May 30, 2006
Beat Me, Congress, With a Title IX Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 01:20 PM EST Go to any .edu website, or look at an official publication from any American university, and tucked away in a corner you will find a statement saying something like: “The University complies with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, related Executive Orders 11246 and 11375, Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1973 . . .” And on and on through dozens of federal, state, and local regulations, to the point where it almost sounds like a law-school reading list.
It’s nice to know that our colleges are so law-abiding. Yet as one surveys the ever-growing list of legislative enactments, court decisions, and bureaucratic guidelines that have been imposed on our institutions of higher education—as recipients of federal funds, as employers, and in many cases as government bodies themselves—to keep them from discriminating against disadvantaged groups, the question inevitably arises: Why? These laws may have been necessary when they were enacted, but why do they still exist? Leaving aside the question of whether affirmative-action regulations are ever justified, why apply them to colleges, by far the most left-wing, diversity-craving, less-racist-and-sexist-than-thou of any major group of institutions in American life? Why make a legal requirement of something they’re desperate to do anyway? It’s like forcing your kids to eat candy.
Liberated from the shackles of government rules, colleges would be free to thumb their noses at the Supreme Court, impose racial quotas and ethnic point systems at will, and practice any kind of affirmative action they want, with no need to dissemble. After all, academics have always been fiercely defensive of their freedoms and prerogatives. Here, for example, Roger Bowen, general secretary of the American Association of University Professors, objects vociferously to the extension of federal regulations to universities: “Faculty members should stand their ground: appeal to the libertarian streak in American culture, which says the government that governs least governs best, especially in [the] intellectual realm, where the quality of our ideas legitimizes our pursuit of truth, unmediated by ideology, positive law, or cultural bias.” (The regulations that Bowen is objecting to in this case are the Sarbanes-Oxley rules on financial transparency.)
So why do academics meekly accept, even welcome, the hundreds of externally imposed rules that mandate nondiscrimination in admissions, hiring, promotion, and many other facets of university life? Is it to preserve the jobs of affirmative-action and government-compliance officers, with whom faculty members tend to be in political sympathy? Do they want to make sure that everyone plays by the same rules, so that nonpractitioners of affirmative action won’t gain an advantage? Might it be the intellectual persistence of Progressive and New Deal policies, with their command-and-control approach? Or even a sneaking admiration for totalitarianism, as long as it comes from the left?
All these reasons are possible. But another explanation may be found in Shelby Steele’s recently published White Guilt: How Blacks & Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era. Tracing the roots of the titular phenomenon back half a century and more, Steele’s thesis is this: With the passage of the civil-rights laws of the 1960s, and their swift acceptance by most Americans, the hostile phase of the civil-rights revolution was over, and the battle for black advancement should have shifted to different arenas. Instead the fighting continued, even gained strength, and grew heated, often violent; and with no more discriminatory laws to topple, civil-rights firebrands had to find new dragons to slay. Soon it was no longer enough for white Americans to simply not be racist; they had to prove that they weren’t, by both word and deed, and keep proving it over and over. This need for perpetual revolution and endless self-criticism, says Steele, has distorted American politics and life over the last several decades. And although Steele concentrates on race, the same principle applies to sexism, “able-ism,” and various other purported forms of prejudice.
An example of this sort of thinking can be found in, of all places, a recent article in Chemical & Engineering News by Prof. Richard Zare, chairman of the chemistry department at Stanford University (where Steele also works).
Zare notes that Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which prohibits sex discrimination in education, is starting to be used to enforce “gender equity” in university science departments, including such areas as faculty recruitment, retention of students, and professional advancement. He makes clear that he thinks this is a good idea. Now, I’ve met a few chemists in my day, and most of them would welcome yet another round of compliance reviews and requests for data about as much as they welcome teaching premeds. Yet Professor Zare is enthusiastic, almost giddy, about this extension of Title IX enforcement.
Here’s why: “I paraphrase what Rep. Vernon J. Ehlers (R-Mich.) is reported to have said at a congressional breakfast: ‘I am Richard Zare, and I appear before you as a recovering racist and a recovering sexist.’ We are all embedded in a culture that broadcasts signals about the innate superiority of men, and it is very easy to suffer a relapse. Although I have a wife who works full-time at Stanford University and three professional daughters who make me very proud, I still can catch myself downplaying the worth of women scientists, even though I know better.”
Sentiments like these exemplify the notion that white guilt, or in this case white-male guilt, is like original sin: You’re born with it, everyone has it, and you can only get rid of it through an elaborate series of rituals. Like self-flagellating medieval monks, even enlightened souls who have impeccable nonsexist credentials (and will tell you about them) bemoan their inherently evil nature and cry out for correction. This explains many of the follies of current academia, both large (the diversity obsession) and small (linguistic tics like opposing the use of “American” to refer to the United States). A previous scholarly generation may have expiated its own racist-sexist-classist-colonialist-orientalist original sin, but any expiation quickly becomes standard practice, and each new generation must search ever harder to find new isms that can be added to the list of evils and ever more minute sins that can be magnified, bewailed, and subjected to ceremonial death by committee.
In the end, that may be the greatest perversion caused by white guilt. The fearless intellectuals of our college faculties, impenetrably protected by tenure from retaliation or discipline, have always boldly explored the frontiers of society, science, thought, and life itself, free from constraints and roving wherever their restless minds take them in search of truth. Bravely and tirelessly they fight off all attempts at restriction or punishment—yet when it comes to affirmative action, their response is: “Tie me up! Beat me! Tighter! Harder!” Regardless of how you feel about academics, it’s sad to see these doughty battlers and rugged individualists timidly submitting to the iron hand of oppression—or it would be, that is, if you didn’t get the sneaking feeling that they’re actually enjoying it.
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