The Iowa Way

Two articles that crossed my desk in the past week attest to the grip that race/class/gender-based political correctness exercises over college and university campuses. The articles also give a sense as to why so few administrations have chosen to use what happened at Duke to address similar problems of faculty groupthink on issues of race, class, and gender on their own campuses.

A faculty environment that openly embraced ideological one-sidedness and a politically correct president who boasted that in her previous position, “56% of [new faculty] hires were women and/or minorities, [and] she also formed a diversity leadership group” provided the backdrop to a sad episode that was recently profiled in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

A summary: in recent months, two Iowa professors (first Arthur Miller, a professor of political science; and then Mark Weiger, an oboe professor) committed suicide, after facing charges of sexual harassment. The specifics of their two cases differed dramatically: based on the information in the article and some other background reading, the allegations against Miller were serious (the trading of a grade for sexual favors) and struck me as, at the least, credible. The allegations against Weiger, on the other hand, seemed to involve not what anyone other than Group of 88-like ideologues would consider sexual harassment but instead faculty conduct that was borderline unprofessional and a personality conflict between professor and student.

Miller was the first of the duo to face legal action. He was also a figure highly unlikely to have the sympathy of Iowa’s leadership. He had feuded with the Iowa administration on academic matters in the past; the university’s dean, Linda Maxson, had blocked his elevation to chair of Iowa’s political science department and had closed down an academic institute that he had founded.

Even that background, however, could not have predicted the astonishing public reaction of the Iowa administration after the allegations against Miller became public. Iowa president Sally Mason sent an e-mail to all faculty and staff at the school:

While every person is entitled to the presumption of innocence, I want to state strongly and unequivocally that such conduct will not be tolerated. It is profoundly damaging to the students and to the educational process.

I applaud the courage of the student victims [emphasis added] in coming forward to report this conduct to the Office of Equal Opportunity and Diversity and to the UI Police Department.

In a view of civil liberties that mirrored Richard Brodhead’s public statement that a trial would give his institution’s falsely accused students an opportunity to “be proved innocent,” Mason appeared unaware that publicly terming accusers as “victims” nullified the “presumption of innocence” to which her faculty member supposedly was “entitled.” Indeed, if the students were “victims,” as Mason claimed, Miller was guilty.

According to the Chronicle, Weiger followed the Miller case closely; “when President Mason issued the statement calling the students ‘victims,’ Mr. Weiger panicked, according to a friend of Weiger’s.”

The Chronicle reported that Mason “declined to answer questions about her statement.” Incredibly, however, Dean Maxson defended the president’s remarks, on the grounds that Miller had been “accused of a very serious infraction of behavioral and legal rules.” So, according to the University of Iowa, in cases of “a very serious infraction of behavioral and legal rules,” an accuser is automatically “the victim”?

In her campus-wide email, President Mason also announced, “Currently all supervisory personnel are required to undergo sexual harassment training. I have asked Provost Loh to work with our faculty and staff governing bodies to extend the required training to all faculty and staff.”

The University’s Council on the Status of Women welcomed Mason’s move, claiming that “sexual harassment does not appear to be taken serious [sic] by some in the University community,” although the body did worry about “what occurs if someone refuses to participate in the training.”

This now-mandatory sexual harassment training—which the university quickly renamed sexual harassment “education”—reminds potential victims that “sexual harassers can include (but aren’t limited to) professors, teaching assistants, research assistants, supervisors, co-workers, classmates, other students, acquaintances, friends, partners, dates, and strangers” [who else is there?]; notes that there is no time limit(!) for filing a sexual harassment complaint; and offers the Crystal Mangum rule: “a complaint made in good faith is not considered false merely because the evidence does not ultimately support the allegation of sexual misconduct.”

The campus newspaper reported on another such Mason-initiated program: the university named a school coordinator for “sexual-misconduct response.” The new coordinator, Monique DiCarlo, said that the school would create new “victim-advocate positions,” with every sexual harassment accuser being assigned a “victim-advocate.” One of DiCarlo’s volunteers explained the rationale: “Having an advocate on hand at all times is crucial for any victim . . . It’s great that victims can form a relationship with someone to help them through that event in their lives.”

But, of course, deeming all accusers to be “victims” entitled to an “advocate” presumes guilt of the accused. If the allegation is false, how can the accuser be a “victim”?

