It states, "In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence."Follow the link for the figure. Today I propose an Affirmative Action and Diversity Corollary to the Peter Principle. People who tick the right Diversity, Inclusion, or Equity boxes will likely be promoted until they reach several rungs above their respective levels of competence. Look no further than the testimony of three presidents of academic institutions you might be familiar with.
In other words, if you work in an organization with a top-down management structure and you are good at your job, you will likely be promoted until you reach one rung above your level of competence. Dr Peter called this level your "final placement."
While the book is written in a lighthearted manner, there's more than a grain of truth in its well-researched analysis of one of the main flaws in hierarchical structures.
In Figure 1 below, you can see a very simple representation of the Peter Principle. It shows a career path where your success is rewarded with advancement, until you are promoted above your level of competence and success is replaced by failure.
🚨🚨🚨Presidents of @Harvard @MIT and @Penn REFUSE to say whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” is bullying and harassment according to their codes of conduct. Even going so far to say it needs to turn to “action” first. As in committing genocide.
— Rep. Elise Stefanik (@RepStefanik) December 5, 2023
THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE AND… pic.twitter.com/hUY3SgoOOi
We'll open with an excerpt from a longer statement from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, an organization that remains on the Cold Spring Shops "nice" list at Christmas, and their check will be going in the mail shortly.
Institutions must take all reasonable measures to protect students from unprotected conduct that stifles free speech or credibly threatens the physical safety of others.As long as Harvard or MIT or Penn maintain speech codes or civility standards that invoke "harassment" or "insulting" or "demeaning," the correct answer from those presidents would be, "Yes, Representative Stefanik, the example you cite is 'harassment' or 'demeaning.' If it weren't for double standards, though, would higher education have any standards at all?
And as frustrating as it is to hear the college presidents’ appeals to “context” in yesterday’s hearing, particularly when it doesn’t seem to matter to them when other speech is at issue, the truth is that context does matter.
It always matters when assessing whether speech crosses the line into an unprotected category such as harassment, true threats, or incitement.
In light of the sudden and convenient discovery of free speech scruples by the college presidents at yesterday’s hearing, we should hold the presidents to these scruples, and we should not lose sight of the bigger picture.The defenders of Business as Usual predictably sought to put a favorable spin on the hearing.
Double standards are frustrating, but we should address them by demanding free speech be protected consistently — not by expanding the calls for censorship.
Some lawmakers accused the administrators of refusing to hire conservative professors; of wrongly classifying hate speech and harassment of Jewish students as free speech; and of allowing diversity, equity, and inclusion officers to protect some minority students but not Jewish students, all actions they say have resulted in growing antisemitism.The house organ for wokeness in higher education professes perplexity at presidents of three universities with lots of U.S. News chops being summoned.
Throughout the hearing, the presidents rebutted many of the accusations by saying the lawmakers presented no data to back them up, and that they were doing everything in their power to keep students safe. They pointed to increased security on campuses and new antisemitism committees, as well as other ways to foster dialogue.
During an especially contentious moment, Rep. Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York, asked Gay whether phrases like “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and “globalize the intifada” are allowed at Harvard, and whether administrators would allow “a student calling for the mass murder of African Americans.” When Gay attempted to respond, Stefanik interrupted, saying that “intifada” is a call for “violent armed resistance against the State of Israel, including violence against civilians and the genocide of Jews.” Stefanik then questioned if the use of the term during protests was allowed under Harvard’s code of conduct.
Gay called the use of the term “hateful” and “at odds with the values of Harvard.”
But “we embrace a commitment to free expression and give a wide berth to free expression, even of views that are objectionable, outrageous, and offensive,” Gay continued.
Protests over the war at all three campuses, and their leaders’ clumsy responses, have made national headlines in recent weeks. The three presidents have also faced pressure from donors, critics, faculty members, and alumni to better support the Jewish students on their campuses. (Many students and professors have also called for better protection for Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian students, amid rising Islamophobia incidents).
