Perseus and Andromeda, ca 1555. Creator: Titian (1488-1576).
This dialogue occurs between two seasoned academics, Anthony Moliere and Ursula Pastors, at the start of term. Both are well-respected researchers that have been hired by a new university to bolster the institution’s credibility. What is not known to the university is that Anthony and Ursula are both vampires. They have been feeding off graduate students for blood since the mid-seventeenth century. It used to be the case that people never really noticed the odd grad student or two go missing from an international academic conference. Now the university administration has “Highly Qualified Personnel” as a performance metric for professors. As such, graduate students are tracked and need to be accounted for.
Ursula: Do you think we’ll be happy here?
Anthony: Happy? What’s happiness got to do with it? We’ve been to so many universities at this point, how will this one be any different?
Ursula: But aren’t you looking forward to the start of term?
Anthony: Yes. The students are what prevent us from drying up.
Ursula: Not only that, you have to admit they’re fun to be around, so wide-eyed and eager to learn.
Anthony: Which century are you referring to, Ursula? Sure, there was a time when research and scholarship meant something — now all that happens is students come to campus to get infected with bad ideas and then sent into the world to corrupt it.
Ursula: Really, Anthony, that’s over dramatic even for you.
Anthony: Is it, Ursula? This afternoon I got an email from the Office of Research Services calling for proposals for ‘Womxn’ research.
Ursula: What’s that?
Anthony: It’s the PC inclusive term for persons that self-identify as trans or non-binary. This has nothing to do with research, you just have to claim you have womxn status and you’ll be practically thrown grant money. It’s complete nonsense. Diversity, Inclusion and Equity. Is it any wonder that the acronym spells D.I.E?
Ursula: Okay, I get you don’t like the trend, but that doesn’t mean it’s not valid. It’s important to have a diversity of voices in academia.
Anthony: There is a medical term for a diversity of voices in your head. That term is schizophrenia. If you want to write about your ‘lived experience,’ write a goddamn journal. If you want to see yourself reflected in something, buy a mirror. Who cares how many of the faculty identify as black lesbians? Or if you’re non-binary? How many acronyms do you actually need to express your sexual orientation anyway?
Ursula: But don’t you think it’s better to create safe spaces on campus, where students are free to express themselves? It wasn’t that long ago that you could go to prison for being gay. We’ve become more open, more tolerant, more accepting of differences and that’s a good thing.
Anthony: There is a difference between being open-minded and empty-headed, you can’t just wave the rainbow flag around, say ‘love is love is love’ and expect everything to be OK; it won’t be. Students graduate having less idea of who or what they are, what to aim for or to aspire to be like. The creation of ‘safe spaces’ is having the paradoxical effect of making everyone overly sensitive and more fragile.
Ursula: Actually, we shouldn’t forget members of the trans community, they have their own flag, you know.
Anthony: Don’t get me started with all that gender fluid nonsense — there are two biological sexes, male and female; why should we change everything for a fraction of the population that doesn’t feel comfortable with what they are?
Ursula: It’s more complicated than that, what we regard as male and female are just social constructs. They don’t define everyone’s experience and they reinforce the dominant hegemony, one where white men are on top and the contributions of others are not valued.
Anthony: I was wondering when you were going to bring race into the mix — white privilege, isn’t it?
Ursula: What’s wrong with drawing attention to the fact that white people have it easier than other races because of historical advantages and slavery?
Anthony: What’s wrong with it is that it’s wrong! It’s wrong to reduce people to their racial identities — that’s racist! I have no problem discus-sing specific individuals that happen to be white and also are privileged. Justin Trudeau is a case in point. There is no way that Trudeau would have become prime minister if it were not for his family name or connections. It doesn’t matter if you’re liberal or conservative, there would be white people on both sides of the political spectrum that would agree with that statement. People are more than their skin tone or ethnicity. Somehow we seem to have forgotten this. Why do we think it’s OK to lower university admission standards to accommodate racial groups with perceived historical disadvantages?
Ursula: Well, isn’t it good to have a diverse campus body?
