture to “La La Land” was the result of human error. No doubt, this is correct. I’m confident that the Academy intended to give the award to “Moonlight,” a film about African-Americans in Miami that was written by two African-Americans, one of whom directed it. But here, mostly in jest, is an alternative theory based on the grading practice that Harvey
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November 11, 2016 — Scott Johnson
Glenn Reynolds posts an email with an important postscript to “Freakout at General Mills.” The email sent to Glenn by an InstaPundit reader elucidates the addressees of the message sent out by General Mills’s Orwellian Vice President for Global Inclusion to employees traumatized by the election of Donald Trump: I worked over 15 years at General Mills, and what’s critical to note is that the addressing of Ken Charles’s note
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October 17, 2016 — Steven Hayward
I’m sure readers will recall how the Academy Awards were protested because not enough minorities were nominated? (Because, as everyone knows, Hollywood is a hotbed of racism.) Wait until the social justice crowd notices the gender breakdown of Nobel Prizes: The American Council on Science and Health notes these data, and comments: And, even when women do win the prize, they are often not given full credit. Dr. Nancy Hopkins, a
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