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While Iowa’s president imitated Brodhead’s response to the lacrosse case, the leadership of Smith College went one step further—inviting one of the most extreme Group of 88 members to lecture Smith students on the dangers of . . . racial stereotyping.

In a typically insightful article this week, Heather MacDonald recounts (among other things) how colleges and universities overreact to minor episodes of bad student behavior, if the affair confirms many academics’ predisposition that their (white) students are inherently racist--and, in the case of white males, sexist as well.

Such an event occurred at Smith College in late 2007, when a white couple who attended a student-sponsored “Celebrity Rehab” party “painted their skin black, donned Afro wigs and dressed as singers Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown.” In response, Smith president Carol Christ—whose official biography celebrates her “well-established reputation as a champion of women’s issues and diversity”—convened an all-day campus forum to discuss diversity and sensitivity.

Who did Christ invite to campus to provide guidance to her students on such issues? None other than Group of 88’er Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, whom she personally introduced and hailed as a “foremost theorist” on race in America.

(Bonilla-Silva, of course, has used different names in his scholarly work for the country that Christ mentioned: “gringoland”; “the United States of Amerikkka”; and “Amerika.”)

Bonilla-Silva’s rhetoric was entirely predictable: “I am here,” asserted he, “to speak truth to power about race matters in contemporary America and, in the process, connect the dots about this ‘incident,’ an incident and an aftermath which I believe are emblematic about how race works in post-civil rights America.”

(This was, of course, the same Eduardo Bonilla-Silva who wrote of the country that would elect Barack Obama its president in 2008 that “in this country, racial ‘others’ of dark complexion are always viewed as incapable of doing much; we are regarded and treated as secondary actors only good for doing beds in hotels or working in fast-food restaurants.”)

Just as he and his fellow Group members had hoped to exploit the lacrosse case to transform Duke, Bonilla-Silva urged Smith ideologues to use the party incident to transform Smith. (Given that Smith is already widely perceived as an academic bastion of political correctness, it’s not clear what specific changes Bonilla-Silva wanted.) In any event, the Group of 88’er denounced “this color-blind racism ideology” (of people like Obama?), and expressed his support for “the struggle to help Smith reflect America’s new racial reality; to help create a Smith College where neither ‘isolated racial incidents’ nor everyday color-blind racism exist. This will require a lot of effort, but the creation of a multicultural ‘beloved community’ requires nothing less.”

(To send their children to an instruction whose president celebrated this vision, parents of Smith students pay $36,058 annually in tuition and fees.)

I e-mailed President Christ to ask her if she knew of Bonilla-Silva’s membership in the Group of 88 before she extended him the invitation; and whether, in retrospect, she considered it wise to have had a figure who himself had set aside the academy’s traditional fealty to due process and made such a high-profile decision based on what turned out to be inaccurate, race-based stereotypes lecture her institution’s students on the dangers of racial stereotyping.

Christ did not reply.

[Update, Monday, 11.30am: As I have been reminded, perhaps it is no surprise that a senior Smith administrator invited to campus one of the most extreme members of the Group of 88, given the previous intersection of the lacrosse case with Smith administrators.

Danielle Carr Ramdath is Smith's associate dean of the faculty, and was brought on board by Julius Chambers and William Bowen for their report on the administration's response to the case. (That report identified Carr Ramdath as an “African-American woman”; it did not disclose either the race or the gender of Bowen and Chambers. For reasons that remain unclear, the signatures of Bowen and Chambers alone were on the report, although its text claimed that Carr Ramdath shared all of its conclusions.)

Shortly after the report appeared in May 2006, Stuart Taylor published an extraordinary critique in the National Journal, correctly identifying it as almost a parody of political correctness; I also published a post pointing out that the report seemed obsessed with "diversity" issues and chastising Bowen, Chambers, and Carr for going out of their way to interview extreme critics of the team among the faculty--Houston Baker, Peter Wood, Karla Holloway--even as the report writers claimed that they didn't have time to interview all the relevant figures for their task.

In the end, no interviews were really required--the report was fully consistent with the preconceived "diversity" worldviews of Bowen, Chambers, and Carr Ramdath.

After the case collapsed, Carr Ramdath was asked if she and her colleagues planned to issue a correction or addendum to the report. She replied, "We stand by the report, which no one has questioned."

In light of the above, obviously, the second portion of her statement was demonstrably false.]