Thursday, 27 May 2021

Daily Digest

Daily Digest

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More on Yale’s Middle Finger to Alumni

Posted: 27 May 2021 11:50 AM PDT

(Steven Hayward)

Gail Lavielle

Further to my item the other day on “Yale to Alumni: Drop Dead,” I learn of another petition candidate who has been organizing to run next year: Gail Lavielle, Yale MA 1981. Scan through her bio: she’s quite impressive, with a distinguished career both in the private sector and in public service, both here in the U.S. and overseas. She seems an ideal candidate for the board of any organization.

Lavielle notes in an email the irregularity and contempt of Yale’s decision to eliminate petition alumni board candidacies, and wonders whether the step was taken in accord with Yale’s own rules:

The statement in the Senior Trustee's letter about respect for petitioning candidates is disingenuous in the extreme. Both the letter and the longer statement on the Board's web site argue that any petitioning candidate with "organized support" would bring an "agenda" to the Board and would therefore be unable to address the issues facing Yale with independent judgment. This suggestion is disrespectful and deeply offensive not only to petitioning candidates, but also to those who sign their petitions and to those who ultimately choose to vote for them. Not only would it be highly inappropriate to serve in such a manner, but it would also be folly to expect that a single new member could impose an outside agenda on a board of trustees.

The timing of the announcement raises concerns. The vote to drop the petition option was taken at a meeting on May 18, almost a full week before the email went to alumni. The announcement was not made until May 24 in the afternoon, almost 15 hours after the end of both the 2021 Alumni Fellow election and the start of the 2022 petitioning period. Meanwhile, petitioning candidates had been required to declare their intention to petition on March 15. They had all been working for more than two months and were standing ready for their petitions to become available for signatures at midnight on May 24. During this time, I released a statement about why I decided to run, my background, and how I would approach the role of Alumni Fellow, which I invite you to read here.

Announcing the Board's decision before March 15 would have made more sense than postponing the Board's vote until May 18 and its announcement until May 24, when the declarations of petitioning candidates had already been accepted by Yale officials months earlier. The timing gives the impression that Board members may have found the potential outcome of the 2021 election in progress inconvenient. The impression may be inaccurate, but it is still difficult to disregard.

I have questions about the decision-making process itself. Yale's by-laws can be amended by a 2/3 majority of the Board only if the agenda item and related materials are distributed to members either at the immediately previous Board meeting or at least 30 days before the vote is to be taken. Records show that the Board's two ex officio members – Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont and Lieutenant Governor Susan Bysiewicz – had received no information on this subject during the relevant time periods. This raises the question of whether the vote was properly noticed and, by extension, whether it was properly taken. It also begs the question of why these two key individuals in Yale's home state (both of whom hold Yale degrees) were not informed that an issue of such importance to alumni was to be raised by the Board.

There is an important question to be answered. If the Yale Corporation did notice the May 18 vote properly to all of its members, it should be able to produce documentary evidence. I call on the Yale Corporation to do so. If it cannot, might the decision to discontinue the petitioning process be invalid? If so, the petitioning period will still be open.

Unless and until Yale produces such evidence, I will continue to move forward with collecting alumni signatures for my petition to appear on the 2022 ballot using the petition form provided by Yale on May 21. I'd encourage you to sign my petition if you're up for it. Some of you will be receiving it by mail this week, as a mailing went out on Monday morning, before the announcement. A form that you can download is also available here. Please mail it directly to me at 109 Hickory Hill Road, Wilton, CT 06897.

Even if the Board can prove that it gave proper notice of the May 18 vote, a groundswell of petition signatures from alumni who disagree with the decision will certainly send a message to the Yale Corporation and the Yale Alumni Association that this dramatic change in election policies is not going to go down without a fight.

I suggest that all Yale alums who are Power Line readers sign petitions for Lavielle, and make your displeasure known to Yale’s administration.

Lockheed Martin and the woke industrial complex

Posted: 27 May 2021 11:28 AM PDT

(Paul Mirengoff)

Christopher Rufo writes another expose of wokeism’s inroads on corporate America. This one is about Lockheed Martin.

According to documents Rufo obtained, last year Lockheed sent white male executives to a three-day diversity-training program aimed at deconstructing their "white male culture" and encouraging them to atone for their "white male privilege."