Anthony: Diversity of thought and ideas, yes, diversity of races and genders, hell no. What’s with diversity anyway? It’s a unicorn; no one has ever actually seen it, but everyone believes that it will somehow make everything OK. ‘Diversity is our strength,’ and so on. But no one bothers to ask for evidence that diversity actually improves anything. Diversity isn’t a place you arrive at, it’s a set of circumstances that we have to figure out how to overcome. Lowering admission standards and setting quotas based on current demographic trends will only serve to breed resentment, envy and distrust of institutions, academic or otherwise. No good can come of this.
Ursula: But what about Black Lives Matter?
Anthony: What about black lives? How are they any more or less important than anyone else? Either all lives matter or no individual life does.
Ursula: But you have to admit black people are more likely to be profiled by the police and sent to jail; they’ve suffered years of historical oppression and systemic racism.
Anthony: Are you seriously claiming that racism toward black people is worse now than it was fifty years ago? That entire race could easily be lifted out of their socio-economic status in one or two generations if black people married before they carried. You can’t tell me that the system creates baby daddies and baby mamas. If Snoop Dogg and Tupac are your role models, what do you expect to happen? You can’t tell me that the police are profiling seven-year-old black children because they might commit a crime sometime in the future. When you don’t take responsibility, someone else will get power over you. That’s not systemic anything, that’s just reality. You can struggle against it, you can pretend it doesn’t exist, you can make excuses, but nothing will change unless you change first.
Ursula: So you don’t think that certain races have advantages over others? You have to admit that it’s easier for a white person to get ahead.
Anthony: So you’re back to white privilege again. This is Canada — if you live in Canada, you have privilege over someone living in Yemen! No one is telling you to cover up if you’re a woman and that you can’t sleep with a man if you’re a man. You have those rights and freedoms, what people forget however is that freedom comes with the responsibility to make personal choices that are aligned with human flourishing. It doesn’t mean you’re entitled to do whatever you want whenever you want and everyone else just has to put up with it. Any social arrangement will disadvantage someone. Some people are smarter and work harder than others. Isn’t society better off if those talented people occupy positions of power and authority in our society? Are some people in positions of power racist, homophobic or transphobic? Yes. Do some of those people happen to be white? Sure, but that doesn’t mean that racism is systemic. Cream rises to the top
Ursula: I think you’re revealing your unconscious bias. Why would you use the metaphor of cream? You make an implicit association that white is better than others; why else would you refer to cream, that’s precisely the kind of thinking that needs to be challenged.
Anthony: You’ve got to be kidding Ursula, you’re playing CRT semantics now. The pandemic in academia right now is critical race theory with its overtly racist invective masquerading as virtue. Students have become so terrified of offending anyone they don’t say anything important at all. They can’t defend their ideas because they’re too busy coddling themselves and each other. But the problem is the truth is necessarily offensive to those that lie and reality tends to be a problem for those that are delusional.
Ursula: I don’t think you’re being fair. Some people have it hard through no fault of their own. You can’t expect equality of opportunity when the odds are stacked against you. You have to admit that the institutions benefit the dominant classes — individuals and groups that have the resources and networks to bias the outcomes in their favour. What’s wrong with pointing that out? Assisting people at the bottom. The people on top aren’t necessarily going to do that of their own accord. Don’t you want to live in a world that values equity?
Anthony: No. I want to live in a world that values merit. I don’t really care what race or gender you are as long as you’re competent. Is that really too much to ask?
Ursula: The problem with the current merit paradigm is that it rein-forces the dominant hegemony. Only people that are already at the top will meet the standard. The ladder is kicked away for everyone else.
Anthony: So what, you have a problem with standards now? News flash: all systems of testing are biased! An exam written in an English-speaking country will generally be written in English unless that exam is testing another language. That automatically will put Chinese students at a disadvantage. It would simply be unworkable to have every student write a test in their preferred language.
Ursula: I don’t have a problem with standards, just the ones that result in inequality.
Anthony: How can you expect equality of outcome when intelligence is unevenly distributed and no one starts life at exactly the same point as everyone else? It doesn’t make a difference whether you’re talking about race or gender or any other social grouping for that matter. There will always be smart and not so smart people. People born into good and bad families or favourable or unfavourable circumstances. The problem isn’t so much realizing some cosmetic version of diversity, but rather overcoming the challenges brought about by people having varying levels of ability, motivations and relative positions.
