University Lights (6)

Turning Out the Lights
The Witches' Brew: Affirmative Action and Sexual Harassment Policy

Fair is foul, and the foul is fair. Hover through the fog and filthy air.

To the noxious brew of University life, bubbling with desperation and viciousness, the collectivists have added a highly lethal poison - affirmative action and sexual harassment policy. These governmental policies thrust the class system of justice (see my article here) deep into institutions arranged around individual merit and competition. As we have seen, the meritocracy of academe is compromised by a class system, in which the faculty is divided between the stars - competitive individuals who comprise a minority at most schools - and the craftsmen and craftswomen, noncompetitive faculty members who are collectively organized into defensive voting alliances. Affirmative action reinforces the class system, legalizes it, and gives the craftsmen great political power. Their political power is increased by sexual harassment policy. Sexual harassment policy gives craftswomen professors and their allies among the minority and GLAAS* faculty, a deadly weapon to repress opposing opinion and pull down the meritocracy.

I believe most stars supported academic affirmative action in the 1970s and 1980s, aside from ideological reasons, because they believed it would increase the pool of candidates from which to obtain faculty members with outstanding potential for excellence; i.e., affirmative action would reinforce the star system. No doubt this happened here and there; but overall, the politics of voting alliances defeated the star system and came to control affirmative action. Affirmative action recruitment came to be a means to build membership in voting alliances. Second rate or third rate candidates would be selected by department majorities, precisely because they would not be stars and would join the voting alliance that brought them employment. Affirmative action thereby reinforces cronyism and political preferment in administration at all levels. It encourages a mythology of false identity and victimage, because these distortions are rewarded by non-merit based preferment.

Subversion of the intent of affirmative action has been sad, but not tragic. The capture of sexual harassment policy by voting alliances and their affirmative action allies, on the other hand, has been tragically pernicious. Sexual harrassment policy motivates false accusation. No doubt, there are genuine case of sexual harrassment; but the reward, in terms of acquiring power that trumps due process procedures that might be in place, is so great that it motivates ruthless lying. Sexual harrassment policy has ushered in an era of suppression of all opinion that defies the mediocrity of the craftsmen class. Political correctness has been built on the basis of sexual harassment policy, expanding suppression of opinion to putative racial harassment, hate speech, and social and political conservatism. This ominous development has been chronicled by Alan Kors and Harvey Silverglate in The Shadow University (Free Press, 1998). It does not need to be repeated here.

Gaining control of sexual harassment policy at universities and colleges, the craftsmen voting alliances have obtained control over administrations. There is no other explanation for the wholesale collapse of administrative protection of speech and competitive excellence at some universities around the country. Sexual harassment policies are institutionalized into permanent offices with paid administrators and advisors. The policies are written and rewritten to weaken due process for accused individuals and to expand discretionary power in application of the policy. Sexual harassment policy has become in universities primarily political.

Control of affirmative action policy and sexual harassment policy creates a legal bastion for political correctness as a weapon in vicious university politics. This corruption of corporate governance and suppression of political opposition by organized political groups with a collectivist ideology has a traditional name that should be applied here: fascism.

* GLAAS: Gay, Lesbian, and Alternative Sexuality

Revised January 16, 2005.

Comments

[Ben]

Good thoughts.