Dear Weekend Jolter,
The scenes of migrating disorder on campus could be fodder, in a darkly humorous way, for a “how it started/how it’s going” meme about DEI.
Left panel: promotional language on how Columbia’s students “engage with each other in serious dialogue between cultures” and how faculty and staff encourage “differing ideas, beliefs, and perspectives through scholarly inquiry and civil discourse.” Right panel: a still from the Battle of Hamilton Hall — alongside a letter by 13 judges declaring the school “an incubator of bigotry” they won’t hire clerks from anymore.
Columbia’s end-of-semester trainwreck might do little to compel a reexamination of the efficacy of the school’s numerous diversity programs. But the disconnect between DEI’s lofty intent and its actual results — one documented well before the wave of anti-Israel unrest — is being noticed, and acted on, all over the country, from boardrooms to provosts’ offices.
Last weekend, MIT president Sally Kornbluth confirmed that the school would no longer require diversity statements in faculty hiring, “making it the first elite university to abandon the practice,” as James Lynch reports for NR:
“My goals are to tap into the full scope of human talent, to bring the very best to MIT, and to make sure they thrive once here,” Kornbluth said in a statement provided to NR. “We can build an inclusive environment in many ways, but compelled statements impinge on freedom of expression, and they don’t work.”
Over at UnHerd, John Sailer described MIT’s decision as a “watershed moment,” given that the pushback against these statements mostly has happened at public schools in Republican-leaning states, at the direction of state lawmakers. “The decision at MIT is different — reform from within, prompted by a university president alongside deans and provosts, at a private institution.”
If the related pullback from standardized-testing requirements, and the subsequent rediscovery of their merits, is any example of the influence universities have on each other, more schools could follow.
Among certain faculty members, no tears would be shed. It is, after all, a salient irony that “diversity” statements require conformity among those writing them. As noted at UnHerd, Harvard law professor Randall L. Kennedy called last month for schools to abandon the mandatory statements and stressed the “intense and growing resentment” academics harbor toward the “DEI enterprise.” Further, he wrote, “It does not take much discernment to see . . . that the diversity statement regime leans heavily and tendentiously towards varieties of academic leftism and implicitly discourages candidates who harbor ideologically conservative dispositions.”
Opposition to the enterprise has little to do with hostility to diversity. Robert L. Woodson Sr., in declaring that DEI “has failed,” writes for NR that the problem concerns not DEI’s intention but impact:
I have taken issue with many DEI efforts because they are dangerous, often fatal, distractions from the very real work that needs to be done in the most vulnerable communities in America. Mandatory racial-sensitivity trainings burn through participants’ goodwill and patience very quickly while doing nothing to reduce crime, violence, poverty, or other urgent problems. . . . Racial justice in America is not, and never was supposed to be, about equality of outcome. It was and is about equality of opportunity, equal protection under the law.
Florida and Texas have recently cracked down on DEI positions and practices at public universities. Woodson specifically lauds the approach taken by Utah, with his organization’s help, to pass legislation both halting DEI activities at universities (mandatory trainings, preferential or discriminatory hiring based on race or gender) and redirecting funding to help any students struggling in school.
More significant may be the internally driven policy changes such as those at MIT or UNC.
In the corporate world, changes are also being made, albeit under outside pressure. Axios reported last month on how some — though certainly not all — businesses are cutting back DEI-related funding and staff, in part out of litigation concerns. The Wall Street Journal reported that dozens of companies “altered descriptions of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in their annual reports to investors as DEI programs come under legal and political threat.”
Whether “diversity, equity, and inclusion” initiatives have gone to ground for a limited time or face a more consequential reckoning is yet unclear. But the anti-Israel demonstrations, and specifically the toxic rhetoric that features in them, further call into question what the initiatives have achieved. Author Dara Horn wrote in the Atlantic about how DEI’s focus on “equity,” in practice, requires not protecting but marginalizing Jews, to level the playing field. Hence their “bizarre exclusion from discussion in many DEI trainings and even policies, despite their high ranking in American hate-crime statistics.”
Belatedly inserting anti-antisemitism into trainings won’t cure what ails DEI. As worthy an aim as diversity is, Professor Kennedy got at the heart of the DEI paradox: Coercing applicants to denounce privilege, “(settler-)colonialism,” “heteropatriarchy,” etc. and echo the ritualistic chants of woke progressives serves to filter out those who aren’t. Intellectually, the environment becomes less diverse. Less stimulating. More monolithic. The kind of environment that might coddle radicals who bat for the same team. An environment of “ideological homogeneity” that, in the verdict of those 13 judges, destroys an institution’s ability to prepare graduates for life — real life — in a pluralistic society.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
Mr. President, remembering is not enough: Biden’s Dangerous Misreading of ‘Never Again’
Fighting the prospect of food bans by issuing a food ban is not the blow for liberty Florida makes it out to be: Florida’s Meat-Mandate Hypocrisy
Politicians can choose to ignore the entitlement crisis, but they and voters won’t like where that leads: The Medicare and Social Security Reports Are Nothing to Celebrate
’Bout time: Trump’s Overdue Embrace of Early and Mail Voting
ARTICLES
Andrew McCarthy: Stormy Testimony Shows: Trump’s Humiliation Is the Point of Bragg’s Prosecution
Andrew McCarthy: Does Biden’s Sabotage of Israel Remind You of Anything?