Ursula: So what you’re saying is that some people are good for nothing.
Anthony: No, I am saying that there are some people who are not good for anything that anyone would be willing to pay them for. That’s not the same as nothing. Your problem is that you only want to look at the people on the top and you ask, why more people that are ‘diverse’ aren’t getting there. You seem to ignore that there are a lot of people at the bottom that no one seems to care who they are.
Ursula: I don’t think you’re getting my point, it’s more about celebrating the abilities and talents of others. Leveling the playing field so to speak.
Anthony: I think we’re not watching the same game, Ursula. Life isn’t an Olympic sport where you can control all the variables and let the best player win. The field of life is seldom ever a level playing field. Where you are born is as much to do with chance than anything else. Since people are endowed with varying levels of ability and intellect, the equality that you are advancing is an abstraction based on your own personal bias on what is ‘right or fair.’
Ursula: Actually, we decide as a society what is right or fair. That is implemented through public policy.
Anthony: Dress it up however you like. Public policy is by definition teleological. The telos is the end point or objective to be implemented. In this case, it is some vague notion of justice that is putatively expedited via social reform. Reformer types make the mistake that objects of reform are resources — human resources. The problem with that is that people are not lumber. They have hopes and aspirations, goals and motivations. They won’t necessarily respond to a government mandate that limits their self-interest for the greater good without a compelling moral justification. A quota of diverse people in positions of power is not a compelling moral justification.
Ursula: So what is?
Anthony: Competence, for a start. People should be competent in the work that they do. It doesn’t matter where they’re from. Do some people get breaks? Do some people have it easier than others? Undoubtedly. But the answer isn’t starting again and redistributing everything equally. Lowering admission standards hurts everyone, particularly the people you are supposedly trying to help. What we need to be doing is improving one student at a time so they can meet the required standard and be recognized for that. What we are doing now is simply qualifying a person’s accomplishment in ways that are based on preconceived notions of the barriers they face based on an arbitrarily assigned social group. That’s just bigotry disguised as justice — social justice.
Ursula: So you don’t believe in social justice, then.
Anthony: No. There’s justice or injustice. Once you start qualifying justice, you introduce arbitrariness and ambiguity that didn’t exist before. You can no longer rely on the rule of law because there are no rules — or at least no rules you can predictably rely on. You can’t arrive at some socialist utopia just by slapping the word social on the word justice. All you are doing is making things confusing. But that is the point. If things are confusing, someone needs to be there to clean up the mess that gets created. Biasing an outcome without understanding the specific facts is bound to create problems. Social justice is simply prejudice, by another name.
Ursula: So you’re saying people should not fight oppression? The way it is, is just the way it is and we should just all accept it, no matter how unfair the outcomes are? How are we supposed to effect social reform without addressing the systemic issues at the institutional level?
Anthony: Well that depends on how you define institutions and what you think they are for. The best definition of an institution that I’ve ever seen was from JR Commons. He defined institutions as ‘collective action in control, liberation and expansion of individual action.’
Ursula: Nobody cares what Commons had to say, he was a racist. He wrote Immigrants and Races in America which conveniently put Whites on top and Blacks on the bottom.
Anthony: Even if JR Commons was a racist, does it make his contribution to the study of institutions any less valid? This is my problem, everyone thinks that they can rewrite history and put themselves on the right side of it. If you said the wrong thing at some point, then you’re cancelled and erased. Nothing you ever said was valuable. History is not inscrutable, but it’s not malleable either. This is how ethics becomes relative. This is how we lose our way. We end up pulling down statutes instead of learning from the accomplishments and the failings of the people that they memorialize. No one is perfect.
Ursula: Get over yourself, everything looks better when you’re on top. It’s easy to say, ‘well that’s just the way it is’ when you’re sitting on top. The view looks very different from the bottom.
Anthony: If you were not a vampire, I would almost believe that you are sincere in your argument.
Ursula: [laughing] Yes, I can’t deny the grads we had lately are a lot less salty…Let’s get going. I have an orientation event this afternoon.
