Affirmative Action’s Perpetual Hoax Machine

By Nicholas Stix

Back on November 25, 2007, economist George Borjas asked what caused the Duke Rape Hoax. I answered him at the time at his blog, but forgot to post my answer here until now.

For my exposés on the hoax, see:

“N.Y. Times to Duke Rape Hoax Victims: Drop Dead”, and

“Nicholas Stix’ Absolutely Definitive Account of the Incredible Disappearing Duke Rape Hoax” (it was my VDARE editor, Peter Brimelow, who honored me by giving my exposé that title).

Postscript, sunday, november 5, 2023: As part of his campaign to purge me from the world of journalism, Peter Brimelow has killed the links to my most important works (most of those works still exist at VDARE; however, if one hits the links to them that were up for many years, one will now get an error page). However, I have re-posted my report on the Duke Rape Hoax here:

http://nicholasstixuncensored.blogspot.com/2017/04/ten-years-later-everything-you-ever.html

George Borjas: You Get What You Pay For

I've just finished reading a superb book, Stuart Taylor and KC Johnson's Until Proven Innocent, the definitive account of the Duke lacrosse rape case. The parts of the book that I found most interesting revolve around the widely publicized "send them to the gallows" reaction of a sizable chunk of the Duke faculty. There is one very revealing passage at the beginning of the book, the consequences of which reverberate throughout the story:

“...Duke sought to join the Ivies, Stanford, and MIT among the nation's leading institutions. It chose to do so, however, on the cheap: bypassing the sciences (where the combination of salary and lab costs for a new hire ran around $400,000), the school focused on bringing in big-name humanities professors, for whom the only startup cost was salary. Politically correct leftist professors were in vogue nationwide, and the leftward slant of Duke's humanities and social sciences faculty accelerated...”

Why is it that this trend so afflicts the humanities and the "soft" social sciences? An easy answer would be that these fields lack a well-defined theoretical framework and have little attachment to (or understanding of) the scientific method--making the professors highly susceptible to the latest fads sweeping the intelligentsia.

But this can't be the whole story. If true, ideological extremism and irrelevance should have also characterized earlier generations of professors in those fields.

Duke has already paid dearly for their initial stinginess. But the costs will mount. The tenured humanities and social sciences faculty are going to be doing a lot of hiring in the next 20 years, and one would not lose money by betting that the hiring process will lead mainly to new hires who have the ideological seal of approval.

My 2007 response to Borjas:

Forget about what the book says. What happened had nothing to do with Duke-specific developments, but with the rise of affirmative action (AA), beginning during the 1970s, and the consolidation and expansion of that power through multiculturalism (MC), which as Arch Puddington pointed out circa 1990, was invented in order to justify the ways of affirmative action to man. The spread of AA/MC’s power base made sexism and racism targeting white, heterosexual men ever more common, and countering such power ever more dangerous.

Keep in mind that AA/MC means entire academic departments (AA studies, Women’s Studies, Gay Studies, Cultural Studies, Peace Studies, etc.), as well as entire non-academic administrative offices (e.g., social workers and VPs for minority students; Depts. of Student Life: What Kors and Silverglate called “the shadow university”); Women’s Centers; remedial programs; etc. It also means many AA hires in traditional fields (Soc, Poli Sci, Eng, etc.). AA hires in traditional fields + AA/MC Departments (run by professional pressure group activists) + non-academic offices also run by anti-intellectual activists = totalitarian Gleichshaltung.

Postscript 2010: When I said, “Forget what the book says,” I was referring to the specific passage that Borjas quoted. I have yet to read the finished book, though I have read a great deal of it in the form of K.C. Johnson blogs totaling tens of thousands of words, and some of Stuart Taylor’s articles. (I would like to have read more of Taylor’s work, but he wrote a good deal of his articles on the hoax for a publisher who doesn’t keep them online for long.)

In any event, American racial reality over the past 40-odd years has been one of ever increasing black racial privilege. Affirmative action, multiculturalism, diversity (D), etc., are based on their supporters' baseless assertion that “privileged, white, heterosexual males” are continually committing massive racial discrimination against blacks, which discrimination is the cause of all black shortcomings. Therefore, supporters of AA/MC/D must engineer constant race hoaxes, in order to justify continued black racial privilege, and provide content for racial “scholarship.”