Well we've moved from knuckling under to fascism in the class room to n uckling inder to fascism in the board room. Marx will jab e his day yet. But I'm not worried though,I have two big dogs and a couple of cats. My cubbard is full. Bring on the Chauvinistas!
Don’t Even Think About Being Evil
Corporate America has managed to make higher education look like an open marketplace of ideas.
Heather Mac Donald
Aug. 14, 2017 6:37 p.m. ET
Illustration: David Gothard
‘Just wait till those campus snowflakes enter the real world—that’ll shape ’em up!” So goes a typical response to totalitarian hysteria at colleges. The firing of a Google engineer last week for questioning the company’s diversity ideology exposes that hope as naive. The “real world” is being remade in the image of college campuses with breathtaking speed.
A conveyor belt of left-wing conformity runs from the academy into corporations and the government, so that today’s ivory-tower folly becomes tomorrow’s condition of employment. Google’s rationale for firing James Damore perfectly mimics academic victimology—the equation of politically incorrect speech with violence, the silencing of nonconforming views, the refusal to hear what a dissenting speaker is actually saying.
After attending a diversity training session, Mr. Damore wrote a 10-page memo titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber.” He observed that “differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don’t have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership.” Among those traits are assertiveness, a drive for status, an orientation toward things rather than people, and a tolerance for stress. He acknowledged that many of the differences in distribution are small and overlap significantly between the sexes, so that one cannot assume on the basis of sex where any given individual falls on the psychological spectrum. Considerable research supports Mr. Damore’s claims regarding male and female career preferences and personality traits.
Mr. Damore affirmed his commitment to diversity and suggested ways to make software engineering more people-oriented. But he pointed out that several of Google’s practices for engineering diversity discriminated in favor of women and minorities. And he called for greater openness to ideas that challenge progressive dogma, especially the “science of human nature,” which shows that not all differences are “socially constructed or due to discrimination.”
Mr. Damore’s fate was foreshadowed by the sacking of Harvard president Larry Summers in 2006. At a conference the previous year, Mr. Summers had hypothesized that the unequal distribution of the highest-level mathematical abilities may contribute to the sex disparity of science faculties. Numerous studies have confirmed that men predominate at the farthest reaches of math skills (high and low).
Mr. Summers’s carefully qualified speculation infamously provoked MIT biology professor Nancy Hopkins to flee the room and tell reporters she “would’ve either blacked out or thrown up” had she stayed. Mr. Summers issued a groveling retraction and ponied up a cool $50 million for more gender-diversity initiatives, but his tenure as president was doomed.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai employed the same bathetic language of injury in his response to Mr. Damore. “The memo has clearly impacted our co-workers, some of whom are hurting and feel judged based on their gender,” he asserted in a memo of his own. Yonatan Zunger, a recently departed Google senior engineer, claimed in an online essay that the speculations of Mr. Damore, a junior employee, have “caused significant harm to people across this company, and to the company’s entire ability to function.” He added that “not all conversations about ideas even have basic legitimacy” (emphasis his).
Ironically, Google is making even stronger claims about its lack of bias against women than Mr. Damore is. U.S. Labor Department auditors allege that the company’s salary differentials reflect sex discrimination; Google strenuously denies it. “We remain committed to treating, and paying, people fairly and without bias with regard to factors like gender or race,” Eileen Naughton, vice president of “people operations,” said July 17. “We are proud of our practices and leadership in this area.” But typical of the cognitive dissonance affecting every diversity-obsessed company, Google puts its workers through “implicit bias” training on the theory that such biases inevitably cloud their ability to judge female and minority employees and job applicants fairly.
The corporate world is even mimicking academia in its inhospitality to nonconforming speakers. Earlier this year, a Google employee asked me if I would be interested in speaking there about the police. The employee ultimately abandoned the idea, however, citing “personal/professional matters.” An affiliation, however remote, with someone who challenges the Black Lives Matter narrative is apparently a job hazard at Google.
Don’t assume that the discipline of the marketplace will prevent this imported academic victimology from harming business competitiveness. Google sets managerial goals for increased diversity. Mr. Damore wrote that he has observed such goals resulting in discrimination. That is fully believable. A comment on an internal anonymous discussion app warned that more Google employees need to stand up “against the insanity. Otherwise ‘Diversity and Inclusion’ which is essentially a pipeline from Women’s and African Studies, will ruin the company.”
America’s tech competitors in Asia are not yet infected by identity politics. The more resources U.S. companies spend on engineering diversity while competing firms base themselves on meritocracy, the more we blunt our scientific edge. Employees are thinking about leaving Google because of its totalitarian ideology, Mr. Damore said in an interview after his firing. While the prestige of elite companies may outweigh the burden of censorship for now, there may come a point when the calculus changes.
Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google parent Alphabet Inc., told a June shareholder meeting that Google was founded on the principle of “science-based thinking.” It says a lot about the corporate world that it makes universities look like an open marketplace of ideas. Research into biological differences may be unwelcome in much of academia, but it proceeds on the margins nevertheless. In the country’s most powerful companies, however, it is enough to disparage a scientific finding as a “stereotype” to absolve the speaker from considering the question: But is it true?
