Christopher Dummitt: Racism accusations can’t stifle the truth about diversity

Of note (and having read both the Usher and Kaufmann pieces, Kaufmann did control for career length and discipline:

…To be fair, there are real criticisms to make of the report. Usher’s point that the MLI press release foregrounds numbers more dramatic than what the full report supports is a legitimate complaint about framing. But it is definitely not evidence of “the worst piece of social science” anyone has ever seen.

What the MLI report is doing is useful: engaging openly with a debate that much of higher education won’t admit is a debate at all. My guess is plenty of academics privately entertain the possibility that equity doesn’t automatically produce excellence, but they don’t publicly say so because it means risking your reputation. As a result, the only people left asking are on the political right, who can then be dismissed, as Usher shows, simply with an accusation of racism, a charge that delegitimizes the question before it’s even considered.

Usher did exactly this to another MLI report four years ago, one I co-authored with Zachary Patterson of Concordia University. That report surveyed ideological conformity and self-censorship in Canadian universities, including whether professors believed diversity should be valued over their discipline’s core intellectual standards.

For asking that question, we too were accused of racism. Usher published a critique alleging assorted methodological problems; when we replied, showing he’d missed the sections addressing every one of them, he simply didn’t respond.

In the case of my report, and again now with MLI’s “The Equity Excellence Trade-Off,” Usher didn’t fact-check the report. He fact-checked the room — and the room agreed with him. Why wouldn’t it, given what we know, on average, about the ideological make-up of the profession?”

Source: Christopher Dummitt: Racism accusations can’t stifle the truth about diversity