THE EVOLUTION OF THE DIVERSITY BOONDOGGLE. Professor Althouse and Sean at the American Mind have been trading fours on the proper focus of criticism of the academy for turning polemicist and potential academic fraud Ward Churchill into an academic star, at least in some disciplines. This comment from Professor Althouse is a good place to begin.

But if your outrage at things Churchill has written is creating a fund of energy that you want to expend on something useful, what I have recommended and continue to recommend is to focus on the institutions that hire and promote undercredentialed political ideologues like him. By focusing on Churchill, you make it easier for those institutions to avoid responsibility for what is a much broader problem. You make it all too easy for these institutions to retaliate against the one individual that critics have locked onto. You help them make it seem as though they've done enough.

Agreed. Mr Churchill is a symptom. The cause is somewhat more deeply rooted. The following commentary will be somewhat cold-blooded. View from a Height points to a column by Colorado law professor Peter Campos that reveals the secret objective of the multicultural university.

Academics claim to despise censorship, but the truth is we do a remarkably good job of censoring ourselves. This is especially true in regard to affirmative action. Who among us can claim to have spoken up every time a job candidate almost as preposterous as Churchill was submitted for our consideration? Things like the Churchill fiasco are made possible by a web of lies kept intact by a conspiracy of silence.

The University of Colorado hired Churchill onto its faculty because he claimed to be an American Indian. Anyone who has the slightest familiarity with research universities can glance at his résumé and state this with something close to complete confidence.

Churchill thus represents the reductio ad absurdum of the contemporary university's willingness to subordinate all other values to affirmative action. When such a grotesque fraud - a white man pretending to be an Indian, an intellectual charlatan spewing polemical garbage festooned with phony footnotes, a shameless demagogue fabricating imaginary historical incidents to justify his pathological hatreds, an apparent plagiarist who steals and distorts the work of real scholars - manages to scam his way into a full professorship at what is still a serious research university, we know the practice of affirmative action has hit rock bottom. Or at least we can hope so.

Unfortunately, the freefall is likely to continue. Mr Churchill was originally hired in the communications department, which, although it might be home for serious rhetoricians and decent forensics programs, is also the major of choice for many scholarship athletes. He later became chairman of the ethnic studies program, which, if our administrators were honest con men, would be acknowledged as serving the function of "cooling out the mark." In this case the con is the invitation to enroll in university -- the fiction of admitting unprepared students and calling it access -- and the cooling out is the provision of a program that provides something resembling a degree. Professor Blogger (via Quid nomen illius?)has a fisking of the Colorado ethnic studies major that would be amusing were it not so accurate. My favorite excerpt, with the description in plain text and his interpretation in italics:

...involve learning and thinking within interdisciplinary frameworks ...You'll only have to take sophomore-level courses in traditional departments...encourage participatory, experiential, diverse and student-centered learning ...You won't have to study much, either, just so long as you parrot the right ideas.

The summation is about right, also

.... and prepare all students to live and contribute to an increasingly diverse America, in an ever-interdependent world.

You might never be able to find work with this degree, but you'll be able to posture with the best of us.

But you will have a degree, and perhaps a separate graduation ceremony. The mark will be cooled out.

Furthermore, the scam is entrenched. Professor Blogger has also discovered a new journal prospectus for participants in the Diversity Boondoggle. This journal makes no pretense of receptivity to differing methods of analysis or different interpretations of data.

(an academic juried journal designed to confront and expose the lies of the right)

We can only hope that their jury work will be more careful than their use of the shift key. Here is their call for papers.

The editors of this on-line journal seek manuscripts that critically examine and expose the lies perpetuated in the larger neo-liberal and right wing assaults on democracy and the public sphere. Authors must demonstrate genuine academic rigor in addressing specific sets of lies and deceptions currently used to manufacture consent for increasingly draconian domestic policies and imperialistic foreign policies. We are soliciting submissions that are not simply based on opinion or conjecture. What is significant to changing public opinion and public policy is academically grounded and sound research.

Unlike federal funding agencies, we do not restrict research to “experimental design.” On the contrary, we heartily encourage humanities based, arts based, narrative, ethnographic (including autoethnography), visual, cyborgian and other methodological approaches. Submissions are welcomed from across the academic disciplines, and we encourage the submission of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary works. We also solicit articles that can document this traumatic and critical juncture in both American and world history and culture. Therefore, submissions from teachers, students, citizen groups, and teacher educators are encouraged.

From my perspective, working as an economist, I can think of three or four papers off the top of my head that had the effect of changing public policy and public opinion despite appearing in the not-explicitly-ideological American Economic Review Proceedings or Review of Economics and Statistics. (If I left out your favorite Econometrica article, sorry; sometimes going from the set theory to the policy implications takes a few more years.)

The new journal, however, has a board of editors at established universities, and authors of accepted papers will be able to list their publications as peer-reviewed at tenure time, whether that review is genuinely rigorous or not will be up to the department and college committees to evaluate. External observers, such as trustees or alumni, will be hard pressed to distinguish publications in this vanity press journal from publications in more traditional journals that also offer teacher educators and area studies scholars outlets for their work.

Furthermore, the proliferation of journals requires that as a matter of institutional integrity, explicitly ideological journals, and journals with weak reviewing standards, in other disciplines ought also be subject to external scrutiny. (Should I name names in economics?) To summarize, the Diversity Boondoggle has provided cover under which pseudo-journals have entered the corpus of peer reviewed scholarship alongside the more traditional journals.

And, as King at SCSU Scholars puts it, the Diversity Boondoggle has crowded out more traditional serious scholarship.

Where are the Washington thinktanks that will support the Democrats' time in the wilderness? Years ago, they were at places like Harvard and Yale. Now radicals make sympathizers like Larry Summers walk the plank and hand over precious tenurable lines for another chair of ethnic studies, people who could not create a sound policy paper if their lives depended on it because they've spent too much time reading Derrida and not enough time reading economics.

The problem is that original thinkers creating new ideas for the Democrats are being squeezed out of higher education in many places by the Ward Churchills, the departments of {fill-in ethnicity or area} studies. The Republicans were able to respond by creating Cato, Heritage, Ashbrook, AEI, and a host of other think tanks where people could think and write. The Republicans had to do this because they were not welcome on American campuses. Liberals are, but to be a liberal on American campuses today requires you to waste enormous amounts of time defending the likes of Ward Churchill, and sacrificing a few seats in traditional disciplines to the Next Great Hope of Deconstruction (if Hope has any real meaning).

King's context is slightly different, focusing on serious policy work (some of which still goes on in the academy, some of which will make partisans of all stripes unhappy.) But as long as Departments of Cooling Out the Mark coexist with what remains of the serious disciplines, the university's image problem will persist.