TRAMMELLING INQUIRY IS THE PRIME DIRECTIVE.

When Harvard president Claudine Gay said something about "her truth," she meant it.  As dean of Arts and Sciences, she presented a plan worthy of Procrustes.

She provided a remarkable summary of her views in her memorandum on August 20, 2020, to the Faculty of Arts & Sciences when she was serving as Dean. In that memo she set out her radical vision of the “transformational project” she had in mind for Harvard—a project that would redefine every aspect of the university in an effort to advance what she called “racial justice.” This meant prioritizing race in faculty appointments; pursuing “inclusive excellence” (a euphemism for lowering academic standards); expanding the diversity bureaucracy—aka expanding “leadership opportunities for staff of color;” and selectively favoring minority candidates for promotion of staff in managerial and executive roles.

None of this was hidden, though the general public appears to have little understanding as to what it meant and how forcefully President Gay would implement it.

There's more in the memo, none of it good.

The project of building a truly inclusive scholarly community begins with what we consider worthy of research and teaching. A full account of contemporary American society demands scholarship that affirms the relevance, significance, and worth of diverse cultural backgrounds and histories. Moreover, preparing our students for leadership in today’s globalized yet profoundly unequal society, requires an education that includes the voices, stories, and lived experiences of those too long pushed to the margins. With these goals in mind, I plan a series of investments across our academic enterprise.

This fall, we will reactivate the cluster hire in ethnicity, indigeneity, and migration, with the goal of making four new faculty appointments. These appointments are critical to our long-term efforts to strengthen our research and teaching capacity, and ensure that our students have access to this vital body of knowledge. In order to accelerate our progress, however, I am also establishing the Harvard College Visiting Professorship in Ethnicity, Indigeneity, and Migration to recruit leading scholars of race and ethnicity to spend a year at Harvard College actively engaged in teaching our undergraduates. Beginning in 2021-2022, the FAS will appoint up to two new visiting scholars each year, based on recommendations from academic departments. Finally, to seed new research directions and develop the next generation of scholars, we will also invest in the academic pipeline. The Inequality in America postdoctoral fellowship program, which currently recruits two new fellows each year, will be expanded in the coming year to recruit two additional early career scholars whose work focuses specifically on issues of racial and ethnic inequality.

I wonder how tight the priors are of the candidates who screen for the jobs, and of the faculty committees who make the call (nobody is offered a job at Harvard, you see.)  Actually, I don't.  "Relevance, significance, and worth" are criteria that can include irrelevance, insignificance, and worthlessness, but good luck finding any research dead ends along the lines of "nothing happened," let alone of students offered the opportunity to consider the criteria by which these scholars deem outcomes to be relevant, significant, and worthy.

On the other hand, Harvard get another layer of management.

I soon will appoint the inaugural Associate Dean of Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging for the FAS. Their work will be dedicated to the creation and implementation of an FAS-wide strategic vision for inclusive excellence that enables all members of our community to be seen, heard, and to flourish. They will report directly to me, and will work closely with the FAS senior leadership team to develop concrete goals and identify personal, departmental, divisional, and school-level actions for building an effective and active culture of anti-racism in the FAS.

Is it a microaggression to refer to a not yet hired dean as a "they?"  More to the point, are there omelettes to be made and eggs to be broken?

Our engagement in anti-racist action and the infusion of inclusive practices into all aspects of our teaching and research mission reflect a new sense of institutional responsibility and will require sustained effort over time. Just like the learning that takes place in our classrooms and labs, this work demands thoughtful attention, experimentation (not all of which will be successful), and patience and humility for when we get it wrong. No one person or institution (not even Harvard!) has all the answers, and we cannot achieve our goals without the courage to listen deeply and generously and to act with urgency, seriousness of purpose, and a mind towards continual growth. The work of racial justice is not a one-time project. We must be relentless, constructively critical, and action-oriented in our pursuit to build the thriving, more equitable FAS we all deserve.

Even as I say that, I am clear-eyed that the work of real change will be difficult and for many it will be uncomfortable. Change is messy work. Institutional inertia will threaten to overwhelm even our best efforts. If we are to succeed, we must challenge a status quo that is comfortable and convenient for many. But I believe progress can be made and will be beneficial to all members of our community.

Has she, or the diversity bureaucracy, considered the possibility that maybe getting some of these things wrong is evidence of reality getting in the way?

In today's university, you don't let reality get in the way of your priors.  Consider the theme of the 2024 American Sociological Association meeting, as reported by John "Grumpy Economist" Cochrane.

The 2024 theme emphasizes sociology as a form of liberatory praxis: an effort to not only understand structural inequities, but to intervene in socio-political struggles. Our field is currently undergoing a renaissance as expansions in anti-racist, decolonial, feminist, queer, and transnational theorizing lead us to more grounded, comprehensive, and inclusive insights. The 2024 program theme focuses on how we can use our understanding of intersectional inequalities and solidarities to help build a better world.

Sociologists in a wide range of settings are motivated by the potential to make a difference. This theme calls on sociologists in all of our roles—as students, teachers, advisors, mentors, leaders, applied researchers, academic researchers inside and outside of sociology departments, community-engaged researchers, and public sociologists—to consider how to use sociology to create more just communities and societies. Sociology practiced in all of these different ways makes valuable and meaningful contributions to the discipline, and the 2024 Program Committee invites and welcomes all sociologists to the table.