Philip Klein: Israel Must Finish Hamas — Even without Biden’s Support
Rich Lowry: A Presidency in Its Dotage
Jim Geraghty: The Math on Colleges Divesting from Israel Doesn’t Add Up
Marco Rubio: What’s Happening to Israel Matters to All of Us
Stanley Kurtz: Stop Greenlighting High-School Walkouts
Frederick M. Hess & Joe Pitts: Taxpayer-Funded Truman Scholarship Has Little Room for the Right
Dan McLaughlin: The Tea Party Movement Is Dead
James Lynch: House Republican Report Details How White House Pressured Tech Firms to Censor Speech
Christian Schneider: Donald Trump, Killer of Customs
Audrey Fahlberg: Ruben Gallego Runs from His Progressive Record
Madeleine Kearns: How Children Became Guinea Pigs
Rebekah Paxton: California’s Predictably Disastrous Minimum-Wage Hikes
Heather Wilhelm: Hide Your Guitar! The iPad’s Coming
Luther Ray Abel: Warning to Young Women: Bears Will Maul You
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Armond White, on a “bully-pulpit horror movie”: Evil Does Not Exist Excuses Treachery
Brian Allen spotlights a Santa Barbara sculptor, working in a medium you might not (probably wouldn’t) expect: Moving Past Paint in California Art
KRISTI NOEM CAN’T PUT THESE EXCERPTS DOWN
Catch up on the circus, with Andy McCarthy’s coverage of the Stormy testimony:
As porn star Stormy Daniels’s testimony unfolds, what has always been obvious becomes even more explicit: The point of this trial is to bruise Donald Trump politically — to humiliate him with a tawdry sexual episode from nearly 20 years ago that is utterly unnecessary to prove the charges in the indictment (even as those charges have been distorted by Alvin Bragg, Manhattan’s elected progressive Democratic district attorney); and to brand Trump a “convicted felon” so that his Democratic opponent, President Biden, can refer to him that way in the run-up to the 2024 election, after which — probably a year or more after which — any convictions from this kangaroo court will be overturned on appeal.
Bragg’s prosecutors have elicited from the porn actress — she was 27 and Trump 60 at the time of their 2006 hotel-suite encounter — that Trump assured her that he and his wife did not sleep in the same bedroom; that she (Stormy) reminded him of his daughter Ivanka; that she told him to his face he was “rude,” “arrogant,” and “pompous”; that the now-former president and de facto Republican presidential nominee became more polite after she “spanked” him with a rolled-up magazine. . . .
Just to remind you, the allegation in the indictment is that Trump fraudulently caused his business records to be falsified eleven years after this encounter. The encounter makes no difference to the proof of the charges. The state’s theory is that Trump’s records are false because they described as ongoing “legal services” what was actually the reimbursement of a debt to Trump’s lawyer (in connection with a legal transaction in which the lawyer did, in fact, represent Trump). Whether the debt arose out of paying Stormy for an NDA or some other obligation is of no moment to the question of whether the book entry “legal services” accurately describes the payments to Cohen.
It could not be more patent that Bragg is spotlighting the long-ago extramarital tryst by his party’s main opponent in the upcoming election to profoundly embarrass him. The Times, naturally, can’t help itself but pile on, noting that as Daniels testifies, “Trump whispers to his lawyer. He can’t stand feeling or appearing weak or powerless. But that’s exactly what he is here as Daniels is describing, in extensive detail, an encounter he continues to maintain didn’t happen.”
Even though Trump is not charged with having extramarital sex, which is not a crime, he has long denied the fling with Stormy. By the time her testimony is over, the jury will have again heard that she publicly denied that she had a sexual encounter with Trump (her lawyer, Keith Davidson, has already said as much). She’ll say she was lying because of what she took to be her obligation under the nondisclosure agreement, and because she feared retaliation. Consequently, whether the sex happened or not is now a live issue in the case, even though it should not matter to the case.
Were Trump to testify, he’d have to address it.
How to explain Biden’s turn against Israel? Rich Lowry does:
Not too long ago, Biden was averring that Hamas had to be destroyed and that our commitment to Israel was “ironclad.” That was before the war — waged in a high-density urban environment against an adversary that hides amongst civilians — created an international backlash and a political revolt among progressives braying “genocide.”
You can count on Joe Biden when the chips are up, but certainly not when they are down.
You want to be in a foxhole with Biden only if you are certain that the members of “the Squad,” the left-wing faction in the House, approve of his being there.
Joe Biden has your back — from a comfortable distance, just in case political circumstances change.
The president is a weather vane for the Left. That doesn’t mean that Biden himself is a committed progressive or in the ideological vanguard. He’s not. A weather vane doesn’t affect how fast the wind is blowing or in what direction; it just shifts in reaction to larger forces.
