MM#286--Unlike The OSU Football Program, The University Has Bigger Problems

Welcome to the Theory to Action podcast, where we examine the timeless treasures of wisdom from the great books in less time, to help you take action immediately and ultimately to create and lead a flourishing life. Now here's your host, david Kaiser.

Hello, I am David and welcome back to another Mojo Minute. We are recording this on the Sunday after the Saturday of the Ohio State Michigan game, and the week after the Ohio State Michigan football game in which the Ohio State Buckeyes lose is always like the November skies that begin to show up here in the Buckeye State. They are always gray, they are always dull. There's no more colors because the leaves have all fallen off and you're just trying to put one foot in front of the other to fulfill your obligations in life. So it is when our beloved Ohio State football team falls to that dreaded team up north, for whatever reason, and as they say down on the farm, it'll just stick in your crawl. Well, not to pile on to the Ohio State University's problems per se, but I read just two weeks ago in a wonderfully researched and well written op-ed by John Saylor about these new diversity, equity and inclusion. Dei is what they're calling it these days diversity, equity and inclusion roles for the Ohio State University. These roles are for hiring university professors at the Ohio State University and they sound quite radical. Nothing at all about merit or the quality of the applicants, but about the applicants' views on DEI. Let's grab some quotes so I can share with you more details about what's taking place. A search committee seeking a professor of military history rejected one applicant quote because his diversity statement demonstrated poor understanding of diversity and inclusion issues. Another committee noted that an applicant to be a professor of nuclear physics could understand the plight of minorities in academia because he was married to a quote immigrant in Texas in the age of Trump. These examples come from more than 800 pages of diversity faculty recruitment reports at the Ohio State University which I obtained through public records request. Until recently, ohio State's College of Arts and Sciences required every search committee to create such a report, which had to be approved by various deans before finalists for a job were interviewed In February of 2021. Then President Christina Johnson launched an initiative to hire 50 professors whose work focused on race and social equity and 100 unrepresented in 100 unrepresented, and buy up hires that acronym BIPOC. I'm sorry, bipoc hires that acronym stands for Black, indigenous and People of Color. These reports show what higher education's outsized investment in diversity, equity, inclusion looks like in practice In Ohio State's sacrifice both academic freedom and scholarly excellence with the sake of a narrowly construed vision of diversity. So there you go, just so we can be clear. The Ohio State University is using other criteria to hire their professors, other than who is best for the job. Merit or who is best qualified doesn't seem to take a priority now, because diversity, equity, inclusion does. Let's go back for some more details of this well-written and well researched article. Each report required search committees to describe how their proposed finalists would quote amplify the values of diversity, inclusion and innovation. Some reports were dutiful and bureaucratic, others exuded enthusiasm. All were revealing. Racial diversity was touted as a tool to achieve viewpoint diversity. But viewpoint conformity often served as a tool to meet de facto quotas. One report said a candidate would be quote greatly enhanced or would greatly enhance our engagement with queer theory outside of the Western epistemological approaches, which would greatly support us both in recruitment and retention of diverse graduate populations. Other committees valued political ideology as an end in and of itself In a search for a professor of chemistry. The report notes that the one candidate's experiences quote as a queer neuro divergent Latinx woman in STEM has provided her with an important motivation to expand DEI efforts simply beyond representation and instead towards social justice and the quote. Another report concedes that quote as a white male. One proposed finalist quote does not outwardly present as a diversity candidate. In his defense it notes that he recently published a critical race theory and these reports required search committees to describe how they evaluated diversity statements. The committee cited those statements as the sole reason for eliminating certain candidates in the fields as varied as aquatic ecology, lighting design, military history and music theory. So again, those quotes come to us from a wonderful piece op-ed written in the Wall Street Journal. Its title is Inside Ohio State's DEI Factory and again the author is Mr John Saylor, Director of University Policy at the National Association of Scholars. So, in Socratic style, as we are want to do here at the Mojo Academy, let's begin to ask some questions. Should or how should universities seek out and hire applicants for various professorships? Shouldn't we start with merit as the most effective method for hiring university professors? Shouldn't we consider professional competence and scholarly merit, rather than personal beliefs and affiliations, to be the best way to choose professorships? And why are the tangible qualifications such as degrees, publications, teaching experience and research contributions discounted now in favor of diversity, equity and inclusion? And to help us answer these questions and many more that we have about where our culture is and where it is going, especially at the Ohio State University. We're going to pull a book from our virtual bookshelf titled A Nation of Victims Identity Politics, the Death of Merit and the Path Back to Excellence by Vivek Rava Swami. Now, you might know, vivek is running for the GOP nomination. I'm not a fan of Vivek being the GOP leader for president for a host of reasons, but for now we will focus on this book because it is quite insightful and I think there is quote a lot of merit about the book and his ideas. So we're not going to discount them. We're actually going to look at them, not because Vivek is Indian, but because the ideas have merit. That's a revolutionary idea in the 21st century. So let's go to the book for our first polka. My mood was dour when I first wrote this book. Among other reflections in these pages, I reviewed the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage. I suggested Taiwan may be our modern day Sicily. I asked the question are we Rome? I concluded we should be so