I.F. Stone, the old leftist muckraker and editor of I.F.
Stone’s Weekly, used to get a lot of mileage out of just
paying attention to what the government said. Government officials
did tell the truth, Stone maintained. You just had to pay
attention.
Flip the ideological perspective and we can learn something. The
liberal establishment actually does tell the truth about what
they’re up to. You just have to plow through some awfully boring
stuff to find it.
Sometimes it hits you right in the face.
Here’s a mild-mannered chamber of commerce type “We believe”
advertisement from the Educational Testing Service, the venerable
Princeton, New Jersey-based designer and purveyor of the famous
academic tests we all took, the SATs, plus the APs (Advanced
Placement), the Graduate Record Exam, and many others, state and
national. Written ostensibly in the voice of President and CEO Kurt
M. Landgraf, the ad, titled, “Making Diversity a Reality,”
begins:
“Like many organizations committed to social justice, ETS faces
challenges in creating and sustaining a diverse workforce.”
Wait a minute. “Social justice” is code for “communist” — it
means “equal outcomes.” And what does “creating and sustaining a
diverse workforce” have to do with administering tests to find out
what high schoolers know? Or with ranking those students to find
out which ones can do the work required at which colleges?
THE ETS AD BRISTLES WITH buzz words and phrases. “Underrepresented
groups.” “Diverse workforce.” “Expand educational opportunity
across ethnic lines.” “Recruiting aggressively among ethnically
diverse groups.”
For more of this appalling pabulum, see ETS’s web page, under
“People, Practices and Standards,” here. ETS, it appears, actually requires its employees
to “Tolerate no incidents of discrimination or harassment,”
“Embrace diversity of thought,” and “Report cases of discrimination
or harassment directly to my Strategic Workforce Solutions
consultant.”
The point of the ad? That ETS thinks it has to meet ethnic
quotas in hiring in order to make ethnic interest groups feel
comfortable with the idea of taking ETS’s tests. Only black test
authors can write questions for black test takers. Only “Latino”
test writers can pose questions to “Latino” test subjects. And so
forth.
Boy, is it hard. Landgraf, or his ghostwriter, wails that “In
the 2000-2001 academic year, U.S. universities conferred only about
500 doctorates in educational psychology, evaluation and
measurement. Of these, only 18 percent came from underrepresented
groups, and included many international scholars who later returned
home to take up their profession(s).”
(Maybe there’s hope. Apparently, the increasingly boneheaded
“professions” ETS seeks for hiring don’t appeal to much of anybody,
underrepresented or not.)
Here’s the kicker: The advertisement, dripping with sanctimony
and earnestness, appears on page 7 of the May 23 issue of…
National Review. A less appropriate or receptive
advertising audience could scarcely be imagined.
THREE THINGS OCCUR TO ME as I read this improbable screed. One, I
find my suspicions of higher education increasingly confirmed.
Should my boys decide to leave high school and pursue their
vocations through something other than a college, it won’t bother
me a bit. I will spare no effort to help them find the mentors and
tutors and jobs to help them.
Two, if my sons do decide to attend college, I will continue to
wisecrack and joke about the process and to point them in a
generally southerly direction, to big state schools where the girls
are pretty and the weather is warm and you can drive a convertible
and play golf. (This after they have earned their own college money
via the Navy or the Marine Corps.)
And three, Bob, George, Wlady, get in touch with these people.
If ETS is dumb enough to pay National Review for a
full-page two-color ad, we ought to be able to get on the gravy
train, too.
