Kennedy's piece is here, and we noted the Princeton open letter here. It's good to have a sober reality check on this nonsense; an excerpt:
The claim of racial exclusion is implausible. For years now, throughout the university, there has existed a self-conscious impulse to promote people of color to positions of leadership. Either today or in the very recent past, Black professors have been chairs of the departments of history, anthropology, English, religion, African American studies, and the Lewis Center for the Arts. Black professors have also served as the dean of the School of Public and International Affairs and as the director of the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies. Scores of scholars of color have been Humanities Council fellows. The general counsel of the university is Latinx. The dean of admissions is African American. The recently retired vice chair of the university board of trustees, Brent Henry, a Black lawyer keenly attuned to matters of racial equity, has been for at least the past decade one of the three or four most important figures in the governance of the university.
Current trustees include Terri Sewell, an African American member of the U.S. House of Representatives; Henri Ford, the Haitian American dean of the University of Miami School of Medicine; and Melanie Lawson, a seasoned African-American television journalist. These people, all Princeton alumni, are alert and capable and in demand. They are by no means needy. They could associate themselves with any number of prestigious enterprises. They would surely decline to contribute to or be involved with the sort of institution that the ultimatum depicts. This power and privilege is possessed also by many of the authors and signatories of the ultimatum, which accounts in part for the whiff of bad faith that suffuses the whole affair.
The ultimatum complains that, in its view, past initiatives aimed at enlarging the number of faculty of color at Princeton have “failed” because in 2019-20 “among 814 faculty, there were 30 Black, 31 Latinx, and 0 Indigenous persons. That’s 7%.” According to the ultimatum, this “is not progress by any standard; it falls woefully short of U.S. demographics as estimated by the U.S. Census Bureau, which reports Black and Hispanic persons at 32% of the total population.”
The suggestion that these statistics show racial unfairness in hiring at Princeton is misleading. According to the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, African Americans in recent years earned only around 7 percent of all doctoral degrees. In engineering it was around 4 percent. In physics around 2 percent. Care must be taken to look for talent in places other than the familiar haunts of Ivy League searches. But even when such care is taken, the resultant catch is almost invariably quite small.
The reasons behind the small numbers are familiar and heart-breaking. They include a legacy of deprivation in education, housing, employment, and health care, not to mention increased vulnerability to crime and incarceration. The perpetuation of injuries from past discrimination as well as the imposition of new wrongs cut like scythes into the ranks of racial minorities, cruelly winnowing the number who are even in the running to teach at Princeton.
The racial demographics of its faculty does not reflect a situation in which the university is putting a thumb on the scale against racial-minority candidates. To the contrary, the university is rightly putting a thumb on the scale in favor of racial-minority candidates. That the numbers remain small reflects the terrible social problems that hinder so many racial minorities before they even have a fighting chance to enter into the elite competitions from which Princeton selects its instructors. The ultimatum denies or minimizes this pipeline problem.
What I am saying is widely known within the university but largely unspoken, because it has become bad manners for a person of progressive inclination to point out obvious fallacies of the sort that damage the credibility of the Princeton ultimatum and similar protests. As everyone knows, some signers of group letters join out of feelings of general solidarity, rather than specific agreement. And peer pressure accounts for the apparent approval of some who actually disagree but want to protect their reputations.
Professor Kennedy, in that last sentence, is being rather generous about the pathetic and craven cowardice of so many tenured faculty.
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