E-Pluribus | May 1, 2023

Why "equity" drags everyone down; the dangers of AI (no, not artificial intelligence -- administrative interference); protecting free speech isn't enough.

A round-up of the latest and best writing and musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:

Jack Miller: Equity and the Race to the Bottom

Just before the 2020 elections, now-vice president Kamala Harris tweeted, “There’s a big difference between equality and equity.” Jack Miller at Real Clear Education agrees, but not in a good way. Harris’s tweet was accompanied by an animated short that concluded equity means “we all end up at the same place.” Miller writes that, unfortunately, that place is the bottom.

Rather than the Founders’ vision of equal opportunity for all, the use of the word “equity” today denotes equal outcomes for all. The implementation of this “equity agenda,” however well-intentioned, will lead to terrible consequences. 

One of the prophets who warned us about the dangers of this understanding of equity was the great twentieth-century novelist Kurt Vonnegut. In his 1961 short story, “Harrison Bergeron,” Vonnegut imagined a society with perfect equity. “Nobody was smarter than anybody else,” the narrator says. “Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else.” 

[ . . . ]

The push for “equity” in American society today resembles Vonnegut’s dystopia – but nowhere more dangerously than in the education system. 

At the university level, DEI bureaucracies have grown to absurd sizes, and they dominate much of campus life. A 2021 Heritage Foundation report found 163 DEI personnel at the University of Michigan, 94 at the University of Virginia and 94 at Ohio State, 86 at the University of California Berkeley, 83 at Virginia Tech, and 80 at Stanford (where Associate Dean for DEI Tirien Steinbach was recently put on leave for galvanizing an unruly protest by confronting a U.S. circuit judge who was trying to deliver a campus lecture). 

Read the whole thing.

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Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.: Forget AI: The Administrative State Is a Bad Algorithm

The latest hair-on-fire panic sucking up all the oxygen in the room is the potential danger of artificial intelligence (AI). While there are many questions and concerns about this emerging technology, Holman Jenkins says our present-day administrative state is the real clear and present danger.

Microsoft’s shares shot up $25 this week on word that the U.K.’s competition regulator intends to block its acquisition of game maker Activision.

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Activision owns the popular “Call of Duty” franchise. British regulators say if Microsoft were to gain this prize, it would monopolize the future of online gaming. U.S. regulators oppose the deal too but say instead Microsoft would monopolize the existing console market. Two antitrust authorities, two different conclusions about the threat. But both are sure it’s a threat. This tells you something about antitrust—it has become an intellectual farce. In fact, neither charge is plausible. In the cloud-based future, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Amazon, Alibaba, Baidu, ByteDance, etc., will hardly surrender to an imaginary Microsoft steamroller. To monopolize today’s console market, Microsoft would somehow have to overcome Sony’s 85% market share.

But antitrust enforcers get no attention if they don’t block deals—no press, no prestige, no bump in resources. Their leaders don’t get their tickets punched. Parents, let your children know: When opportunists smell advantage, opportunists will be seen diving in head first. After the Trump administration’s AT&T-Time Warner folly, I speculated trustbusting would hit rock bottom when Lina Khan’s Federal Trade Commission attacked Microsoft-Activision purely on big-tech animus. Rock bottom turns out to be deeper than I suspected. Ms. Khan has been caught playing footsie with the Brits to sandbag two U.S. companies because she feared U.S. law might not let her sandbag them.

Welcome to the natural end state of bureaucratic evolution, from lawful to lawless.

Read it all here.

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Robert Weissberg: Protecting Free Speech is the Wrong Strategy

Robert Weissberg is not opposed to free speech, but at Minding the Campus, he argues that free speech is not an end unto itself. Weissberg says that on campuses today, “the battle is about evidence and logic, what is true and what is false[.]”

Now for the bad news: this academic cavalry will be as effective at beating back the barbarians as would a horse cavalry in today’s Ukraine. To be blunt, defending free speech is the wrong tactic in current campus battles—it will misdirect resources and, thus, fail. The parallel might be the British horse-mounted lancers who, in splendid formation, charged German machine gunners in WWI. They were surely inspiring, but instantly doomed. This is how we are about to engage the enemy.

Placing free speech at the center of efforts to eliminate campus diversity, inclusion, and equity (DIE), speech codes, mandatory sensitivity training, de-platforming, micro-aggressions, and all the rest is predictable. Nobody feels safe from the mob’s ire, and scarcely any administrator will risk his cushy job to quell its fury.  So, with terror in the air, why not rally around free speech?

Unfortunately, what makes the free speech defense so alluring is its ease of embrace, not its effectiveness. Endorsing an unfettered soapbox for everyone helps professors flaunt their anti-woke credentials and erudition at zero political or personal cost.

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Celebrating intellectual openness in and of itself side-steps the quackery currently running rampant on campus. Today’s war is about defeating dishonesty, not intellectual openness per se. You do not refute crackpot ideas about sex as a social construct, for example, by calling for “more dialogue.” You eliminate it by showing how it is factually incorrect. It is this unwillingness to confront the quackery for what it is, rather than make vague speeches about free expression, that dooms the campus free speech crusade.

Letting a thousand flowers bloom on today’s campuses will invariably bring a cacophony of jabbering nonsense, not truth. Pushed to its limits, the free speech defense is quackery-friendly, an open invitation for cranks to demand a place at the table for phrenology, witchcraft, astrology, and countless other subjects that have no place in academia. Just wait until the religious fanatics and conspiracy nuts show up and demand a hearing. This is viewpoint diversity on steroids.

Read it all.

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Around Twitter

The Institute for Free Speech and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression are helping to defend the Moms for Liberty group whose members have repeatedly been silenced in school board meetings in the name of “decorum”:

Author Mark Goldblatt was a recent guest of Glenn Loury. Goldblatt discusses the impact of allowing “sentiment” to replace evidence and logic. (Click to watch excerpt.)

And finally, if, as Chelsea Clinton says, questioning the age-appropriateness of books amounts to "attempted book bans," then per the linked article, the author of Gender Queer (the book pictured in Clinton’s tweet) suggests a book ban of . . . Gender Queer might be in order: