“Harvard is quietly asking donors for $10 million gifts to establish new endowed professorships in a sweeping bid to reshape its faculty under the banner of ‘viewpoint diversity,’ according to two people familiar with the initiative.” — The Harvard Crimson
Richard Amesbury at McSweeney’s:
On behalf of the university, I’m pleased to announce our earnest and long-overdue commitment to diversifying our faculty. No, not the reckoning we broadcast to great fanfare in 2020, which we have repudiated in exchange for federal funding. No, I refer instead to “viewpoint” diversity.
For too long, the university has ignored the wisdom of the donor class and hired based on academic excellence. Regrettably, this has led to the underrepresentation of discredited viewpoints in elite higher education. Many ideas that enjoy enormous popularity among billionaires—cryogenic immortality, disregard for punctuation, the Antichrist—have scandalously been excluded from our labs and classrooms.
No longer. We solemnly vow to dismantle systemic barriers to inclusion—such as shared governance, apolitical job searches, and the discriminatory practice of vetting ideas—and to ensure that all viewpoints, however dubious, enjoy equal footing in the academy.
More here.
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