Intersectionality is also central to the theme. While the term is prone to misconception, intersectionality, at base, is the most sociological of insights: inequalities reflect a wide array of social locations, as well as spatial, historical, political, global, and economic contexts. Thus, rather than reducing inequalities down to one thing (e.g., class, race, gender, ability, or sexuality), sociologists increasingly explore how intersecting identities—which further intertwine with societal contexts—shape opportunities and experiences.

This theme pushes us to not only identify intersectional inequalities, but also theorize building intersectional solidarities, emphasizing how sociology can suggest new ways of organizing society. The pandemic has exacerbated inequalities, created new challenges, and led to millions of preventable deaths. It has also disrupted ideas about how society should be structured, creating new openings for the field.

This theme also reflects the “pleasure turn” in sociology, to consider how sociology can contribute to a positive, transformative vision of society, recognizing that marginalized people find ways to not only survive oppression, but also make spaces for being, thriving, and rejoicing. Following developments in the areas of Black Joy, Trans Joy, and Afrofuturism, joy can ward off cynicism and despair to create power and meaning. The theme suggests that sociology can contribute to a living world, one where solidarity, healing, and growth exist, building communities of hope, justice, and joy.

Good grief.  It's the jargon of nonsense.  That "praxis" is a tell: it's a highfalutin' way of saying "practice," generally it connotes ways of specifically implementing a concept, such as the overprotection of a strong point on the chess-board, or the proper use of the Bishop pair.  (Aron Niemzowitsch, Praxis of My System.)  It's different from "practice," where you work on those arpeggios and glissandos until they sound right, or on those free throws until the muscle memory is wired in, or on pulling and blocking the end until even Vince Lombardi is satisfied.  And building a better world?  We all have different visions of "better" and if achieving one was simple, we'd likely already have implemented it.  But the notion of the man of system dies hard, doesn't it?

I wonder, as well, whether this conference will consider "rely less on intellectuals and technocrats" as a disruption worthy of study.  And if you want to build communities of hope, justice, and joy, find a church.

I mean, when I take the view that public funding for education is censorship per se and yet I shed no tears when Florida's higher education commissars bounce sociology from the list of approved general education core courses.

But the trammelling of inquiry in the service of somebody's agenda goes on and on.  It even turns up at the rolling mill.

Unfortunately, the modern history profession has all but abandoned this pursuit of objectivity in exchange for progressive ideology. This is most obvious in its embrace of critical race theory and the fatally flawed 1619 Project. A recent controversy in the field exemplifies this focus on ideology over history.

It involves an extensively covered article by Jenny Bulstrode in the journal History and Technology. In her paper, “Black Metallurgists and the Making of the Industrial Revolution,” she argues that a crucial 18th-century innovation in the manufacture of wrought iron credited to Henry Cort was stolen from its real developers: 76 enslaved Africans at a Jamaican foundry. It immediately made a big splash in the media, with laudatory coverage from the Guardian, NPR, the New Scientist, and other publications. Bulstrode’s claims that a foundation of British prosperity was purloined from oppressed black slaves fit perfectly into the progressive vision of Western history as built on white supremacy and slavery. Not only that, the paper was written by a prize-winning university lecturer and passed peer review, and the author marshaled a great deal of evidence to support her contentions.

The problem is that she misinterprets sources, reaches insupportable conclusions, and fails to back up her key assertions.

Logic is so cisheteropatriarchal, isn't it?  Don't let your annoying coherent beliefs or your insistence on rules of evidence and argumentation get in the way of The Narrative.

Bulstrode has received significant backing from the progressive press as well as from the editors of History and Technology, who took the unusual step of publishing an editorial expressing their “unreserved support” for the paper. This is bizarre for an academic journal, as editors rarely step in to defend an author or refuse to publish a legitimate dissent to a published article. In this case, it is an even starker choice given that the journal has already published a correction to the paper with respect to the claims about [ironmonger Henry] Cort’s brother. The editors gloss over this major factual error, dissenting academics are derided as unserious, and the problematic arguments made by Bulstrode are backed without any additional evidence. Why would such a strong step be taken to defend a paper that is clearly lacking in historical rigor? The answer lies in politics.

The History and Technology editorial focuses on the paper’s usefulness in “decentering white actors in formative technology developments of the early British industrial era,” and its problematization of “the concepts of modernization and industrialization . . . help show the close ties between these aims and colonizers’ assertions of geopolitical, racial, and religious supremacy.” Bulstrode’s work is valuable in its argument against “a schema which valorizes EuroAmerican intellects and disallows for non-European peoples as the creators of novel technological practices,” helping to displace “narratives that center the agencies and experiences of white capitalists.” According to the editors, “she brings to this literature an agile analytic by which ‘invention’ and ‘innovation’ must be detached from pre-existing ideas of where a particular technology begins and ends.” This is politics, not scholarship.

It's Taylor and Francis, a publishing house notorious for providing Minimal Publishable Units a home, and it's unlikely many people are going to read the essay.  But again, the objective is to trammel inquiry.  Never mind that any technology is emergent, and the precursor might have arisen in some other industrial venture (but not rolling sugar cane).  That whiteness must be decentered.

This paper and its vociferous defense by progressives in the press and the academy are purely instrumental. The accuracy of the historical claims is secondary to the primary directive, which is to craft a false impression of the past to achieve political aims in the present. The editors of History and Technology say this outright, lambasting the critics who pose a “challenge to what we see as meaningful historical accountability” by insisting on apolitical history based on evidence.

I'll let Reason's Josh Blackman enter the closing argument. "[T]he answer to any question turns not on any sort of objective moral truths, but based on a dogmatic preference for the plight of the oppressed."  It is a misleading dogma, and it should be treated as such.