Occasionally, the racial victimology and extortion complex provides some entertaining and pleasant justice.\u00a0 The accusation that Columbia University President Lee Bollinger is insufficiently committed to diversity, and, by implication, is racist, is one of those moments.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The departure of two black administrators from Columbia has provoked the racism insinuations from two black Columbia professors.\u00a0 Delightfully, the New York Times<\/em> saw fit to amplify <\/a>their charges in a long, vacuous story on the front page of its New York section.\u00a0\u00a0 Frederick Harris, the director of Columbia\u2019s Institute for Research in African-American Studies, opined:<\/p>\n the departures \u201chave shaken my confidence \u2014 as well as the confidence of many others at Columbia \u2014 in the ability of Columbia to maintain diverse leadership at the top.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n June Cross, an associate professor at the university\u2019s Graduate School of Journalism, told the Times<\/em>:<\/p>\n \u00a0\u201cI\u2019m not saying race is the issue, but it is the subtext.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Ungrounded innuendo doesn\u2019t get any more devious than that.\u00a0 What does it mean for race to be a \u201csubtext\u201d but not an \u201cissue\u201d?\u00a0 This gem of obscurantism comes from a journalism professor, someone supposedly able to teach students how to write clearly.\u00a0<\/p>\n Neither of the two departed administrators, Michele Moody-Adams and Claude Steele,\u00a0 are themselves charging racism\u2014at least yet.\u00a0\u00a0 Of course, Steele is exquisitely careful to preserve the legitimacy of all such racial accusations as a general matter:<\/p>\n the questions about racial implications, he said, were a \u201crational reaction.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Really?\u00a0 \u201cRational\u201d to cry racism without the slightest evidence of racial animus?\u00a0 And yet even Steele denies that in this case, his \u201cidentity\u201d had anything to do with his departure.\u00a0<\/p>\n Doesn\u2019t matter.\u00a0\u00a0 The racism charge is always available whenever anything happens to someone self-identified as black\u2014even if that something consists of, in Steele\u2019s case, magnanimously accepting what is undoubtedly a massively inflated salary at a rival prestigious institution (here, as the new dean of Stanford\u2019s School of Education).\u00a0<\/p>\n Fortunately, the present knee-jerk charge of racism couldn\u2019t have happened to a more deserving victim.\u00a0 Columbia President Bollinger has crusaded for the need of universities to retain a robust system of racial preferences to combat the circumambient racism in our society, taking his defense of preferences at the University of Michigan law school and undergraduate college all the way up to the Supreme Court (he won an affirmation of those law school preferences in Grutter v. Bollinger,<\/a>\u00a0 while losing on the undergraduate case in Gratz v. Bollinger<\/a>).\u00a0 Moreover, Columbia has the largest percentage of black freshmen\u2014almost 15 percent–of any of the top 30 universities (wonder how that happened?), reports the Times<\/em>, and the second highest percentage of black faculty.\u00a0\u00a0 And of course, Columbia has a robust diversity bureaucracy, including a \u201cvice provost for diversity.\u201d<\/p>\n Doesn\u2019t matter.\u00a0 All a race-monger need do is to point to the lack of proportional representation of blacks in an institution (unavoidable in any organization with some semblance of academic qualifications, given the academic skills gap) and the racism case is made.\u00a0 The Times<\/em> dutifully presents the allegedly damning statistics served up by June Cross, which are the sum total of racism evidence against Bollinger and Columbia included in the entire Times<\/em> article:<\/p>\n At the Graduate School of Journalism, Ms. Cross said she was the only black woman with tenure, and one of three black people over all out of the more than 40 faculty members.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Let\u2019s see: a 7.5 percent black representation on the journalism faculty\u2014in a country with a 12 percent black population, much of whom lack advanced linguistic skills.\u00a0 That\u2019s prima facie evidence of racism?\u00a0 Given the exhausting efforts made by every media outlet to find black anchormen, reporters, and editors, it could be that in fact 7.5 percent of all media professionals are black, but it is unlikely that black representation in the media is so much higher than that\u00a0 as to suggest that Columbia is discriminating against qualified black applicants (a hypothesis that is of course preposterous on its face, since the reality in every college today is precisely the opposite: there is not a single collegethat is not tying itself into knots trying to come up with any justification for bringing more blacks into the student body and faculty).\u00a0<\/p>\n The fanatically multicultural, \u201canti-racist\u201d Columbia Teachers College found itself in Bollinger\u2019s position in 2008 when a black professor accused the college <\/a>of \u201cinstitutional racism.\u201d\u00a0 In every such instance of\u00a0 delicious table-turning, when individuals or institutions who have made a career out of denouncing alleged bias in other institutions are themselves accused of racism, one always wonders whether\u00a0 the falsely accused victim has a little a-ha! moment, in which he entertains the thought: \u201cMaybe the other entities that I have accused of racism throughout my career were just as innocent and well-intentioned as I am.\u00a0 Maybe this racism business has gotten out of hand\u2014in fact, maybe it\u2019s a racket.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Or does the self-consciously anti-racist victim of a false racism charge simply segregate off his current experience from what he knows to be the case in the rest of the world: That when other employers are accused of racism, it must be true, because we live in a racist world.\u00a0\u00a0 It\u2019s only in this one case where the complex has gotten out of hand.\u00a0<\/p>\n It would be nice to know what\u2019s going through Bollinger\u2019s head at the moment: A sense of betrayal?\u00a0 Offended righteousness?\u00a0 Penitence?\u00a0 But whatever his state of mind, it\u2019s sadly unlikely that he will reevaluate his understanding of the world.\u00a0 There is too much self-love involved in being an anti-racism crusader.\u00a0 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Occasionally, the racial victimology and extortion complex provides some entertaining and pleasant justice.\u00a0 The accusation that Columbia University President Lee Bollinger is insufficiently committed to diversity, and, by implication, is racist, is one of those moments.\u00a0 The departure of two … Continue reading
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