The Other McCain

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The Ivy League Is Decadent and Depraved

Posted on | October 10, 2020 | 4 Comments

 

Nearly 70 years ago, a young alumnus of Yale University published a critical examination of his alma mater. God and Man at Yale set off a firestorm of controversy and made its author, William F. Buckley Jr., an intellectual celebrity. Buckley’s argument was that Yale, supposedly governed by a board of trustees and responsible to the alumni whose contributions funded the institution, was teaching ideas which the alumni almost certainly did not approve. Founded as a Christian institution, Yale employed professors who openly mocked Christianity, and its courses on economics and political science showed a distinct tendency toward socialism and collectivism. Buckley’s critique was met with a fierce reaction from liberals, and Yale did nothing to reverse its leftward drift, with the result that by the late 1960s, its campus was taken over by student radicals who supported Communist victory in Vietnam and who demanded release of the “New Haven Nine” (Black Panthers accused of torturing to death a suspected informer named Alex Rackley).

Since then, of course, Yale has become a disreputable abyss of “postmodern” nonsense. The professors are notorious perverts and Yale’s administration is a corrupt gang of academic swindlers, with a student body selected on the basis of illegal racial quotas:

Black applicants to Yale University are up to eight times more likely to be admitted than Asian applicants with the same level of academic skill, a disparity that the Department of Justice says violates federal law.
In a lawsuit filed Thursday afternoon in the U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut, the DOJ alleged that Yale was in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits racial discrimination by institutions that receive federal funds. In its 32-page complaint, the department documents Yale’s use of race as a factor at every step of its admissions process and details statistical evidence that students of similar academic skill but different racial groups face wildly divergent admissions chances.
The suit follows DOJ’s official request that Yale cease its use of race as an admissions factor, itself the result of a multi-year investigation into Yale’s admissions practices. Although the two institutions negotiated extensively since that request was made in August, a DOJ official told the Washington Free Beacon, Yale has refused to alter its admissions process, necessitating legal action. . . .
For at least the past two decades, DOJ argues, Yale has consistently ensured that its freshman class is between roughly 6 and 8 percent black, an illegal “racial balancing.” Salovey claimed that over the same period the racial composition of admitted applicants “fluctuated significantly for all groups” but did not address the concerns about black students specifically.
Data on the 2017 and 2018 applicant pools, released by Yale to DOJ, show bigger signs of discrimination. In those classes, about 6.4 percent of white and Asian applicants were admitted, compared with 8.3 percent of Hispanic and 9.5 percent of black applicants. But those numbers mask gaping disparities that become apparent when comparing applicants’ academic achievement, as measured by an “academic index” in use across the Ivy League. . . .
Black applicants above the second decile of academic skill are consistently five to eight times more likely to be admitted compared with their Asian counterparts; Hispanic applicants are two to four times more likely to be admitted.
These disparities, DOJ argues, are driven by Yale’s use of race at every step of the admissions process. According to the complaint, application readers are encouraged to use race as an explicit factor in grading the quality of an applicant; Yale also regularly “bops” white and Asian applicants, replacing them with black or Hispanic applicants to maintain the class’s racial composition.

It is self-evident that Yale has implemented a racial quota system, justified by a rationale of “diversity” that deserves critical scrutiny. This is one of those situations where the “motte and bailey” fallacy is employed by liberals to defend the indefensible. Most people have no objection (and indeed, are likely to support) “diversity” as a general goal. This is the non-controversial “motte” of the argument, and having gained our assent to this, liberals will then deny that “diversity” is being implemented through discriminatory quotas (the “bailey”).

Given the documented disparity in admission rates for students with similar scholastic records — black students being at least five times more likely than Asians to be offered admission — and given also the fact that the number of black students admitted to Yale has hovered suspiciously in the same percentage range for two decades, we cannot deny the reality that “diversity” at Yale is synonymous with discriminatory quotas.

Most people disapprove of racial discrimination, and when you show clear and convincing evidence that “diversity” requires discrimination — that is to say, the “motte” and the “bailey” are inseparable — you force the liberal into a crisis of cognitive dissonance. The result? The liberal points an accusatory finger and shrieks: “RAAAAACIST!”

Now do you see why the Yale curriculum is all postmodern nonsense? Only by resort to the works of Derrida, Foucault, et al., is it possible to believe that the opponents of discrimination are guilty of racism.

Liberalism ultimately destroys everything it touches, because liberalism has no real principles beyond a devotion to a handful of vague slogans — “Equality,” “Progress,” “Democracy,” “Science,” et cetera.

Once upon a time — by no coincidence, the exact time that Buckley published God and Man at Yale — liberals expressed enthusiastic devotion to “Tolerance” and “Academic Freedom.” You see, Buckley wrote his book during the onset of the Cold War, at a time when Americans were increasingly alarmed by Communist subversion and espionage. Buckley’s book did not dwell on this topic, but his liberal critics could read between the lines and perceive the threat to what Buckley called the “superstition” of Academic Freedom. There were, to my knowledge, no Yale professors at that time with a history of association with the Communist Party, but the same was not true at other universities. Liberals were quick to detect in the pages of God and Man at Yale a threat to “Tolerance” of Communism in academia.

You see that the situation has now made a 180-degree reversal, so that Yale and other elite universities now advocate intolerance of any criticism of certain ideas. It is impermissible at Yale to question the “Science” behind climate-change hysteria, and so also the “Science” of Third Wave gender theory is off-limits to criticism at Yale. Certainly, any Trump supporter is persona non grata at Yale, and any student who dared to speak out against the regime of “diversity” quotas would probably be tarred, feathered and run out of New Haven on a rail.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit, Yale Law ’82, summa cum laude.)

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Reminder that you can find my columns at The American Spectator, including my most recent, “Are Americans Tired of Being Called ‘Racist’ Yet?”




 

Comments

4 Responses to “The Ivy League Is Decadent and Depraved”

  1. Racial Discrimination at Yale | 357 Magnum
    October 10th, 2020 @ 11:42 am

    […] Discrimination in the name of Diversity. The Ivy League Is Decadent and Depraved. […]

  2. Where’s The Boss? – Theological Geography
    October 10th, 2020 @ 9:35 pm

    […] is right, decadent and depraved are suitable adjectives for the subject. Decadent was and remains a common descriptor of The West by Russian Orthodox prelates. Communists […]

  3. News of the Week (October 11th, 2020) | The Political Hat
    October 11th, 2020 @ 10:44 pm

    […] The Ivy League Is Decadent and Depraved Nearly 70 years ago, a young alumnus of Yale University published a critical examination of his alma mater. God and Man at Yale set off a firestorm of controversy and made its author, William F. Buckley Jr., an intellectual celebrity. Buckley’s argument was that Yale, supposedly governed by a board of trustees and responsible to the alumni whose contributions funded the institution, was teaching ideas which the alumni almost certainly did not approve. Founded as a Christian institution, Yale employed professors who openly mocked Christianity, and its courses on economics and political science showed a distinct tendency toward socialism and collectivism. Buckley’s critique was met with a fierce reaction from liberals, and Yale did nothing to reverse its leftward drift, with the result that by the late 1960s, its campus was taken over by student radicals who supported Communist victory in Vietnam and who demanded release of the “New Haven Nine” (Black Panthers accused of torturing to death a suspected informer named Alex Rackley). […]

  4. Amy Coney Barrett and Affirmative Action – The First Street Journal.
    October 13th, 2020 @ 7:00 am

    […] Robert Stacy McCain wrote about Yale’s persistent use of apparent racial quotas: […]