An unsurprising figure is involved in the current battle between Harvard University and the federal government, and he has come out to EXPOSE Harvard's racist and discriminatory practices by sharing a "trove" of internal documents they don't want you to see. Lydia walks us through what these documents are, how things escalated to this point, and what Christopher Rufo wants us to think it all means - which The New York Times helped platform on an episode of The Daily. Cool. Best Practices for Conducting Faculty Searches Rufo's smoking gun that makes no sense: Harvard's "Placement Goals" - HELP US FIGURE OUT WHAT THIS IS! **If you enjoy our work, please consider leaving a 5-star review! You can always email questions, comments, and leads to lydia@seriouspod.com.** Please pretty please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com/wherethereswoke! This content is CAN credentialed, which means you can report instances of harassment, abuse, or other harm on their hotline at (617) 249-4255, or on their website at creatoraccountabilitynetwork.org.
What's so scary about the woke mob, how often you just don't see them coming.
Anywhere you see diversity, equity, and inclusion, you see Marxism and you see woke principles being pushed.
Wokeness is a virus more dangerous than any pandemic hands down.
The woke monster is here, and it's coming for everything, everything, everything, everything, everything.
Instead of go-go boots, the seductress green M&M will now wear sneakers.
Hello and welcome to Where There's Woke.
This is episode 85. I'm Thomas Smith.
That over there is Lydia Smith.
How are you doing?
I'm feeling real angry.
I'm really irritated.
I'm feeling hangry.
I never feel hangry.
That doesn't apply to this.
It doesn't.
You're hangry right now?
No.
No, there's no way.
I'll never tell.
No, I'm just feeling really irritated by...
It's real annoying.
That's our lives and job.
Why did we sign up for this?
Oh, boy.
How are you?
Besides being hangry.
Yeah, well, you know.
Allegedly.
Plugging away.
Excited to talk about one of our favorite villains.
Yeah.
Wait, isn't he from here or something?
He's from Sacramento.
That's right.
Sacramento Zone.
So I know what high school he went to.
Wanted to burn it down.
So my dad's cousin's daughter went there.
So then I reached out to her because they're close in age.
And I said, did you know this person?
And she was like, no, not really.
And I was like, okay, well.
If you have friends from that high school you still talk to, can you please reach out?
We will be talking about this person in depth much more at a later time.
But today we will be talking about Christopher Rufo, high level.
Are we debunking?
We're doing some debunking.
We're going to focus in on something in particular related to academic institutions.
Let me just give you this quote that actually happened in the SACB pretty recently.
This is from a piece from a law professor, constitutional law expert, Erwin Chemerinsky out of UC Berkeley.
And he wrote, Christopher Rufo, who is advising the Trump administration on matters of higher education, said that the goal should be to cause universities to, quote, Yeah.
Yeah.
So we're going to be talking about that today.
Yeah.
This was in the daily, wasn't it?
I think I listened to this.
It was.
We're going to dig into that after the break.
Doing great work, New York Times.
Awesome.
Did that help?
Did that solve it?
New York Times.
You feel better now, New York Times, that you're interviewing the fascists?
Both sides, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, I'm so informed now on the fascism.
It's great.
I love to be informed on the fascism.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, I can't wait to be informed on the fascism.
But without platforming the fascists.
Yes.
Yes.
We'll take our break.
And if you'd like to avoid the ads, get goodies.
If you had a good feeling, warm feeling in your heart, go to patreon.com slash wherethereswoke.
For the show.
We love our patrons so much.
We do.
We do.
All right.
After this break, we'll get to it.
All right.
So on April 11th, The Daily had Christopher Ruffo on.
And part of this is, I mean, I think they would have had him on no matter what, but they recently...
the way that they handle their students, the way that they approach courses, etc., etc.
So the New York Times, wanting to make sure that they gave the opportunity for the other side to respond, even though the other side is in charge.
And this person has a fine platform as it is and has been able to affect significant policy.
They invited Christopher Rufo on.
And so we're going to kick off this episode with listening to a couple clips from this.
I apologize in advance, but we got to do it.
So why don't we start with this first clip where Christopher Rufo is going to dig into what's happening at Harvard specifically as an example.
It's not Harvard Law, though.
It's just Harvard.
Because if it's Harvard Law, then they've got a major ethics problem in terms of their instruction.
But other than that, I don't think that I'm going to agree with anything this says.
Okay, here we go.
And as you've said, so much of this for you goes back to the university.
The incubation center, in your words, for these ideas.
What exactly are these universities doing wrong besides the virtue signaling and your telling that you saw in 2020?
You know, take Harvard.
Harvard's DEI departments have been engaged in a level of race-based hostility, scape And I just say that every time we do, we listen to anything for this show or any show.
I have to take a second to remember, oh, this is what people sound like at 1x speed?
Jeez, what a weird thing.
I'm with you on this because I listened to this as fast as I could.
