We are pleased to announce that a new issue of Closing Remarks is out on campus. Closing Remarks is a Christian arts and culture magazine that the Foundation for Intellectual Diversity supports on campus, in addition to The Brown Spectator. Topics in the new issue include God and mathematics and the relationship between faith and economics. For more, visit the magazine’s home page.

It’s no secret that President Ruth Simmons has aligned herself with leftist causes—her backing of the reparations movement being the most obvious example—so it was interesting to see how her ideology influenced her decision, as a board member, on whether to give a bonus to the CEO of the Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Well, the Providence Business News is reporting that the CEO got his bonus—$9 million. That’s a lot less than the $67.9 million he got in 2007 when company revenues were $2 billion less than they were last year. The news article says Simmons and the board board spent some time deliberating over the bonus and were cognizant of the need to exercise ‘restraint.’ We don’t know the details of the voting process and Simmons’ role, but the fact that she continues to serve on the board for Goldman Sachs, reflects a degree of pragmatism that is often wanting on Brown’s campus.

The Providence Journal news blog covered our criticism of the ACORN event. Here is the complete post:

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Brown University’s invitation for Wade Rathke, co-founder of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, to speak at Brown next Tuesday has prompted criticism from a group whose mission includes the “restoration . . . of academic integrity.”

Stephen Beale, president of the nonprofit Foundation for Intellectual Diversity, a Brown alumni organization, on Tuesday described ACORN as “a disgraced and discredited organization” and said the selection of Rathke “raises eyebrows.”

“Once again, Brown is living up to its reputation as an isolated outpost of left-wing political activism, no matter how deplorable and scandalous,” Beale said.

ACORN has drawn fire from conservatives after a sting by conservative activists who caught ACORN employees in several cities on camera, seeming to give housing advice to a couple who claimed to be involved in prostitution.

Republicans also charged the year before that employees of ACORN falsified voter registrations in Florida.

U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-RI, set off a firestorm of conservative criticism last fall as one of a handful of senators who opposed action to shut off federal housing funds to ACORN. At the time, he argued that allegations against a few employees do not justify a blanket sanction of the organization.

Rathke served as ACORN’s lead organizer from its founding in 1970 until he stepped down last June, according to Brown University’s Taubman Center for Public Policy and American Institutions.

The former ACORN official will deliver a speech entitled, “Citizen Wealth: Winning the Campaign to Save Working Families,” as part of the center’s Brown Bag Series scheduled for noon next Tuesday at 67 George St.

One of the co-founders of ACORN is coming to speak at Brown, according to The Providence Journal. After several employees were caught on tape giving advice on how to pay taxes and secure housing for a prostitution ring, most people on the Left, including President Obama, did the common sense thing and distanced themselves from the organization. But not Brown. Once again, the University has no shame when it comes to embracing left-wing activism. Below is our press release on the event:

Alumni Group Criticizes ACORN Speaker at Brown U.

PROVIDENCE, RI – The Foundation for Intellectual Diversity today criticized plans to have ACORN co-founder Wade Rathke speak at the Brown University.

“Having the former leader of such a disgraced and discredited organization speak on campus certainly raises eyebrows,” said Stephen Beale, President of The Foundation for Intellectual Diversity, a Brown alumni organization.

“After several ACORN employees were caught on tape offering tax and housing advice to individuals posing as leaders of an underage prostitution ring, most Democrats, including President Obama, felt they could no longer be associated with such an organization—but apparently not Brown University,” Beale said. “Once again, Brown is living up to its reputation as an isolated outpost of left-wing political activism, no matter how deplorable and scandalous.”

With the start of classes last week, the spring semester is gearing up, and so is this blog. This semester is already off to an exciting start—a new issue of Closing Remarks is out, The Brown Spectator is due for another issue soon, and The Providence Journal is reporting today that the co-founder of ACORN is coming to speak at Brown. We will also continue to follow the latest developments with slavery reparations and plans to expand Africana Studies. Stay tuned. This will be an exciting one.

