Some thoughts on race and affirmative action:

If gender is merely a matter of self-identification, should not race be also? I have always thought that, given the affirmative action-laden higher education admissions process, applicants should self-identify as “black” or “Native American” whenever they so desire. I mean, why not? If they feel black or Native American, should not they be able to claim such an identity, as Rachel Dolezal has done? Doing so would quickly cause affirmative action to collapse of its own ridiculous weight.

Indeed, all of this race balkanization–with such extreme emphasis as belonging to this or that race–only further divides us, as race baiters like Al Sharpton well know. So why not accept the progressives’ terms of the debate–that our gender and race is all simply a matter of self-identity–and identify as a member of races that are favored/more protected by law? After all, no one can ever really know what lies in another’s heart. Does Bruce Jenner sincerely believe he is a female, or does he simply like to dress up in women’s clothes? Does Rachel Dolezal sincerely believe she is black? No one can possibly know the answer, perhaps not even Mr./Ms. Jenner and Ms. Dolezal.

What would a university do if an applicant self-identified as “black” on an application but showed up looking “white”? And if the university made such a judgment, what on earth would that mean? How would the university defend its belief that a student didn’t “look” black? What sort of bizarre racial stereotypes would it rely upon in making such an appearance-based judgment? And if the university actually decided to take action against the student for racial misrepresentation, what on earth would that mean? How would the university judge whether the student was really “black”? What percentage of blood would suffice for such a progressive institution? Fifty percent? Ten percent? One percent?

For decades I’ve been saying that “white” people should put down “black” on racial quiz forms, and defy anyone to prove them wrong. Race is, after all, a social construct.

…and the “liberals” are leading it:

At this point I have to ask: Where has Schlosser been the past year? He talks about the erosion of professors’ abilities to teach their students topics that may challenge their worldview. But how has he missed that liberal politicians have already adopted the position that an accusation is all the evidence one needs?

California passed “yes means yes” last year, a law that makes it far easier to accuse someone of sexual assault and provides no due process rights to those accused. States across the country have introduced similar bills. U.S. Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand and Claire McCaskill are pushing for a national law that also erodes due process rights.

And the same people pushing for trigger warnings and safe spaces are pushing the “terrifying” policy that accusations equal guilt.

It’s great that Schlosser and others have finally realized the problems on college campuses, but they still have a lot to learn.

Yes, they don’t realize that they created this monster.

[Update a few minutes later]

The lowest-paid and least secure in the system are adjuncts.

[Update a few minutes later]

Jonathan Chait: The liberal backlash against campus PC is in full swing.

Josh Marshall is unimpressed, too:

In other words, Kipnis wrote a sharp-tongued, one-dimensional caricature of university sexual assault and trigger warning activists at Northwestern. And they turned around and proved her one-dimensional caricature 100% right.

Yup.

Afraid of his own students:

The current student-teacher dynamic has been shaped by a large confluence of factors, and perhaps the most important of these is the manner in which cultural studies and social justice writers have comported themselves in popular media. I have a great deal of respect for both of these fields, but their manifestations online, their desire to democratize complex fields of study by making them as digestible as a TGIF sitcom, has led to adoption of a totalizing, simplistic, unworkable, and ultimately stifling conception of social justice. The simplicity and absolutism of this conception has combined with the precarity of academic jobs to create higher ed’s current climate of fear, a heavily policed discourse of semantic sensitivity in which safety and comfort have become the ends and the means of the college experience.

Does anyone really imagine that such an environment is conducive to actual education?

[Update a few minutes later]

Campus justice: punished until proven innocent:

But I’ll let Leiter argue with Weinberg about the case itself, because I want to take issue with this passage: “As I noted earlier, the Title IX investigation yielded no finding of retaliation against Kipnis. One can only imagine how disappointed she will be with this. It turns out that the process she had been demonizing—which of course may have its flaws—pretty much worked, from her point of view.”

I think this is deeply wrong, and for all that, it is not an uncommon sentiment. You often hear this sort of argument when people complain about the byzantine procedures that colleges use to adjudicate charges of a racial or sexual nature, or when they argue that we should always presumptively believe any rape accusation: “Well, if they didn’t do that, the system will figure it out eventually, so what’s the big deal?”

This ignores the fact that the process itself can become the punishment. Sexual assault, racial harassment and similar crimes are serious charges, that should be treated seriously. This makes being charged with such an offense a very big deal for the accused. The judicial process is time consuming, often confusing, and scary. The accused may need to pay for legal advice, even though they often aren’t allowed to take counsel into the system with them. Then there’s the worry of knowing that however crazy the charge sounds to you, the campus judicial process may have very different ideas.

It’s becoming Kafkaesqe.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Another campus-rape case falls apart. At this point, it’s appropriate to ask if there are any of these high-profile cases that aren’t false accusations and fraud.

…was sauce for Laura Kipnis’s gander:

It’s hard to work up too much sympathy for Kipnis, though. One wonders where she’s been for the past two decades when kangaroo courts were set up at institutions of higher education all over the country.

Has she been rushing to defend all the men convicted by campus courts of sexual assault with no lawyers present?

Kipnis learned (much to her surprise) that, as she wrote, “any Title IX charge that’s filed has to be investigated, which effectively empowers anyone on campus to individually decide, and expand, what Title IX covers. Anyone with a grudge, a political agenda, or a desire for attention can quite easily leverage the system.”

No kidding. And Title IX is only the tip of the iceberg. Anyone with a political agenda and an ax to grind can get professors reprimanded, students kicked off campus and commencement speakers disinvited.

Did self-described feminist Kipnis rush to the defense of Ayaan Hirsi Ali or Condoleezza Rice when they were told they couldn’t come to Brandeis and Rutgers? (In an essay for Slate, Kipnis referred to Condi as President George W. Bush’s “Stepford Wife.”)

Has she been defending Christina Hoff Sommers when the students at Georgetown and Oberlin tried to prevent her from giving a visiting lecture and then demanding “safe spaces” to be protected from her harsh words?

Somehow, one suspects not.

[Update a few minutes later]

“I pity the fool, for not opening her eyes and seeing what little fascist enclaves universities have become thanks to progressive intolerance and lack of ideological ‘diversity.’ Other than that, as a court of equity would say, Kipnis has “dirty hands,” and her involvement in the progressive cabal diminishes her entitlement to relief.”