Famed economic historian Niall Ferguson was recently
denounced for being insensitive to diversity. He does not mention the point-- perhaps it does not need mention-- but Ferguson is married to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, long a target of Islamist assassins, and the father of a biracial child. Calling him a bigot is a bit rich. Failing to feel some pride in his wife's courage bespeaks a special kind of bigotry.
Anyway Ferguson recently convened a conference at Stanford's Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank. No one much cared about what was discussed and debated. For those who believe in
diversity uber alles, a conference on history and public policy must be judged
by the number of representatives from different oppressed groups.
The virtue of this approach, Ferguson explains in his Times
of London column this morning, is that you do not need to think. You do not
need to consider the facts and the evidence. You do not need to activate your
rational faculties. In this case, you need but know the gender breakdown of the group… to
know what to believe.
The New York Times was appalled at the lack of diversity. It blared out the shrill
headline… there were no women at the conference. Which means, to Times readers,
that the whole thing was an exercise in bigotry. You need not know anything else.
As it happened, Ferguson did invite five women to
participate. All declined. He described the result:
Last
month I organised a small, invitation-only conference of historians who I knew
shared my interest in trying to apply historical knowledge to contemporary
policy problems. Five of the people I invited to give papers were women, but
none was able to attend. I should have tried harder to find other female
speakers, no doubt. But my failure to do so elicited a disproportionately
vitriolic response.
Under a
headline that included the words “Too white and too male”, The New York Times
published photographs of all the speakers as if to shame them for having
participated. Around a dozen academics took to social media to call the
conference a “StanfordSausageFest”.
Shaming the participants as bigots. Two Stanford historians,
wanting to show why they had not been invited, took the occasion to display
their own special kind of bigotry:
So
outraged were Stanford historians Allyson Hobbs and Priya Satia that they
demanded “greater university oversight” of the Hoover Institution, where I
work. Other Stanford institutions had embraced diversity, but Hoover had
“proved impervious to the demographic changes transpiring in the academy.” It
was “an ivory tower in the most literal sense”. The most literal sense?
Embracing diversity means hiring historians who want the
world to know that they were hired to fulfill diversity quotas. And also, to
promote radical leftist political causes. What other conclusion would you draw from their overreaction: they are especially sensitive about diversity because it seems to have been a primary consideration in their hiring:
What we
see here is the sexism of the anti-sexists; the racism of the anti-racists. In
this Through the Looking Glass world, diversity means homogeneity. I was struck
by the objection of professors Hobbs and Satia that, whereas Stanford has the
“high-minded purpose” of “fostering education, research and creativity for the
benefit of humanity”, the Hoover Institution’s values are “very different . . .
economic freedom, private enterprise, and commitment to facts and reason”. Good
grief, not those discredited tenets of white patriarchy!
These professors are so woke that they have invented new
words, words like whitesplaining… because, don’t you know, whites, and white
men in particular are a plague visited on the earth:
“The
whitesplaining of history is over,” declared another heated article by Satia
last week. The historian’s role, she explained, was not to help improve policy
but to be a “critic of government . . . to speak to the public, so that people
may exert pressure on their elected representatives”. Her exemplar in this
regard? Step forward the very white, very male British social historian EP
Thompson.
Hideous
Newspeak terms such as “whitesplaining” and “mansplaining” are symptoms of the
degeneration of humanities in the modern university. Never mind the facts and
reason, so the argument runs, all we need to know — if we don’t like what we
hear — are the sex and race of the author.
Emphasize the point. They want to use the educational system as a way
to brainwash students into adhering to the ideologically correct position,
based on the sex and race of the author. As we have seen in many other cases, they denounce anyone who has ever taken a divergent political position and want him to be shut up or shut down. Now, that will surely help America to
compete in the world.
Of course, mindlessly attacking bigotry risks turning one
into a bigot:
But
does it really constitute progress if the proponents of diversity resort to the
behaviour that was previously the preserve of sexists and racists? Publishing
the names and mugshots of conference speakers is the kind of thing anti-semites
once did to condemn the “over-representation” of Jewish people in academia.
Terms such as “SausageFest” belong not in civil academic discourse but in the
pages of male-chauvinist comics such as Viz.
In a world where it has recently come to everyone’s attention that
the British Labour Party, through its leader Jeremy Corbyn, has been infested
with anti-Semitism, we should not be surprised that leftist academics are trafficking in the same tropes. I am sure that I do not need to tell you where these woke professors stand on the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
Your hed for this is GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRReat!
ReplyDeleteWell, there's idiocy, too.
ReplyDelete