It’s not entirely clear why these three particular presidents were called to Capitol Hill, considering that many campuses across the country have grappled with protests, rising tensions and finding a balance between promoting free expression and keeping students safe. All three have had high-profile controversies and faced criticism for their responses to the Hamas attack and their handling of protests following the start of the war, but the same has been true for other campuses and presidents.Predictably, there's pearl-clutching over "Islamophobia" (better understood as Islamoskepticism) as well as more talk about "dialogue."
Barbara R. Snyder, president of the Association of American Universities, said in a statement to Inside Higher Ed that the hearing will give the three presidents an opportunity to share the positive and constructive ways their universities have dealt with the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attack.What they confirmed was that our universities are being run by terminally stupid people, and that none of them ever faced a skeptical faculty senate. Afterwards, Inside Higher Ed contributor Katherine Knott predictably wanted the wagons circled.
“I hope the hearing will inform the committee about some of the countless ways—from hosting respectful dialogues about the history and context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to awareness events to combat antisemitism and Islamophobia—that America’s leading research universities have responded constructively to the unprecedented challenges posed by this crisis,” Snyder said.
The all-woman panel will include presidents who are relatively new to their posts and have little experience testifying before an adversarial congressional committee. The longest-tenured among the three is Penn president Liz Magill, who started in July 2022. She’ll be testifying along with Harvard president Claudine Gay and MIT president Sally Kornbluth. The presidents have said in statements that they look forward to sharing updates and information with the committee.
House Republicans lambasted the leaders of three elite universities for more than four hours Tuesday in a contentious hearing that was focused on campus antisemitism but frequently veered into broader conservative critiques of higher education.It's all about the mean Republicans.
“I do not refer to colleges and universities as ‘higher education,’ because it’s my opinion that higher-order skills are not being taught or learned, and I think today’s hearing indicates that,” said North Carolina representative Virginia Foxx, the top Republican on the House Education and Workforce Committee, which hosted the hearing.
“I have always defended higher education, but today I am embarrassed,” said Louisiana representative Julia Letlow, also a Republican.
Throughout the morning and afternoon, Republicans appeared frustrated when the presidents didn’t give clear-cut answers to yes-or-no questions, speaking over the witnesses and cutting them off. Most of their queries were directed at Gay and Magill. They hammered the institutions’ leaders on what they perceive as a lack of ideological diversity among faculty members and pressed the presidents on whether faculty members have been disciplined or students expelled for their actions in the past two months.Never mind that the presidents could have noted that, yes, the pro-Hamas left on campus had been engaging in harassing and demeaning conduct that would be actionable under existing speech codes and bias response protocols.
Academic freedom and free expression are bedrock principles in higher education, Gay, Magill and Kornbluth said repeatedly as Republicans on the committee called for action against antisemitic speech.That is an unforced error by the Republican delegation, calling for more balanced enforcement of speech codes, rather than restoring a state of good repair to academic discourse.
“What we seek is not simply free expression, but the reasoned dialogue that leads to truth and discovery and that does the work of moving us all forward,” Gay said. “We don’t always get it right, and our students don’t always get it right.”
Kornbluth said that problematic speech should be countered with more speech and education. “I strongly believe that there is a difference between what we can say to each other, what we have a right to say and what we should say as members of one community,” she said. “Yet, as president of MIT, in addition to my duties to keep this campus safe and maintain the functioning of this national asset, I must at the same time ensure that we protect speech and viewpoint diversity for everyone.”
Pennsylvania representative Susan Wild, a Democrat, said she wished the hearing was a “robust intellectual discussion” about the limits of free speech. “I feel for all of you,” she told the presidents. “It is a balancing act that you have to perform.”
Wild asked at what point speech incites violence and crosses the line, pointing to the video played at the start of the hearing that showed students calling to “globalize the intifada.”
“That video, as a human being, was very hard to watch,” Magill responded. “The chanting—calling for intifada, global revolution—was very disturbing. I can imagine many people’s reaction to that would be one of fear. I believe at a minimum it is hateful speech that has been and should be condemned. Whether it rises to incitement of violence under the policies at Penn … is a much more difficult question. It is a very narrow category.”
Unfortunately for Big Higher Education, that's too bourgeois a concept, and Aaron Sibarium of the Free Beacon gets to open up a can.
