I’m sorry to say, however, that we have defaulted on our contract with the American public. For starters, universities regularly engage in illegal race- and sex-based hiring. You know it, and I know it. Hiring committees often decide from the outset to hire a woman or racial minority. Deans often refuse to make hires if the candidate does not contribute to “diversity.” Some people deny this ever happens; they say that although affirmative action is crucially important, no one has ever been hired because of his or her race or sex. I’ll let you be the judge of whether that is plausible.
And it isn’t just hiring. Recently, it came to light that the Harvard Law Review rejected 85% of submissions using a racial rubric. Remarkably, the student editors often cited demographic reasons to accept or reject papers. “We have too many Yale JDs and not enough Black and Latino/Latina authors,” one editor claimed. Another complained that an article cited only “nine women and one non-binary scholar,” while another criticized a paper for only using the word Black seven times.
I ask you: Is this how the Harvard Law Reviewshould be run? How did it come to be run this way in the first place?
Furthermore, universities regularly discriminate, not just on the basis of race and sex, but also ideology.
We know, for example, that academics discriminate against conservatives. How do we know this? You can just ask faculty, and they’ll tell you. According to a survey conducted by Yoel Inbar, 37% of psychology faculty say they would discriminate against a conservative in a hiring decision, a finding replicated in other studies and confirmed by any conservative in academia.
To nobody’s surprise, this ideological discrimination extends to graduate admissions. For example, in 2020–21, the English department at the University of Chicago announced that it was “accepting only applicants interested in working in and with Black Studies.” If you just wanted to get a PhD to study Chaucer or Shakespeare, sorry, you were out of luck.
Academics also engage in a kind of implicit discrimination in the way they construct job ads, which are often written to exclude conservatives, libertarians and centrists. Examples are legion, but consider a recent ad from UC Berkeley seeking a tenure track professor who works on “abolition studies, anti-racism and anti-blackness, social inequality, racial socialization, racial capitalism, trans/queer/feminist theory, structural intersectionality, social justice and structural change, and critical disability studies.”
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more.