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April 1 , 2002 8:30 a.m. Ivory Hopes Debunking bogus diversity claims in the mainstream media.

he diversity wars drag on, and it isn’t easy to tell who’s winning. Three incidents in recent days drive home the embarrassingly flimsy nature of the diversity movement’s pronouncements — and the maddening success the movement has nonetheless enjoyed in foisting its bogus claims on the American public. Yet all is not lost.

The last two weeks saw flare-ups in long-running battles over alleged racial profiling by police, alleged discrimination against female professors, and the alleged stifling of the “female voice” by an oppressive and patriarchal Western culture. The parallels between these three cases are striking. In each instance, the same sort of blatantly unscientific methods have been used to validate claims of discrimination, and in each case, a similar (and not entirely discouraging) pattern of response has emerged.

For at least a year now, Manhattan Institute fellow Heather MacDonald has been challenging questionable but widely credited claims of racial profiling practiced by police on the New Jersey Turnpike. As MacDonald has repeatedly pointed out, differential rates of stops and arrests by race are meaningless without a comparison of actual driving behavior. If more black drivers speed than whites, then the fact that more black drivers are stopped is not discriminatory. MacDonald has now been vindicated by a study of driving on the New Jersey Turnpike which concludes that black drivers are in fact more likely to speed than whites.

Now shift to the latest in a series of reports from MIT alleging discrimination against female professors. The new reports, like their predecessors, makes precisely the same leap as the phony claim of racial profiling on the New Jersey Turnpike; they move from differential treatment between male and female professors to claims of discrimination. But such claims are meaningless without a prior assessment of the scientific merit of the work of the professors in question. If male professors have more publications and citations than their female counterparts, discrepancies in lab space or salary are based, not in sex discrimination, but in actual differences in achievement. It so happens that reports by Judith Kleinfeld, and by Patricia Hausman and James Steiger have established exactly that. The female professors at MIT who complained of discrimination have significantly fewer publications and citations from other scholars than do their male colleagues. (For a good account of the ongoing MIT controversy, see John Leo’s latest column.)

The MIT reports are based, overwhelmingly, not on scientific data, but on subjective feelings of “marginalization” by female professors. To say the least, such reports are unreliable, since nearly all professors tend to feel that they receive less than their due. Nor do the MIT reports allow that fact to emerge, since, in the 1999 report, male professors with records of publications and citations comparable to those of the woman complainants were never asked how they felt about the treatment and recognition accorded to them. (The more recent reports appear to have failed to make this comparison as well, but do not reveal their methods in sufficient detail to allow this to be ascertained with certainty.)

Now switch to the extraordinary article in this past Saturday’s New York Times on the controversy swirling around the work of Carol Gilligan. For years, the Times has uncritically touted Gilligan’s writings, even when serious critiques of her work have been available. But last Saturday, to its credit, the Times finally printed a story that featured, not only Gilligan’s views, but also the claims of her critics — first among them, Christina Hoff Sommers. (For more on Sommers’s devastating critique of Gilligan’s work, see The War Against Boys.)

Gilligan’s work on the plight of adolescent girls relies chiefly on her highly questionable interpretations of subjective reports. More than that, however, just as with the MIT study, Gilligan’s work is infamous for drawing conclusions about the impact of adolescence on girls without obtaining comparable data on boys — even when it’s common knowledge that the emotional turmoil of adolescence spares neither girls nor boys. By speaking to girls alone, Gilligan manages to turn adolescence into a patriarchal plot, instead of a challenge to be weathered by girls and boys alike, if in different ways.

So in case after case, the advocates of preferential treatment base their arguments on spurious studies. And the flaws are the same. Claims of discrimination are concocted out of statistics on differential treatment by race or gender that never take actual differences in behavior into account. Then, subjective interpretations of subjective reports from the alleged victim classes alone are turned into “scientific” claims of discrimination.

The pattern of response in all of these cases is also the same. Patently bogus reports are touted, without criticism, on the front pages of the New York Times, after which their conclusions filter down through the mainstream media until they become the common wisdom of the culture. The bad news is that this pattern persists, as the response to the MIT report demonstrates. The press, for the most part, is still credulous. And despite the complete lack of scientific legitimacy to the charges, the folks who run MIT are still afraid to say boo to the feminists who author these “reports.” Apparently, MIT administrators would rather corrupt academic standards by giving undeserved advantages to female professors, than face charges of sexism. And no doubt with an eye to the political awkwardness of the driving data, lawyers at the Justice Department have stepped in to try to suppress the report on the New Jersey Turnpike.

Yet there are also remarkable signs of hope in all this. For one thing, you are reading about all these controversies on NRO, which didn’t exist a few years back. The rise of the Internet and the introduction of the Fox News channel have made it possible for conservatives to do an end run around the mainstream media on dust-ups like this. Judith Kleinfeld, who exposed the misrepresentations in first MIT report three years ago, has already told the story of the Internet’s role in that battle. (See “Exposing Junk Science in Cyberspace,” Society, March/April, 2001)

But it’s gone beyond that now. The rise of an alternative conservative media is slowly beginning to have effects on the mainstream. We already know that books discussed on the conservative web have begun to break onto the New York Times best-seller list. And now, in its Saturday story on Carol Gilligan, even the New York Times gave space to Christina Hoff Sommers, and to many of Gilligan’s other critics. More shocking still, the latest issue of the prestigious New York Review of Books features a review of a series of books on women by liberal journalist Andrew Hacker. That review includes an extremely respectful discussion of Sommers’s book, and the theme of the review itself is that, contrary to the claims of people like Carol Gilligan, it may indeed be the case that boys, and not girls, are falling behind in our educational system.

Of course it, helps to be right. People like MacDonald, Kleinfeld, and Sommers wouldn’t have a prayer if they weren’t better on the facts than their opponents. But being right is only half the battle nowadays (and maybe less than that). The good news is that, while critics of multicultural orthodoxy are still, more often than not, isolated or on the defensive, breakthroughs are increasingly frequent. The battle over the bogus claims of diversity partisans is far from over. Yet it is very much a battle, the ultimate outcome of which is now, thank goodness, uncertain.

- Mr. Kurtz is also a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.