![]() She has crossed a professional line that conservatives insist must be respected if the discipline is to retain its integrity. She sits in the judge’s seat, and it’s a position she doesn’t want to give up. It is loaded with psycho-political content ready to be summoned forth as the candidate struggles to give the right answer. She poses her question as a hand grenade whose pin is about to fall out. If you handed her Richard Bernstein’s famous 1990 New York Times story on political correctness, she couldn’t get through two paragraphs before tossing it away in a huff. An interviewer on a hiring committee who is herself white but who quizzes each candidate on his promotion of diversity can’t hear any criticism of her approach. The cries of white supremacy and (let’s add) or rampant male sexism in the pages of the Chronicle of Higher Education and elsewhere aren’t vulnerable to rebuttal. They succeeded in convincing the country that scholarly norms had decayed and the resulting decadence had opened the way to political correctness on the syllabus and in the curriculum. Alan Sokal and the Bad Writing Award demonstrated how far disciplinary standards had fallen. Thirty years ago, Allan Bloom, Roger Kimball, et al pinpointed the intellectual corruptions of the academic humanities. The old conservative critiques aren’t pertinent anymore, not to this kind of agenda. ![]() The diversity statements that job candidates submit are less important as statements of faith in the diversity dogma than they are ways of identifying diverse identities. Identity, not ideology–that’s the crucial thing. Personnel decisions are now a more specific and intractable matter. After all, everybody on the job market these days believes pretty much the same thing when it comes to the social and political basics. Ideological conformity doesn’t help here. She fully supports LGBT rights.īut that doesn’t matter. She teaches freshman composition but specializes in environmental topics and writing. At the same time, during job season, the education press filled the air with complaints written by persons of color about white supremacy in its various forms in higher education, while tales of the plight of LGBT students and faculty circulated, giving job candidates who were non-white and LGBT still more special status in the scramble for attention from hiring committees. In her job search, she also found several diversity statements were required of her. ![]() As far as she could tell, the questioner, too, was white, middle-aged, female, and heterosexual. ![]() Last year, a former student of mine won a job interview at the satellite campus of a state university system. One of the first questions she had to answer was this: “Tell us how you will contribute to diversity on our campus.” My ex-student was Shiite, female, heterosexual, and 50 years old. ![]()
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