Lockheed’s executives apparently received the full, no-holds-barred White males suck treatment. This included deconstructing employees' "white male privilege" through a series of "privilege statements," then working to rebuild their identities as "agent[s] of change."

The Red Chinese are good at this sort of thing.

Among the sins the corporate executives were asked to own up to was this: "My culture teaches me to minimize the perspectives and powers of people of other races.” That’s the opposite of what is happening in classrooms all over America. The statement in question wasn’t true when my daughters attended public school in the 1990s. It wasn’t even true when I attended public school in the 1960s, although I don’t doubt that it was true in many school districts.

The executives were instructed to read statements intended to drive home the idea that white male culture is "devastating" to racial minorities and women:

The trainers had the Lockheed employees read a series of "I'm tired" statements from fictitious racial minorities and women. The statements included: "I'm tired of being Black"; "I'm tired of you making more money than me"; "I'm tired of people disparaging our campaigns (like Black Lives Matter)"; "I'm tired of Black boys/girls being murdered"; "I'm tired of people thinking they're smarter and more qualified than me"; "I'm tired of hearing about how we need a wall at the southern borders but not on the northern borders"; "I'm tired of the desire or comment to remove race—the concept that we should be 'colorblind.'"

Attributing these whiny and in some cases silly statements to “racial minorities” and women disparages members of these groups. A reasonable executive might wonder why he should hire anyone this tired and this dispirited.

Were there any fictitious statements like “I’m tired of being denied college entrance because I’m Asian” or “I’m tired of having admissions officers rate me low on ‘personal qualities’ because I’m serious”? I’m guessing there weren’t.

The trainers disparaged “white male culture” because it consists of traits such as "rugged individualism," "a can-do attitude," "hard work," "operating from principles," and "striving towards success," which are superficially positive but are "devastating" to women and minorities. But why should these positive traits be “devastating” to women and minorities? The premise seems to be that women and minorities feel threatened because they don’t possess them to the same extent as white males.

Here, again, the instructors are doing what they accuse “white male culture” of doing — teaching white males to minimize the powers of people of other races.

What would be “devastating” is a world in which corporations repudiated or downplayed the value of hard work, a can-do attitude, operating from principles, and striving towards success. If Lockheed’s executives reject these concepts, which are likely responsible for much of their personal success and the success of their company, then Lockheed’s future is bleak.

And if hucksters like the guys who reeducated Lockheed’s execs succeed in spreading their defeatist, racialist doctrines throughout our schools and our corporations, America’s future is bleak, as well.

Against “Paradigm Shifts,” and Other Shifty Jargon

Posted: 27 May 2021 09:46 AM PDT

(Steven Hayward)

In looking through a bunch of old computer hard drives for a specific piece I dimly recall (but still can’t find), I came across a cache of short (500 word max) columns I wrote back in the 1990s and distributed to a select list of readers by FAX machine if you can believe it—in other words, before the days of blogs such as Power Line. Which means none of them are available anywhere on the internet. And a few of them hold up quite well, so naturally I thought I might as well do my part to promote recycling. Here’s one from some time around 1995 or so (and extra credit for anyone who gets the “Pinkerton guards” reference):

Wanted: A New Paradigm for New Paradigms

I was long ago persuaded that my crusade against the use of the term "values" in moral debate was hopeless. It does no good to point out that you can just as easily speak of "Manson family values" (learned, no doubt, from watching Mr. Nietzsche's Neighborhood on PBS) as "traditional family values." The problem with the vocabulary of "values," as Allan Bloom so memorably pointed out in The Closing of the American Mind, is that the philosophical basis of the term "values" is the very thing that most value-speak is directed against. Values are relative, subjective, mutable, particular, and therefore susceptible of free choice. ("Where did I get my values? Why, from 'the roomful of values' at True Value hardware store, of course!") Principles, on the other hand, are based on nature and reason, and hence can make a claim for universal applicability.

Yet this is, as I say, a losing crusade. Value-speak is just too dear a value these days. But as we're leaving no windmill untilted-against, it is perhaps not too late to nip "paradigm-speak" in its infancy before it gets completely out of control, while most ordinary people still think paradigm-shift is a computer keystroke combination.