What is the best kept secret in higher education? Women now make up 58% of those enrolled in all two and four-year colleges. On the one hand, this turnaround in opportunity is to be welcomed; our culture is now that much more open and free. On the other, due to entrenched interests and political correctness, universities are extremely reluctant to publicly discuss the (growing) minority status of men. And indeed, administrators and women’s organizations have tended to cheer this turn, without paying sufficient heed its negative implications.

Specifically, universities across the country have been forced to engage in what is essentially “affirmative action” (that is, discriminatory favoritism) for male applicants. Brown’s numbers are telling, as the following charts I have assembled demonstrate.

Data sourced from Brown University Office of Institutional Research, “Common Data Set,” from each year referenced on charts; assembled by myself. “Applications differential” is the percentage difference between female and male applicants for a given year. “Admissions differential” is the percentage difference between female and male admitted students for a given year.

The above  charts show a widening gap in the female / male applicant pools; and a relatively flat line in admitted student gender disparity.

Crunching the raw numbers, I have calculated a mere 12% correlation between year-to-year applicant gender disparity (“applications differential %”), and year-to-year admitted student disparity (“admissions differential %”). (If interested in raw data, please email me.)

This, my friends, is a lot of gender engineering.

Further,  given that the admissions office knows something about who is likely to enroll if admitted, the next statistic is even more telling: year-to-year applicant gender disparity, and year-to-year ENROLLED student disparity (not pictured), demonstrate an even-worse 10% correlation.

Once-upon-a-time, the Spectator approached Dean of Admission James Miller to ask about the gap in male / female applicants. Dr. Miller argued that no gender bias was exhibited in admissions standards. Rather, he claimed, Brown’s interest in expanding its sciences programs, coupled with the dearth of female science applicants, explained the apparent bias.

While it is impossible to substantiate Dr. Miller’s argument without additional data (as Jason Carr noted in the original Spectator article), these new charts demonstrate that the problem is worsening. Are we to believe that, despite millions of dollars spent on a concerted efforts to recruit female students, a female advisory program considered to be a model for higher education, and construction of dramatically improved facilities, the significantly larger female applicant pool now contains even fewer women (as an absolute number, not as a percentage) interested in the sciences? This is the implication of Miller’s logic, which is clearly implausible – such is the size of the growing admissions disparity.

To be fair, preferential admissions standards are not necessarily a bad institutional decision in certain circumstances: there is, perhaps, a reasonable argument to be made for “gender balance” in college admissions. That is to say, if a college becomes imbalanced, for example, to 65% male or 65% female, it may well lose many of its best potential students to other, more balanced universities. Such logic has led engineering schools, such as MIT and CalTech, to actively recruit women. MIT is now 50% female, and CalTech is now nearly 40%.

Whether such policies are appropriate at any particular time is, of course, an open business question, and is one to be answered by a given school’s board of directors. The trade-off for gender bias in admissions, as with any sort of bias (e.g., racial), is the resulting breach of meritocracy: selection based on standards other than applicant quality. Depending on one’s political outlook, this is either inherently wrong, or a necessary evil. In no one’s ideal world would race or sex be a consideration in applications.

Brown is not an isolated case. Such is the extent of the problem that, according to Inside Higher Ed magazine, as of November the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has formally  ”started an inquiry into the extent to which liberal arts colleges discriminate against female applicants in an attempt to minimize gender imbalances in the student body.”

Dishonesty about the existence of this problem cannot but compound it. As we have established, there are very legitimate arguments against this sort of admissions bias. And regardless, as the problem is clearly worsening, it is in everyone’s interest to discuss it openly. Female students and faculty should pat themselves on the back for a job-well-done in overcoming significant obstacles; but the pendulum must now move back toward the center.

One potential solution is to revisit provisions of the 1972 “Title IX” legislation that restricts university spending on male sports programs. Some universities are already increasing their sports-spending, and even creating entire football programs, in order to attract male applicants. There are, in all likelihood, countless creative ways to address the problem, and reduce the necessity of admissions bias for men. But ideas require open and active discourse to develop. And until we overcome fear and political correctness, this will not be possible.

The below mentioned Providence Journal article about Brown’s delegation to the Copenhagen climate summit also alludes to the University’s own program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Here is what Aron Buffen, a Ph.D. student in geology, told The Journal about these efforts:

Buffen said he is proud that Brown has already committed to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions to 42 percent of its 2007 levels (the same as 15 percent of 1990 levels) by 2020.

