Teresa Sullivan: Liberalism Then and Now
For a couple of weeks in June, academic politics exploded beyond campus borders when the University of Virginia’s Board of Visitors fired the Charlottesville flagship’s recently hired president, Teresa Sullivan, and then unanimously rehired her after a loud protest from faculty and others. Multiple stories in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, National Review, USA Today, newspapers large and small across the nation, and an avalanche of blog posts attest to the widespread interest in the governance of what, after all, is one of the smaller, though highly selective, major public universities.
The fact that “diversity”-justified affirmative action was the dog that did not bark during that entire controversy is surprising. The fact that the “diversity” dog didn’t bark during the recent Charlottesville kerfuffle is especially odd because, as I noted in some detail in “Was Teresa Sullivan An Affirmative Action Hire?” (and also here), feeding, coddling, and protecting it been such a prominent part of Sullivan’s career. Also, the next president of UVa, like the president of every selective institution, will in all likelihood have to come to terms with a Supreme Court ruling in Fisher v. University of Texas next term that either eliminates or significantly narrows the “diversity” loophole through which academic diversicrats have been driving the locomotive of discriminatory racial preference for a generation.
Throughout her career, Sullivan has clearly been one of the leading and most experienced “diversity” engineers driving that locomotive. At the University of Texas, she held joint appointments in sociology and the law school, and she was vice president and graduate dean in 1996, when affirmative action there was ruled unconstitutional by the Fifth Circuit in Hopwood v. Texas.
Her husband, Douglas Laycock, then on the law faculty at Texas, played a prominent part in the Hopwood defense. Moreover, the very policy that the Supreme Court will review in Fisher — discriminating against whites and Asians and in favor of blacks and Mexican Americans in admissions even though a race-neutral policy (the “top ten percent” plan) had already produced substantial “diversity” — was implemented when Sullivan was executive vice chancellor for academic affairs for the University of Texas System and heavily involved in its development. Later, as provost of the University of Michigan, she was an ardent defender of the race preference policy that the Court upheld in Grutter and will now revisit in Fisher, and she was an outspoken opponent of the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, a state constitutional amendment that barred the university and other state institutions from granting preferential treatment based on race, sex, or ethnicity.
It will thus no doubt come as a surprise to many people to learn that some of the strongest and most cogent criticism of the principles underlying race preference policies can be found in Sullivan’s own early academic writing. Her dramatic race preference reversal, however, was unfortunately not simply an idiosyncratic inconsistency. It is emblematic of the descent of American liberalism from its former principled devotion to colorblind equality to its present post-principled belief that equality demands distributing benefits and burdens based on race and ethnicity.
Individual vs. Group Rights
In City of Los Angeles v. Manhart (1978), the Supreme Court invalidated a pension plan in which women were required to make larger contributions than men because, as a group, they live longer, rejecting the argument that the statistical association between sex and mortality justified the disparity. In an influential 1980 law review article, Sullivan, then an assistant professor of sociology and faculty research associate in the Population Research Center at the University of Chicago, published a vigorous defense of Manhart’s individual rights analysis with her husband, Douglas Laycock, then a law professor at Chicago, and two others. They argued with great force that the “most fundamental principle” of civil rights is that “no individual shall be considered simply as part of a racial, sexual, religious, or ethnic group, or treated differently because of his membership in such a group.”
Three years later Sullivan, now associate professor of sociology and still research associate in the Population Research Center at the University of Chicago, with Laycock and one other co-author, published another influential University of Chicago law review article responding to a critic of her earlier defense of Manhart who argued that it is both efficient and legitimate to take group differences into account. That mistaken view of fairness, she insisted, “fundamentally misconceives the basic principle of civil rights law” — that it is “unfairness to individuals that lies at the core of civil rights policy.” She fundamentally disagreed with those who “use race and sex as cheap proxies for traits with which they are correlated,” because doing so was unfair to individuals. If individuals could be treated differently because of their race or sex, she wrote incredulously, “[c]ollege admissions officials could use ethnicity as a factor to predict the grade-point averages of applicants” and admit or reject them on the basis of race or ethnicity. “Whenever race or sex is used as a predictor,” she concluded, “some individuals are disadvantaged because of a stereotype that is true of others, but not of themselves.”
