Many college professors have light teaching loads because they are expected to do research that expands knowledge. Sometimes their research actually does that, but quite often, the papers they write and publish are worthless, adding nothing to our knowledge and often propping up untenable political beliefs.
In today’s Martin Center article, NAS president Peter Wood takes aim at one such “research” paper that purports to find abundant racism in academic hiring.
After explaining that in his long experience, he never heard of anything but lenient and favorable treatment extended to black candidates, Wood writes: “What then to make of the research report in the journal Nature Human Behavior, in which 10 academics (one from California, seven from Texas, and two from Louisiana) purport to show a racial double standard that impedes the success of black scholars in American higher education? The article is unambiguously titled: ‘Underrepresented Minority Faculty in the USA Face a Double Standard in Promotion and Tenure Decisions.’”
The author of this paper digs deep to find small differences in committee votes on tenure, which of course proves racism. No other explanation is possible.
I suppose that Wood will be deemed a racist for offering this analysis:
The 10 scholars who devoted considerable effort to compiling and analyzing their data give the appearance of having bored a deep well in search of the underground river of anti-URM discrimination, only to find nothing but dry sand. To the extent that a small percentage of URM individuals fare a little worse than non-URM individuals in tenure and promotion decisions, this could be due to a variety of factors other than invidious racial (or intersectional) discrimination. It might be due in some instances, for example, to candidates who have been beneficiaries of lower standards of vetting at earlier gateways in their careers. Possibly they have “failed upward” until they have reached the point where the institution is compelled to impose a real standard.
It’s a shame that our education system subsidizes such tendentious “research” as this.