“This may sound ambitious compared to proposed legislation in the U.S. House and Senate –– which call for reducing national emissions by 17 percent and 20 percent respectively from 2005 levels by 2020 –– but Brown has already cut annual emissions 19 percent from 2007 levels. Quite impressive, I’d say,” Buffen wrote in an e-mail. …

“Brown’s pledge has been proposed from the top down,” Buffen added. He said he, Dagon and Severson are working on a plan to get every Brown student directly involved. The possibilities, he said, are exciting.

We would like to know  if these efforts truly saved energy and expenses. Or is this yet another case of the University using its scarce funds to advance a political cause?

It should come as little suprise that Brown University is well-represented at the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen this week and last. According to The Providence Journal, three students and the director of Brown’s Center for Environmental Studies are attending.

The students and their professor are writing for a University blog about the summit, where readers will encounter some perhaps new yet familiar-sounding Leftist lingo, such as “climate justice” and “carbon debt.” If these students are being taught to simply to shoehorn climate research into the familiar categories of progressive ideology, we have to wonder about the scholarly merits of the environmental science program at Brown.

Of course, this summit has been overshadowed somewhat by the recent scandal in which it was revealed that climate scientists in the United States and Great Britain have stifled dissenting viewpoints in their field. We hope the local delegation to Copenhagen doesn’t bring such attitudes back to Brown.

As classes end today and things on campus wind down, so will this blog. In the meantime, as news breaks during winter vacation, we will be posting updates. Some things to look out for:

● Closing Remarks, the magazine of Christian thought that we support, is due for an issue to be published soon. Past issues are available here.

● Recently, Brown paid reparations for its historical role in the slave trade. We will continue to track this ongoing issue on our Web site during winter break.

● The Foundation is planning a number of speaker events for the spring. As details become available, we will announce them here.

● We also recently released the first edition of our e-mail newsletter. An online copy is available here. You can sign up for it here.

● Our new Facebook page launched last week. Become a fan by clicking here.

● Finally, we have plans to make some improvements to our Web site. So check back from time to time to see how things are coming along.

Of course, we will be back in full force at the start of the next semester in January.

PROVIDENCE, RI – The Foundation for Intellectual Diversity today called on Brown University to suspend a $10 million plan for slavery reparations and instead use the funds to make up its budget deficit.

The Providence Journal reported Dec. 5 that the University had given $30,000 to three Providence elementary schools and planned to raise a $10 million endowment to support future grants to local public schools. The gifts were recommended in a 2006 report of the University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice, which examined Brown’s historic ties to the slave trade.

“We wonder how alums would feel knowing that their donations to Brown could be used to further the political agenda of the faculty and administration,” said Stephen Beale, President of The Foundation for Intellectual Diversity. “We simply do not understand how funding programs at public elementary schools has anything to do with Brown’s mission of educating undergraduate and graduate students.”

Earlier this year, the University announced it was raising tuition by 3 percent and cutting as much as $90 million in expenses over the next five years in order to compensate for declining revenues.

“To blindly pursue a $10 million reparations program during an economic recession is not only frivolous, but deeply irresponsible,” Beale said. “We can have a debate about whether Brown should apologize for its role in the slave trade, but there is no question that the University owes alums and students an apology for the mismanagement of school funds.”

The Slavery and Justice Committee was convened in 2003 after a contentious debate about slavery reparations divided the campus in 2001. When The New York Times reported that Brown was exploring whether it should make pay reparations, President Ruth Simmons issued a denial in an April 28, 2004 op-ed in The Boston Globe:

“The Committee’s work is not about whether or how we should pay reparations. That was never the intent nor will the payment of reparations be the outcome. This is an effort designed to involve the campus community in a discovery of the meaning of our past,” Simmons wrote.

“Sadly, this promise has now been broken,” Beale said. “Once Brown started issuing payments to Providence public schools, this process crossed the line separating serious academic inquiry from political activism. Brown administrators can call these payments whatever they want, but anyone with a dictionary can tell that they are being less than truthful. We urge students, parents, and alums to hold the administration accountable for its words and actions.”