Tenure Standards

Boston’s Emerson College has come under fire for is lack of faculty “diversity.” As reported in the Boston Globe article,

[i]n its 129-year history, Emerson College has granted tenure to just three black professors. Two of them had to sue for the distinction. Last year, when two more black scholars were up for tenure, school administrators denied them both, despite approval from colleagues in their departments.

The result has been a flurry of accusations and investigations that have swept across the downtown campus and into the academic world around it. The local chapter of the NAACP has cried foul. The Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination has launched an inquiry.

One can’t evaluate the merits of the two current cases based on the information in the article, but two quoted statements (statements of the sort that always appear in disputes of this kind) struck me as worth noticing. Here’s the first, which as you’ll see actually makes two points, not one:

“Students and parents are selecting schools where there are role models of the professionals whom the students aspire to be,’’ said Theodore Landsmark, president of the Boston Architectural College and a civil rights leader who is serving on [an outside] panel [reviewing the cases] along with Harvard College dean Evelynn Hammonds. “Schools that lack diversity are finding that they are less competitive in a global marketplace,’’ Landsmark said.

I confess that for various reasons I’ve never been impressed with the “role model” argument, but one of those reasons is that even if one believes that racial “role models” have some influence, there are good grounds to wonder exactly what that influence is. Defenders believe that black “role models” teach black (and other) students that being black is no bar to success, that they too can grow up to be as successful as the black “role model.” Perhaps that happens, but given the pervasiveness of racial preferences in hiring and promotion (think “diversity”), and the widespread recognition of those double standards, another much less appealing lesson is also possible: because preferred minorities are widely held to lower standards than whites and un-preferred minorities, you too can succeed even if you’re not better than your competitors.

Be that as it may, if un-diverse institutions will fail because they “are less competitive in the global marketplace,” then no civil rights laws and enforcement mechanisms are needed (EEOC, go home!) because the market will do in the un-diverse.

Finally, note the comment of Prof. Roger House, one of the professors denied tenure this year (but allowed to reply in 2011 in return for dropping his complaint with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination).

House declined recent requests for comment, but previously questioned the fairness of the college’s tenure process. “It seems they have different tenure standards for different people based on race,’’ he told the student newspaper in February.

It would be interesting, and almost novel, if Prof. House really believes that tenure standards should be colorblind. Unless Emerson College is virtually unique, I suspect it indeed does have, or will soon have, “different tenure standards for different people based on race.” Such differential standards are demanded by those who promote and enforce “diversity.”

ADDENDUM

Roger Clegg reminds me (or, if you’re a skeptic, informs me) that “role models” were rejected by the Supreme Court as a justification for racial preferences in Wygant v. Jackson Board of Education, 476 U.S. 267 (1986). Indeed, Justice Powell, who blessed affirmative action in Bakke, wrote the majority opinion, and Justice O’Connor, who sanctified it in Grutter, concurred.