MacDonald: Victimology and Evidence at Yale
The stated rationale, according to its director? To make Yale “feel like a friendly place as opposed to an alien, hostile place" to gays.
Proposition 8 and the likely decision of California’s Supreme Court to enshrine discrimination into the state constitution testify to how contemporary political culture can be “an alien, hostile place” to gays and lesbians. But Yale? Or any other elite university? As MacDonald pointed out, “the idea that Yale is an ‘alien, hostile place’ to gays is one of those absurd conceits that could only be maintained in the alternative universe of academia.” Yale appears to have produced no evidence to corroborate the director’s wild claim, and MacDonald’s article profiles the many academic and institutional moves Yale has made to produce a more tolerant environment for gays and lesbians. Indeed, it would seem far more likely that a student with religious objections to homosexuality would find Yale “an alien, hostile place.”
MacDonald also noted that the university offered no evidence to justify proposals before Yale's Committee on Gender-Neutral Housing “to decide whether Yale should allow juniors and seniors to live with roommates of the opposite sex, an accommodation demanded in the name of transgender students.” Yale appears not to know how many (if any) of its undergraduates actually are transsexuals, and undoubtedly any attempt to find out would be labeled discriminatory by the university’s newly created Office of LGBTQ.
On issues of political correctness, involving the academic majority’s assumptions about race, class, and gender, it too often seems as if the university is an evidence-free zone.
I have encountered a similarly fealty to ideology over evidence at my own institution, Brooklyn College, which recently adopted a new, five-year “diversity” personnel plan. The scheme proposes radical changes to the college’s personnel and curricular structure, including having all job candidates asked how they would bring “diversity” into the classroom (this would be the only college-wide question asked of potential Brooklyn professors) and the"restructuring of science, mathematics, and other courses to broaden the focus and to integrate the constructs of class, race, gender and gender orientation, and diverse cultural perspectives.” (On a day when President Obama issued an eloquent statement on the importance of separating science from politics, this latter requirement is particularly ironic.)
The stated rationale for these (and many other) changes? “By lacking racial and ethnic diversity among our faculty, we make it difficult to present our students a quality liberal arts education.” Yet, much like at Yale, the report offers no evidence to corroborate its conclusion—perhaps because, in this instance, the evidence contradicts its conclusion. According to the 2000 census, 75.1% of US citizens are white, while about 77.5% of Brooklyn’s professors are white. Blacks are slightly underrepresented, Hispanics more so (but in both instances at far narrower margins among those hired from the mid-1990s on). The major discrepancy between the census and the college’s faculty population, however, comes among Asians, who are overrepresented among the faculty by a factor of more than 2-to-1 based on their overall population. Such figures, of course, are inconvenient if the goal is to claim that the college’s faculty is “lacking racial and ethnic diversity.”
But why let evidence get in the way of the preferred argument?