“Cargo cult” is the term used to explain how primitives imitate technological symbols in the belief that doing so will allow them to reap the benefits not otherwise available to them. The most famous examples are the balsa wood airplanes and boats created in Melanesia with the thought that real planes and ships would once again supply them with the developed world’s gifts that were dropped on these islands during World War II. The notion that everyone should get a college education and the related ideology Diversity, Equity and Inclusion are just as foolish. The underlying idea is that if you give everyone a college diploma, they will reap the benefits of what used to take high-level natural talents and hard work. Their adoption has diminished the value of higher education, substantially raised its cost, saddled thousands of students with large college loans they will not be likely to repay because the course of study they chose will never result in the high salaries they imagined the receipt of a diploma would yield. Until these ludicrous notions took hold, the average IQ to perform at a college level was 115 to 130. At the present time, the mean IQ of college students is the same as the general population -- 102.
In the pre-affirmative action/pre-diversity America of the mid-1900s, the average undergrad IQ was above 115. Expanding the student population by creating incentives for underperforming groups and individuals to apply has resulted in reduction of academic rigor, grade inflation and the decline in the value of a bachelor's degree. Affirmative action admission policies manage to be both racist against high-performing groups and also destructive of academic excellence. If there's a more poisonous set of policies in America, I don't know what it is.
Years ago, Professor Thomas Sowell schooled me on the racial performance gap which, combined with affirmative action and the schools' search to fill their ranks with more minority students, resulted in minority students regularly being admitted to schools in which they were not well-equipped to succeed. The latest SAT scores confirm that there has not been a great change in this picture:
While over 51 thousand white students scored 1400-1600 on the 2022 SAT test and over 47,000 Asian students did, only slightly under eight thousand Hispanics and only 2,106 Blacks students did.
Some years ago, an English professor at both a private and community college in the northeast wrote about the pain for both pupils and teachers while dealing with students who lack basic skills for higher-level education.
Sending everyone under the sun to college is a noble initiative. Academia is all for it, naturally. Industry is all for it; some companies even help with tuition costs. Government is all for it; the truly needy have lots of opportunities for financial aid. The media applauds it -- try to imagine someone speaking out against the idea. To oppose such a scheme of inclusion would be positively churlish. But one piece of the puzzle hasn’t been figured into the equation, to use the sort of phrase I encounter in the papers submitted by my English 101 students. The zeitgeist of academic possibility is a great inverted pyramid, and its rather sharp point is poking, uncomfortably, a spot just about midway between my shoulder blades.
For I, who teach these low-level, must-pass, no-multiple-choice-test classes, am the one who ultimately delivers the news to those unfit for college: that they lack the most-basic skills and have no sense of the volume of work required; that they are in some cases barely literate; that they are so bereft of schemata, so dispossessed of contexts in which to place newly acquired knowledge, that every bit of information simply raises more questions. They are not ready for high school, some of them, much less for college.
To cover up the gap between reality and this “noble initiative,” a great deal of money is being spent on remedial courses in even the most prestigious schools. New courses of studies, far less rigorous than traditional ones, were created and staffed with teachers whose work is subpar for traditional studies They churn out papers no one apparently reads carefully and when they do, as Stanford did Claudine Gay’s PhD thesis and questioned her underlying research, she refused to provide it and still got her doctorate. As Cornell’s William Jacobson posts:
“Even if no plagiarism, these garbage papers get cited in future garbage papers to advance the agenda - see, we have academic citations, it must be true! No one reads any of this crap, but it still establishes the dominant narratives. It's a circular system in which fantasy gets verified. If exposing plagiarism helps break the circle, great.”
Congresswoman Elise Stefanik exposed the DEI mindset of the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT. How under the rubric of anti-discrimination, it is discriminating and, in particular, antisemitic and racialist at its core and in operation. Penn’s president resigned; Harvard’s refused to do so with the full support of its Board until in her paltry academic output 50 clear instances of plagiarism were found. MIT’s president Sally Kornbluth has not yet been replaced, but Bill Ackman, who did so much to force Harvard to act responsibly, has indicated he will begin a thorough review of “all current faculty members at MIT, President Kornbluth, other officers of the Corporation, and its board members for plagiarism,” using the institution’s own plagiarism standards, moreover. “We will share our findings in the public domain as they are completed in the spirit of transparency.”
Seeking an explanation of why academicians who knew full well they were endorsing policies that undermined merit and diminished the institutions they were part of failed to speak up or act, I found the most credible explanation in the Wall Street Journal’s “Best of the Web.”
Years ago, Harvard University Press published a book called “Private Truths, Public Lies” and explained the work and its author:
Preference falsification, according to the economist Timur Kuran, is the act of misrepresenting one’s wants under perceived social pressures...
A common effect of preference falsification is the preservation of widely disliked structures. Another is the conferment of an aura of stability on structures vulnerable to sudden collapse. When the support of a policy, tradition, or regime is largely contrived, a minor event may activate a bandwagon that generates massive yet unanticipated change.
In distorting public opinion, preference falsification also corrupts public discourse and, hence, human knowledge.
This week on X Mr. Kuran, a Duke University economist, writes:
Preference falsification has been central to the trajectory of DEI. People who abhor DEI principles and methods came to favor these publicly through a preference cascade. Every instance of preference falsification induced others to pretend they consider DEI just, efficient, beneficial to marginalized groups, etc. In time, a false consensus effectively displaced the search for truth as the university’s core mission, replacing it with DEI.
Most professors watched in concealed horror the transfer of enormous powers from themselves to rapidly growing DEI bureaucracies. In countless contexts, they endorsed policies they considered harmful, participated in the defamation of scholars they admired, and sheepishly submitted to DEI training -- all to be left alone, to avoid being called racist, to advance their careers…
The shock that unleashed the ongoing cascade in reverse was the Hamas massacres of October 7. The chain of events that they triggered in the U.S. -- anti-Jewish demonstrations, the Congressional hearings, the plagiarism revelations -- brought to the surface outrage that had been building up quietly for years…
The process is by no means over. As preference falsification on DEI continues to diminish, more scholars and administrators will find in themselves the courage to stand up for values that they truly believe in. Though the DEI complex will fight back, it won’t be easy to quash the honest discourse finally under way…
Mr. Kuran adds:
For years, DEI advocates spoke from high moral ground. Only the deranged could be against inclusion. Diversity (as defined by DEI experts) was self-evidently beneficial. Since October 7, the moral high ground has shifted. DEI has been exposed as a sham.
Just as the balsa wood planes aren’t bringing carloads of radios, Levis, spam and other objects of desire to Melanesians, DEI is not making and cannot make high-performing professionals out of people without the abilities to perform such tasks, and the overloaded DEI staffs and remedial teachers are not magicians who can do this. It’ll be a tough fight to save higher education, but the nation needs to value more highly merit, and the fight for merit over racialism will win in the end.
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