The bottom line of Sullivan’s individual rights position uniformly expressed in these early articles was based on a root and branch rejection of the idea that the usefulness of predictions based on statistical correlations between various outcomes and race or sex is ever “more important than nondiscrimination” because “[e]very individual has a right not to be treated as the average member of his sex or race.” Sounding very much like an old-fashioned, not modern, liberal, Sullivan concluded her article by stressing that “[s]ex and race blindness have been the civil rights ideal.” Using race or sex “to predict the future of individuals is fundamentally inconsistent with that ideal,” she argued, “and if generally applied, would have consequences that most Americans would find abhorrent.” Indeed.
Here is a relevant fact: President Sullivan is a Professor of Sociology. As an academic discipline, sociology lost all credibility several decades ago.
Like so many academic leaders, Sullivan is a distinguished mediocrity, who should not be president of Mr. Jefferson’s university, or any other self-respecting institution of “higher learning.”.
You are absolutely right. This is coming from one who has a doctorate in that miserable pseudo-discipline. In my case, I was able to divert my career in another direction, and, therefore, succeed and find fulfillment and happiness. The other graduates in my program who succeeded also left the discipline; those who didn’t are bitter losers who have been stuck in the same punk ass jobs, teaching the same punk ass courses for the past 35 years. Enjoy, douche bags!!
What is amazing about this story is the spinelessness of the governing board.
The governing board first gave this SullivanThing the heave-ho. Then they let her back in. Enough said, we can see that UVA is a minor league operation. Mr. Jefferson is appalled.
Sociology as a discipline has been shrinking for quite a long time. 100% deserved.
This SullivanThing is unter-mediocrity at its worst. Madame has no business managing anything greater than herself. I leave to her family and friends the question of whether she is capable of managing herself.
I doubt it.
This article, which could have been entitled “Sullivan vs. Sullivan”, in some ways defines a great deal about what is generally referred to as the culture wars. The great fault line in today’s American politics is between those people who continue to side with the early view of Sullivan that discrimination based on race (or gender) is wrong and against the purpose of the Constitution, and those who favor Sullivan’s later view that the principle of non-discrimination can be bent in order to promote greater numbers of women and minorities in all aspects of American life.
It is interesting to me that so many so called right wing blogs are labeled that simply because they continue to argue the view of race neutrality that was the backbone of all arguments against slavery and Jim Crow laws. The entire civil rights history up until 1965 was united by the principle of race neutrality and they are written into United States Law by the fourteenth amendment and the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
My own journey away from the left began with the left’s abandonment of the principles that are embodied in these landmark civil rights laws. It always seemed very short-sighted that after having fought so long and hard for their establishment to then turn around and abandon them for some advantage in competing for employment or college admission.
The “Sullivan vs. Sullivan” divide is the great fault line of American politics and it is one that can permanently damage the country unless the ever growing demands for preferential treatment are reined in.
Racial/gender etc. preferences have propelled a lot of people into positions of power and influence in American life that they would never have achieved on merit alone.
This is particularly obscene when said individuals become members of Congress and presidents, where their ideological mindset and lousy decision making become problems for all of us.
As for a discussion one woman’s path of convenience from one delicately held position to another delicately held position, I have a hard time reading about that.
Or caring.
The common folk will probably not get too upset about this until the NFL is ordered to have specified numbers of asians, native Americans, women and physically handicapped individuals on their opening day rosters of both the teams and the cheerleaders. /sarc off.
Actually, I would LOVE to see someone file suit to cause exactly that ruling. I can’t think of a faster way to make the absurdity of affirmative action become crystal clear to all concerned.
You joke, but they’re serious about applying title IX to engineering and science. That will finish the destruction of the economy, as the number of engineering graduates slows to a trickle, and the work gets sent to Mumbai. Until the Indians stop accepting dollars, anyway.
Since affirmative action came into existence, the gap between rich and poor has grown.
Perhaps this is not a coincidence, since affirmative action helps minority members by enabling them to enter high-prestige professions—thus reinforcing the view that respected professions should get higher salaries. However, all professions are necessary, and all deserve respect. Certain workers—home health-care aides, to take a single example—fill an important need, work hard, and yet do not receive high wages. Most of these aides are members of minorities. An unexpected side effect of affirmative action has been the perpetuation of the denial of both respect and reward to important, hard-working laborers.
