From a City Journal article by MacDonald:
"The prevalence of systemic racism in the U.S. is far from an established fact, however. Other credible explanations exist for ongoing racial disparities, including family structure, cultural attitudes, and individual behavior. To declare from the highest reaches of the academy that racism is the defining and all-explaining feature of American society is to adopt a political position, not to state a scientific truth. That political position entails a host of unspoken assumptions about the world, themselves open to debate. In aligning itself with one particular political position, the academy is betraying what Max Weber saw as its mission: to stay assiduously neutral and to teach “inconvenient” facts about the world that undercut received assumptions across the political spectrum. Political action was antithetical to scholarship, Weber argued.
Even before the Floyd riots, universities were notoriously hostile to points of view that challenged the already-powerful campus orthodoxies. Students and professors erupted in sometimes violent rage toward outside speakers who brought nonconforming ideas onto campus. Those few courageous faculty members who dared dispute the racism thesis found themselves ostracized. University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax was denounced by her dean, the aforementioned Ted Ruger, and removed from teaching first-year classes, for mentioning the academic skills gap. Other dissidents from the diversity ideology, like Evergreen State College’s Bret Weinstein, were driven out of their jobs. Most freethinking students or professors simply kept quiet, terrified lest they become the next pariah.
Anyone who thought that the intellectual conformity on college campuses could not get worse lacked imagination. In the post-Floyd era, any prospective Ph.D. proposing to study the behavioral components of inequality will find it almost impossible to be admitted to a graduate program, much less to find a job afterward. A few reckless undergraduates may still push back against the received wisdom, but their numbers will shrink, and the social and professional toll from their obstinacy will be higher. Candidates for the federal bench during the Trump administration have already seen their nominations torpedoed because of undergraduate journalism mocking the pieties of multiculturalism. In the future, the costs of such heresies will rise, and the inhibitions on free thought and speech will grow more crushing.
Each diversity initiative, whether in academia or in business, requires pretending that it was not preceded by a long line of identical efforts. Instead, every new diversity campaign starts with penance for the alleged bias that leads schools and corporations to overlook some vast untapped pool of competitively qualified blacks and Hispanics. Now, the pressure to admit and hire on the basis of race will redouble in force, elevating even less skilled candidates to positions of power throughout society. American institutions will pay the price.
What if the racism explanation for ongoing disparities is wrong, however? What if racial economic and incarceration gaps cannot close without addressing personal responsibility and family culture—without a sea change in the attitudes that many inner-city black children bring with them to school regarding studying, paying attention in class, and respecting teachers, for example? What if the breakdown of the family is producing children with too little capacity to control their impulses and defer gratification? With the university now explicitly committed to the racism explanation for all self-defeating choices, there will be little chance of changing course and addressing the behaviors that lie behind many racial disparities. The persistence of inequality will then produce a new round of quotas and self-incrimination—as well as more violence and anger. And the graduates of these ideologically monolithic universities will proceed further to dismantle our civilization in conformity to a lie."