The Left demanded unilateral student-debt relief; Biden complied. The Left wanted a de facto open border; Biden delivered it. The Left is radical on abortion; so is Biden. And the Left long ago lost all patience with the Gaza war and “Genocide Joe’s” support for it; and here, lo and behold, Biden is as estranged from Israel as any U.S. president in recent memory.
Jim Geraghty’s got a reality check on those calls for colleges to divest from Israel:
Few universities have any portion of their endowments directly invested in any Israeli company. The universities usually invest their endowments in index funds, which hold shares of stock in lots and lots of companies, with regular buying and selling of shares to maximize returns.
It’s a shame none of these institutions have a business school or economics department full of people who understand all this, and who were professionally trained to explain it. If only these universities had people who were knowledgeable about how international finance works, and who could explain to the protesting students how little their university endowments invest in causes they find morally abhorrent!
The Post’s higher-education reporter, Danielle Douglas-Gabriel, explains that the anti-Israel BDS movement — boycott, divest, and sanction — wants universities to “take a closer look at their endowments and sell off any investments that are supportive of weapons manufacturers or companies that do business with the country of Israel.”
You know which companies “do business with Israel”? Just about every household name! McDonalds, Amazon, Disney, Google, Chevron, Caterpillar, Hewlett Packard, Texaco, Intel. If you say, “don’t invest in any company that does business with Israel,” you’re telling the university to limit their investments to a small group of companies that haven’t expanded to Israel yet. . . .
Guys, I realize few of you majored in math or international relations, but this isn’t going to work. Both the Israeli government and the Israeli people prioritize eliminating the threat from Hamas — which still has hostages, remember! — over maximizing foreign investment. If you choose to yank your six-figure sum, they’ll find a way to carry on.
And even if all of America’s colleges and universities suddenly decided to divest any holding even remotely connected to Israel, there would still be no shortage of foreign investment. The world does not lack for people with capital who are looking for a good rate of return. Israel has the 28th-largest economy in the world, with a gross domestic product of roughly $530 billion. U.S. goods and services trade with Israel totaled an estimated $50.6 billion in 2022. Exports were $20.0 billion; imports were $30.6 billion. Sure, since October 7, the country has suffered an economic slowdown — a lot of human capital has been diverted to the war. But you’d have to inflict crippling economic damage to get the Israelis willing to make the concessions that the students want.
These kids trashed their campuses, harassed fellow students, disrupted classes, and in some cases got themselves arrested, all for a goal that was never realistic and was never going to happen.
Florida’s ban on lab-grown meat is a clear overreach. From NR’s editorial:
On the first day of May, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida signed SB 1084, a bill that completely prohibits the production and sale of lab-grown meat in the Sunshine State.
We must ask: Why?
Announcing the new law, DeSantis proposed that “Florida is fighting back against the global elite’s plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish or bugs to achieve their authoritarian goals.” In concert, the governor’s office declared that the State of Florida had taken “action to stop the World Economic Forum’s goal of forcing the world to eat lab-grown meat and insects.”
Odd as it may sound, it’s true that the ultimate aim of many of those who champion lab-grown meat — or, rather: lab-grown “meat” — is, indeed, to decree that the people of the world enjoy diets that they would never choose of their own volition. Bill Gates, who has invested heavily in this industry, has said “all rich countries should move to 100% synthetic meat” and suggested that governments could “use regulation to totally shift the demand.” Preventing this sort of dystopian intervention into people’s diets is a worthy endeavor. But there is a profound difference between fighting back against mandates and prohibiting consumer products per se, and, here, Florida has done the latter. In so doing, the state has taken a wholly worthwhile cause — the cause of individual choice — and sullied it with an unlovely combination of hypocrisy and two-bit protectionism. . . .
The bill’s authors talk disparagingly of bans, but they have just issued one; they fret about mandates, but they have just added a mandate to the lawbooks; they worry about subsidies and “nudges” and industrial policy, but, as the agriculture commissioner openly admits, this decision was taken with the “thriving” of the existing market in mind. The rhetoric of its architects notwithstanding, the result of this change has not been an increase in liberty, but a reduction.
As such, the act represents an overreach — an overreach taken with good intentions, no doubt, but an overreach nevertheless.
Shout-Outs
Park MacDougald, at Tablet: The People Setting America on Fire
Stephanie McCrummen, at the Atlantic: The Great Serengeti Land Grab
Ken LaCorte: Inside Stormy’s shakedown
CODA
Journey back to 1998 with me. Alice in Chains was entering what would be a long period of stagnation (during which the band’s singer would fatally OD), but guitarist Jerry Cantrell filled the time exploring a solo career. His debut, Boggy Depot, enjoyed some radio play at the time, and gave AIC fans what they were missing. You hear the same lush harmonies, dirty riff-work, and period pathos, but it would be wrong to classify the record as ersatz Alice in Chains. His personal songwriting is a more delicate rock. (To analogize, solo Cantrell is to AIC as a Perfect Circle is to Tool — if you’re into that kind of thing. Which I am.) “My Song” is a highlight.
Enjoy. Have a great weekend, and thanks for reading.