The presidents of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT appeared before Congress on Tuesday to discuss the rising anti-Semitism on their campuses. It did not go well for them.It's all too much for William "Legal Insurrection" Jacobson. "THESE THREE UNIVERSITY PRESIDENTS ARE VERY UNIMPRESSIVE PEOPLE." That post includes additional excerpts from the hearing, and clips of his appearances on assorted news services later that night. In one of those appearances, he notes,
Faced with hostile questions from the Republican-controlled House Committee on Education and the Workforce, whose members include Harvard alumna Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.), the presidents struggled to explain why their institutions—which have repeatedly denounced, disinvited, and punished professors for airing conservative views—suddenly discovered the value of free speech when students and faculty began defending Hamas.
"In what world is a call for violence against Jews protected speech, but a belief that sex is biological and binary isn’t?" Rep. Tim Walberg (R., Mich.) asked Harvard president Claudine Gay. The school’s diversity administrators had thrown a fit when Carole Hooven, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, stated on Fox News that there are only two sexes, causing such a firestorm that she had to take a leave of absence. Gay didn’t answer the question.
The exchange captured the tenor of the contentious hearing, "Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confronting Anti-Semitism," which was unusually well-attended and widely viewed on social media. Along with Penn president Liz Magill and MIT president Sally Kornbluth, Gay repeatedly argued that calls for "intifada," no matter how hateful or offensive, were protected by academic freedom. Each time they did, the committee would throw those words back in their faces, rattling off all the ways in which the schools had suppressed free speech and created an ideological monoculture.
"You’re speaking out of both sides of your mouth," Rep. Jim Banks (R., Ind.) told Magill. The Penn president stated throughout the hearing that Penn’s free speech policies "follow the Constitution," even as the university attempts to punish Amy Wax, a tenured law professor, for a bevy of constitutionally protected remarks, including her criticism of diversity programs. The school has not tried to sanction Huda Fakhreddine, a professor of Arabic literature who told Jews to "go back" to "fucking Berlin," or Ahmad Almallah, a creative writing instructor who led chants of "intifada revolution."
I actually thought the three presidents were, frankly, fairly pathetic. They seemed to be either unaware of what’s happening at their campuses or unwilling to deal with it. Repeatedly throughout their testimony when they were questioned by various representatives, they would say, oh, we welcome all viewpoints, we welcome, we embrace everybody, we want to have this culture of acceptance on campus. But we all know that that’s not true. I’m on a campus, it’s not true. I’ve followed campuses for over 15 years, almost daily, and reported on them. So I really felt there was a disconnect there.He's the voice of moderation. Entrepreneur Bill Ackman is, to put it mildly, angry.
To think that these are the leaders of Ivy League institutions that are charged with the responsibility to educate our best and brightest.Yes, that smirking. John Hinderaker saw it too.
On the bright side, our congressional leaders deserve accolades for showing tremendous leadership and moral clarity in their statements, by the questions they asked, and the respectfulness with which they conducted the hearing.
It was a masterclass of how our government and democracy should operate.
If you have time, please watch the entire hearing. Throughout the hearing, the three behaved like hostile witnesses, exhibiting a profound disdain for the Congress with their smiles and smirks, and their outright refusal to answer basic questions with a yes or no answer.
What is striking to me is how unintelligently these three academics answered Stefanik’s questions. There are actually some interesting issues here, which a smart and principled administrator could have spoken about in a compelling way. But these academic hacks had nothing insightful to say, and were just trying to get out of the hearing as fast as they could, smirking all the while. I would only add that a Harvard student who wrote that all blacks should be murdered–say, in a conservative student paper, if Harvard had one–would not have a future at that institution. There would be no discussion of “context.”I saw some observations on social media to the effect that those three were smirking in a nervous, defensive way, recognizing, perhaps, that they were trafficking in bullpuckey. Perhaps. In my 35 years in higher education, I came to understand that as the Condescending Smirk, usually accompanied by some cliché or perhaps a mention of something heard on NPR, as if between the body language and the reference, a microphone was being dropped. Sadly, no.
If there are still people who think we should defer to the views of academics because they are smarter than we are, this short video segment should help to disabuse them of that idea.
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