Institutionalizing Bias

I'm participating in a winter-term project at Williams, where the EphBlog is analyzing the college's new"diversity" initiative. A good hint of the initiative's direction comes in the identity of the sole consultant brought aboard to discuss"faculty issues." Evelyn Hu-DeHart was chair of the ethnic studies department at Colorado when Ward Churchill was hired, has described Churchill as"her hire," and has resolutely defended the propriety of Churchill's hiring, tenure, and promotion. That alone would seem to disqualify her from giving guidance to another institution on personnel matters, and it's little surprise that the specific policies that Hu-DeHart recommends are exactly those followed by Colorado in the early 1990s--the policies that led to Churchill's hiring, tenure, and promotion. To those who raise the possibility of a lack of ideological balance in ethnic studies departments, Hu-DeHart plays the race card: critics should look into the ojectivity of “all these dominant white professors [who] are studying European history or the [history of] white Europe.” How reassuring.

Meanwhile, FIRE continues to fight a strange policy at the University of Wisconsin, where a committee has recommended upholding the policies of two UW branches that ban RAs from leading Bible studies on their own time and in their own dormitories. Quite apart from the obvious free speech issues related to the ban, you have to wonder about the mindset of the Student Life administrators who imposed the ban in the first place. There can't be more than a handful of RAs who even want to lead Bible study sessions. Any reasonable administrator would have simply done nothing, rather than provoke a constitutional fight.