The idea of the "paradigm shift" originated with Thomas Kuhn's widely cited but less widely read book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In a nutshell, Kuhn argued that prevailing scientific theories come undone when anomalies crop up that current theory can't be modified to explain, requiring a "new paradigm," or "paradigm-shift," to displace the old theory entirely. Copernican astronomy replacing Ptolemaic astronomy is a good example of a “paradigm shift.”

This somewhat helpful intellectual model (wildly popular when I was in graduate school) was loosed upon the wider world a few years ago when the Pinkerton guards weren't watching. Now we have the new paradigm economy, the new welfare paradigm, the new paradigm for NFL offenses, the new paradigm for this and that and everything else. (You know who you are out there.)

It is not just that "paradigm" is an overfancy word for "model" that has my BS detector on alert (though I often advise people to take their airplane sick bags with them to the American Political Science Association meetings, where—I'm not making this up—I once heard a professor remark to another that "I find his paradigm to be puerile"). The deeper reason to wonder whether paradigm-speak isn't more than a little shifty, especially when applied to the social sciences, is the fact that it looks so much like one of those self-contradictory Hegelian paradoxes, i.e., all paradigms are subject to shifts, except this one, which explains all the others. Call it the paradigm to end all paradigms. Intellectual habits like this always buy trouble over time, first by indulging intellectual vanity by puffing up ideas with the veneer of jargon, and more importantly by conceding the historicist premise that all ideas/paradigms, like all "values," are more or less arbitrary products of their time.

So next time some itinerant smart-aleck taunts you with "Buddy, can you paradigm?", send him packing to the nearest shelter for homeless intellectuals, aka, the Ivory Tower.

PAUL ADDS: Those who didn’t get the Pinkerton reference can find it here. Richard Darman ridiculed James Pinkerton’s “new paradigm” by quipping:

The effete might debate whether the new paradigm is, perhaps, enigmatically paradigmatic. At the same time, in the real world, others might simply dismiss it by picking up the refrain, “Hey, brother, can you paradigm.”

Big Tech as Big Brother

Posted: 27 May 2021 09:35 AM PDT

(Paul Mirengoff)

To follow up on Scott’s post below, let’s remember that Facebook censored all talk about the Wuhan coronavirus originating in a Chinese lab. There was always legitimate reason to believe that the virus might have originated there. But only now that the evidence establishes a strong likelihood of this will Facebook finally permit the matter to be discussed on its platform.

It’s sickening that Facebook wouldn’t permit discussion of a legitimate and important question. It’s all the more disgusting that Facebook’s censorship was in service of the totalitarian rulers of China.

The notion that it was racist to consider whether the virus originated in a Chinese lab, as opposed to a Chinese market, is laughable. It’s China, either way.

The difference is that in one scenario it’s Chinese merchants (I guess) and in the other it’s the Chinese government (though not acting with the intent of creating a pandemic).

So Facebook wasn’t protecting the Chinese people or the racial group to which they belong. Facebook was protecting the Chinese government.

Readers can decide for themselves why Facebook would act to protect that regime.

I’ve never participated in Facebook. Friends and family members who do seem to find it worthwhile.

But people with a decent regard for free speech and an understanding of what China is all about might ask themselves whether the personal enjoyment they may derive from Facebook is sufficient reason to remain associated with it.

CRB: From Big Tech to Big Brother

Posted: 27 May 2021 04:44 AM PDT

(Scott Johnson)

I have devoted my “Shapes of Things” series to the problem of Big Tech and free speech and have used an avatar of Big Brother to anchor the series (as I do on the home page for this post). Seeking to deepen our view of the problem that the series illustrates, I have chosen to preview Daniel Oliver’s essay “From Big Tech to Big Brother” from the new (Spring) issue of the Claremont Review of Books.

Among other things, Oliver is former chairman of Federal Trade Commission (1986-1990). He is familiar with the the virtues of competition and the depredations of monopoly power. In his essay Oliver reviews and proposes to resolve the Big Tech/Free Speech problem: “We need either new legislation requiring the breakup of the [Big Tech] companies, or a law prohibiting them from engaging in viewpoint discrimination, or both.” Although the conclusion of Oliver’s analysis is unsurprising, it has the advantage of being true.
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