lucky. Rome lasted thousands of years and I worry we might actually be Carthage. The path to conviction runs through doubt. The process of writing the Nation of Victims was my journey through doubt about America. We began as a nation founded on irreverence, curiosity, exploration, open debate. We were the explorers, the pioneers, the irreverent, the unafraid. Our forefathers chose victory in the face of insurmountable hardship. Now we choose victimhood in the face of ease of comfort. But today I feel differently. Since writing this book, I traveled the nation. I decided to start actually solving the problems I identified in this book and its prequel, woke Inc. I started by founding the company Strive, an asset management firm in my home state of Ohio, to represent the voices of citizens in the economy by guiding companies to focus on excellence over politics. My wife Approva and I welcome our second son into this world and, as my first son turned three, our family embarked on a wild presidential campaign that, as of this writing, is still in its earliest stages. By the time you read this, we will better know what its destiny will be. But as I transversed the terrain of doubt, I am now on the doorstep of conviction. If there's one thing that both major political parties agree on today, it's that we are a nation in an inevitable national decline. Yes, we are. We can all agree that our nation is on a major decline, a decline of steep proportions, and one of the problems in this so-called decline is this DEA, dea stuff, the diversity, equity, inclusion stuff coming from our major universities and corporations, because it is not putting the best of people in the right positions, and Vivek correctly nails this. Let's go back to the book. The modern left fills that void with its own vision of identity. Race, gender, sexuality, climate change, victimhood. Culture is the invisible line that ties these identities together. Right now, many conservatives define themselves in opposition to these identities, as though we are victimized by it ourselves. But there is a better way Victimhood is a choice. Hume's famous thought experiment was about his so-called missing shade of blue. If he were alive today and uncancelled, he would challenge Republicans to find our missing shade of red. The individual, the family, the nation, god these are the pillars on which the new dream will be built. And later on is where Vivek ties our American culture to what we are seeing exactly happen at the Ohio State University in its hiring practices. Just two more quotes. That's what George Orwell had in mind when he said the best way to control minds in society was to control its language first. American culture seems to be overtaken by a battle using language to exert social control. The Orwellian use of language surfaces in concepts such as doublespeak, where a regime describes an idea as its opposite to legitimize it in the eyes of the populace. War is peace, conformity is diversity, equity is equality, exclusion is inclusion. By calling a negative concept the name of its opposite, this doublespeak uses the positive connotations of the one to gradually legitimize the other. Exactly, vivek nails that victimhood mentality and that notion of doublespeak that we're seeing happen all over our country, especially most aggressively in the last five years, and because it's such an overwhelming part of our culture, there's a lot of people that are becoming distraught, not seeing a way out of this dramatic, major decline. One more final quote from Vivek, because I think it's very important and it gives us, gives us, some hope. But I believe that Martin Luther King Jr was right that, though the arc of the moral universe is long, it bends towards justice. America's arc bends towards justice too. It has been bent towards justice, and now has been a long road, one that King helped us travel. I know the journey is not done, but we were headed in the right direction, we were making progress, and the right way to make further progress as a country isn't to eradicate every last remnant of racism at all cost, constructing ever more elaborate linguistic purification rituals to do so. Rather, we should allow those final remnants to gradually a trophy into irrelevance. By contrast, the anti-racist movement in America instead throws kerosene on those final burning embers of racism, inflaming that very problem that is that it is supposedly addressing. Anti-racism often speaks racism into existence by demanding that we view and treat people differently on the basis of their skin killer. Yes, there are moments in American history when racism was so rampant that it demanded a comprehensive societal response, but that moment has passed. Now, trying to mount a comprehensive societal response against a problem that was already diminishing at present raises new cost of its own. Even worse, it risks exacerbating the very problem it purports to solve, much like an overactive immune system fighting a virus that has already been cleared, only to kill the host in the process. Amen, well said and well written of a VEC Great diagnosis. Now, getting back to the Ohio State University, when the Buckeye State's flagship university is invested heavily in DEI, with an emphasis on faculty hiring, it's like choosing the Buckeye quarterback based on race and not merit. No true Buckeye fan would want that. They would want the best person for the job, without any discrimination. That's what Martin Luther King would want. Now, in fairness to the Ohio State University, we do have a quote from a university spokesman cited in the article. Let's grab that. Seems they may be understand that they have stepped in it, but let me get that quote for you. And here we go. In his email, the Ohio State spokesman said that the colleges in the system now use quote standardize evaluation tools to assess job candidates without regard to demographic categories like race, sex and ethnicity. That's what the law requires even more clearly Now, since the Supreme Court decided students for fair admissions versus Harvard in June. So in today's mojo minute, to keep the sports analogy alive, because this is, after all, the week after another defeat against the team up north, the third straight defeat, and again that sticks in our crawl. But instead of choosing which race, our Ohio State quarterback should be like the H-1, the Ohio State quarterback should be like the HR department was doing at the Ohio State University, perhaps in keeping with Martin Luther King Jr we should choose the very best quarterback on the team, no matter what his race is, and he should in fact lead us to victory, a blind victory that all of us can be proud of. We hope Ohio State's football coaches are not listening to Ohio State's HR department.