Affirmative action is just a fancy name for reverse racism. I do not use the term discrimination in this case, because discrimination based on merit is not a bad thing. Discrimination based on race, however, is evil. Discrimination based on race = affirmative action. Affirmative action is therefore on its face and in all its permutations, an evil thing.
If we were totally honest we would call affirmative action what it really is, revenge for the decades of racial injustice we saw in the US. Most honest people of character reject revenge as a valid motive for making policy. Indeed, people of color should be insulted at the very idea that they need an unfair advantage to get ahead.
“Indeed, people of color should be insulted at the very idea that they need an unfair advantage to get ahead.”
This is only true if they are of honorable character. For so many of them this is not the case. Why is this so? Is there a reasonable rationale for the widespread phenomenon of “the soft bigotry of low expectations” which applies to them more times than one can possibly count?
The soft bigotry of low expectations either infuriates or corrupts. Or both.
Obama is now planning to use Title IX quotas in math/science (STEM) education. Ridiculous!
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/townhall.comstaff/2012/07/14/obama_may_impose_new_title_ix_quota_for_math_and_science
The difference in Teresa Sullivan’s beliefs, in my opinion, is attributable to Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory (BEST) gaining traction on campuses beginning in the 80s but especially the 90s. It has become education’s equivalent of the Unified Field Theory pursuit. No one who expects to gain the next lucrative admin job in academia would argue anymore on the basis of the individual. They have become too engrossed in the socio-cultural perspective of learning grounded in community instead of the transmission of knowledge.
But they can’t say it that way. BEST has not yet completely transformed the desired mindsets as it is just now being fully implemented in K-12 via Common Core.
Coincidentally I wrote this recently sounding the alarm at this sea change in K-12. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/so-now-common-core-rejects-individual-thinking-to-embrace-soviet-psychology-ecology/
This is not news to me because it’s the theory used in other countries pushing the same education for sustainability and restructuring of Western economies around Green Growth. Having the feds say point blank that this is what Common Core is based on is huge though. That’s not a matter of tying it up. That’s an open proclamation.
Diversity is so important to higher ed now precisely because they have shifted quietly to this cultural, interaction, view of learning on many campuses already. They just didn’t want to admit it. The emphasis is on the 8 cultural forces present on campus, schools, and classrooms. Language, time, environment, opportunities, routines, modelling, interactions, and expectations are regarded as the shapers of each individual and the group dynamic. When the critical aspect of the educational experience is the daily interactions and experiences among the group, the dynamic does not work unless the group is diverse.
In both K-12 and higher ed, the administrators and accreditors really need to be honest with taxpayers and tuition paying parents and students about what is really going on. They are implementing a social, political, and economic transformation and have not bothered to tell us while still cashing our checks.
It’s all about the lust for power & control over the masses. Most people don’t care about that, as they’d happily sell their very souls in a New York minute for that ever-elusive “peace of mind” that comes of thinking that their every need will be met………for free. That in itself is every bit as evil as those who seek to enslave these fools.
It might be time to just scrap the whole damned thing & start all over again (we will have no choice but to do that eventually anyway).
I am always amazed at white progs who yell the loudest in support of AA, but their actions do not comport with their verbal support.
If diversity is SO important then how come Sullivan, the presidents of Texax and UM voluntarily resign and ask the board to replace them with a black? How come these same presidents don’t ask their one-half of their AA supportive faculty, board of regents, staff and professors to voluntarily resign so they can hire blacks and latinos to fill their jobs?
How come AA is not practiced by the MSM nightly anchors, editors, publishers, WH reporters step aside for a black? How about asking for an accounting of the staffs of our white progs in Congress-to see how many blacks they have on their staffs??? How many blacks are on the staff at MM, CAP, Kos, HuffPo, and the other white prog 527s?
AA is a gimmick used by the white progs to further enslave blacks by making them think they support blacks and latinos. And blacks and lations are just stupid enough to believe the white progs.
Is she 1/32 Cherokee too?
Well, since Obama is moving towards quotas limiting men in science, how about limiting men in the military? I presume Teresa is appalled over that extreme military male domination of the armed forces, to the detriment of female promotion and career tracking slots for women with better educations and IQs. Surely Teresa has no problem extending Title Nine to Selective Service registration? Surely Teresa is all for getting the girls up and running, playing hand grenades with the guys with a little affirmative action draft of females? However, I don’t know how Teresa is going to talk the remaining guys into taking all the casualties for the girls.