Ms. Mac Donald is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of “The War on Cops” (Encounter, 2016).
Appeared in the August 15, 2017, print edition.
Don’t Even Think About Being Evil
Corporate America has managed to make higher education look like an open marketplace of ideas.
Heather Mac Donald
Aug. 14, 2017 6:37 p.m. ET
Illustration: David Gothard
‘Just wait till those campus snowflakes enter the real world—that’ll shape ’em up!” So goes a typical response to totalitarian hysteria at colleges. The firing of a Google engineer last week for questioning the company’s diversity ideology exposes that hope as naive. The “real world” is being remade in the image of college campuses with breathtaking speed.
A conveyor belt of left-wing conformity runs from the academy into corporations and the government, so that today’s ivory-tower folly becomes tomorrow’s condition of employment. Google’s rationale for firing James Damore perfectly mimics academic victimology—the equation of politically incorrect speech with violence, the silencing of nonconforming views, the refusal to hear what a dissenting speaker is actually saying.
After attending a diversity training session, Mr. Damore wrote a 10-page memo titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber.” He observed that “differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don’t have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership.” Among those traits are assertiveness, a drive for status, an orientation toward things rather than people, and a tolerance for stress. He acknowledged that many of the differences in distribution are small and overlap significantly between the sexes, so that one cannot assume on the basis of sex where any given individual falls on the psychological spectrum. Considerable research supports Mr. Damore’s claims regarding male and female career preferences and personality traits.
Mr. Damore affirmed his commitment to diversity and suggested ways to make software engineering more people-oriented. But he pointed out that several of Google’s practices for engineering diversity discriminated in favor of women and minorities. And he called for greater openness to ideas that challenge progressive dogma, especially the “science of human nature,” which shows that not all differences are “socially constructed or due to discrimination.”
Mr. Damore’s fate was foreshadowed by the sacking of Harvard president Larry Summers in 2006. At a conference the previous year, Mr. Summers had hypothesized that the unequal distribution of the highest-level mathematical abilities may contribute to the sex disparity of science faculties. Numerous studies have confirmed that men predominate at the farthest reaches of math skills (high and low).
Mr. Summers’s carefully qualified speculation infamously provoked MIT biology professor Nancy Hopkins to flee the room and tell reporters she “would’ve either blacked out or thrown up” had she stayed. Mr. Summers issued a groveling retraction and ponied up a cool $50 million for more gender-diversity initiatives, but his tenure as president was doomed.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai employed the same bathetic language of injury in his response to Mr. Damore. “The memo has clearly impacted our co-workers, some of whom are hurting and feel judged based on their gender,” he asserted in a memo of his own. Yonatan Zunger, a recently departed Google senior engineer, claimed in an online essay that the speculations of Mr. Damore, a junior employee, have “caused significant harm to people across this company, and to the company’s entire ability to function.” He added that “not all conversations about ideas even have basic legitimacy” (emphasis his).
Ironically, Google is making even stronger claims about its lack of bias against women than Mr. Damore is. U.S. Labor Department auditors allege that the company’s salary differentials reflect sex discrimination; Google strenuously denies it. “We remain committed to treating, and paying, people fairly and without bias with regard to factors like gender or race,” Eileen Naughton, vice president of “people operations,” said July 17. “We are proud of our practices and leadership in this area.” But typical of the cognitive dissonance affecting every diversity-obsessed company, Google puts its workers through “implicit bias” training on the theory that such biases inevitably cloud their ability to judge female and minority employees and job applicants fairly.
The corporate world is even mimicking academia in its inhospitality to nonconforming speakers. Earlier this year, a Google employee asked me if I would be interested in speaking there about the police. The employee ultimately abandoned the idea, however, citing “personal/professional matters.” An affiliation, however remote, with someone who challenges the Black Lives Matter narrative is apparently a job hazard at Google.
Don’t assume that the discipline of the marketplace will prevent this imported academic victimology from harming business competitiveness. Google sets managerial goals for increased diversity. Mr. Damore wrote that he has observed such goals resulting in discrimination. That is fully believable. A comment on an internal anonymous discussion app warned that more Google employees need to stand up “against the insanity. Otherwise ‘Diversity and Inclusion’ which is essentially a pipeline from Women’s and African Studies, will ruin the company.”
America’s tech competitors in Asia are not yet infected by identity politics. The more resources U.S. companies spend on engineering diversity while competing firms base themselves on meritocracy, the more we blunt our scientific edge. Employees are thinking about leaving Google because of its totalitarian ideology, Mr. Damore said in an interview after his firing. While the prestige of elite companies may outweigh the burden of censorship for now, there may come a point when the calculus changes.
Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google parent Alphabet Inc., told a June shareholder meeting that Google was founded on the principle of “science-based thinking.” It says a lot about the corporate world that it makes universities look like an open marketplace of ideas. Research into biological differences may be unwelcome in much of academia, but it proceeds on the margins nevertheless. In the country’s most powerful companies, however, it is enough to disparage a scientific finding as a “stereotype” to absolve the speaker from considering the question: But is it true?
Ms. Mac Donald is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of “The War on Cops” (Encounter, 2016).
Appeared in the August 15, 2017, print edition.