*shakes head*
With respect,the article seems to be mystified at this seeming “reversal”. I’m laughing hysterically. No “reversal” took place because no moral conviction was ever in play as you and I understand the concept or as it defined by Webster’s.
Look:
“In City of Los Angeles v. Manhart (1978), the Supreme Court invalidated a pension plan in which women were required to make larger contributions than men because, as a group, they live longer, rejecting the argument that the statistical association between sex and mortality justified the disparity. In an influential 1980 law review article, Sullivan, then an assistant professor of sociology and faculty research associate in the Population Research Center at the University of Chicago, published a vigorous defense of Manhart’s individual rights analysis with her husband, Douglas Laycock, then a law professor at Chicago, and two others. They argued with great force that the “most fundamental principle” of civil rights is that “no individual shall be considered simply as part of a racial, sexual, religious, or ethnic group, or treated differently because of his membership in such a group.”
“Three years later Sullivan, now associate professor of sociology and still research associate in the Population Research Center at the University of Chicago, with Laycock and one other co-author, published another influential University of Chicago law review article responding to a critic of her earlier defense of Manhart who argued that it is both efficient and legitimate to take group differences into account. That mistaken view of fairness, she insisted, “fundamentally misconceives the basic principle of civil rights law” — that it is “unfairness to individuals that lies at the core of civil rights policy.” She fundamentally disagreed with those who “use race and sex as cheap proxies for traits with which they are correlated,” because doing so was unfair to individuals.”
The reason why this woman took this stance is because she may have had to pay more than a man,she rightly said this was unfair. However,if it had been MEN who had been required to pay more, she would have been on the OPPOSITE side of the argument and argued just as vehemently that it was fair for MEN TO HAVE TO PAY MORE. Because the whole thing was naked self-interest from the very beginning. Who here hasn’t argued with a woman before? And tell me,honestly,that any time you have her pinned dead to rights she doesn’t change her position in order to get out of it and pretend like YOU were the one making the original statements she made until you find yourself arguing in a circle? Who hasn’t heard the adage about never arguing with a woman because they are always “right”? Hmmm?
This lady was never for any of the things she said, as marvelously correct as she (probably accidentally) happened to be,she just didn’t want to have to pay more than a man. That’s the long and the short of it. I mean,look for yourself at the end of the article where she was in a position to show that these were her ABSOLUTE INVIOLABLE MORAL CONVICTIONS by supporting them when they would benefit new male college enrollees (40% compared to women’s 60%). She was CONFUSED. She knew which way to come down when SHE was going to benefit, but when it was somebody’s else’s turn, suddenly equality of OUTCOME is more important than equality of OPPORTUNITY. This doesn’t reflect a change in liberalism,which surely has changed, this is your typical woman’s reasoning on politics,philosophy,morality,the whole schmiel.
Now, I KNOW this sounds like a bigoted statement to make, BUT if you will do me a favor and even if you vehemently disagree and condemn me here, just keep what I said in mind and evaluate female politicians and lawmakers using it as your scalpel you will find the same thing over and over and over. I guarantee it.In the vast overwhelming majority of cases, what is good for women-and by extension the woman in question-trumps RELIGION, it trumps POLITICS, it trumps MORALITY, it even trumps what is humanly possible within the framework of the laws of the universe we live in. It trumps EVERYTHING.
I just want to add that THIS is supreme genius at work:
“Since the Supreme Court has held many times that race cannot be preferred “for its own sake,” if it chooses to rein in Grutter rather than throwing it out, one way it could do so would be to require universities to list with some specificity precisely the traits and characteristics for which they desire to use race and ethnicity as proxies.”
Throwing it out altogether would only be a short term solution. Twenty or fifty or 100 years from the point it was rejected it would be repackaged and brought up again. And again. And again,ad infinitum,until they got their way. Using the solution you just brought up would cast the whole exercise in a farcical light and cause embarrassment,not to mention make it nearly impossible to hide the implicit racism inherent in this strain of thought. Eventually, they would stop attempting to exploit the American sense of egalitarianism for their own evil ends out of self-consciousness, which even a blatantly evil sociopath is able to experience in a negative way just like the rest of us.
You can’t teach a liberal morality, but you can even train a worm to travel in a straight line with pain.