It was like 1.7, which is fast for me.
Wow, that's fast.
I finally converted you.
It only took so long of having to listen to these assholes to realize you want to do more things with your day than capture every second of them.
I don't need a 45-minute discussion between Michael Barbaro and Christopher Rubo.
Michael Barbaro is the worst interviewer.
Pleasant voice to listen to.
I don't understand why he's there, but okay, here, let's hear this answer.
That in my view, constitute a violation of federal civil rights law.
Stupid bullshit.
Sure.
You have discriminatory admissions.
At Harvard, I know.
At Harvard, yeah, you have, you know, penalizing individuals because of their ancestors, And you have them doing that in a systematic way.
You have discriminatory hiring and promotions, hiring and promoting people on the basis of race and punishing members of certain racial groups simply because of who their parents were.
And you also have the ideological component coming from the DEI departments, coming from HR, that, you know, Stigmata?
Stigma?
I don't think he means stigmata, does he?
That's the thing.
Yeah, bodily wounds, yeah.
Yeah, Christ.
Oh, I guess, yeah, he is a religious-y guy, so.
But wait, how does that make any sense?
As a kind of mark, a kind of stigma that they have been crucified and everyone can see it?
What was he trying to say?
I don't think that's right.
Yeah.
Yeah, maybe you're right.
Maybe he meant stigma.
I think he means stigma, but then again, he is a super religious guy, so maybe he would be using it correctly, but anyway.
I have to hear that again.
So-called whiteness as a pathology, as a kind of mark, as a kind of stigmata that is not just at Harvard, but at many universities.
The question is, well, how have they been getting away with it for so long?
And the answer is that they've never been held to account before.
Because you made it up yesterday?
They paid no price for this kind of racialist discrimination.
And so they continued to do so.
I just want to be clear, because some of this is fiercely debated, some of this is still in the courts, but you landed on this very specific solution to address what you see as the excesses of the American left, which is to use the federal money that these universities depend on as a cudgel to force them to change.
Why do you settle on that tactic?
What is that question?
For a simple reason, because money talks and because fear is like, I get, I get what we're doing here.
I do see some amount of argument for like, well, you want to be informed on the whatever, as much as it annoys me, I do see some kind of argument, but then they do stuff like this where like, they don't want to seem combative, but they ask a question like, who cares about the answer to that question?
I don't think he has a question.
He just wants to say that's what they're That's an irrelevant question.
It's like, that's what they can do.
Who cares about why they decided that?
You care about his position and why he believes that, but it just becomes a nothing question.
What does the answer to that matter?
That's stupid.
Whatever.
He's a great motivator.
Nice words.
Pleasing sounds, promises to change, all of those very pleasant and non-confrontational proposals regarding academia have not worked.
But what we've seen in dramatic fashion in recent months is that the other approach actually works much better.
And so, look.
The raw material of politics is money, power, and status.
And so his questions are, you know, he's saying, that's what I'm thinking about.
How can we take away their money?
How can we take away their power?
How can we take away their status to the point that we're causing so much pain to the decision makers so that they have to change?
Yeah.
That's kind of how he finishes that thought.
I do think that that answer is important because clearly we can see it, but now we're hearing directly from him.
This rhetoric is honestly very intense, in my opinion.
It's not just like, well, you know, like we make up X percent of the budget for Harvard University.
And so naturally, if we say that the money is contingent on the administration's position on X, Y and Z and the executive orders, blah, blah, blah, blah, it's going to affect their budget.
But here it feels very authoritarian coming from from him and that the language.
And that's why that question is so pointless.
Like fascists are going to fash.
They have their views.
It's fine if you want to ask him about his stupid fucking views and why he thinks them.
But you're doing this like placeholder question instead of asking anything important or real.
You're just like, why do you want to use this club to beat that guy to death with?
Why are you choosing that club to beat him to death with?
Like, that's what, who cares?
Like, just, why are you beating the guy to death?
That's the actual question.
Hey, maybe don't beat the guy to death.
You shouldn't do that.
That's bad.
But no, we're journalists.
So you gotta say, well, why that choice of club?
Yeah.
Stupid.
So we're gonna skip a little bit ahead where Barbaro asks him, you know, what do you wanna see?
Effectively, his answer is, well, clubs hurt people pretty well.
That's what the answer is.
That's all that happened.
Yeah, they do.
It's true.
Okay, what, sorry.
Next clip.
So what's an ideal outcome of holding up this money in your mind?
What should a university look like?
What could it look like when the Trump administration says all those hundreds of millions, in some cases billions of dollars, that you are relying on, we're holding it back unless you change your culture, your practices, in some case your curriculum?
Yeah, so there's a short-term answer and there's a long-term answer.
In the short term, I'd like to see the abolition of discriminatory DEI programs.
I'd like to see colorblind admissions and a requirement that the universities publish disaggregated admissions and class rank data at the end of each year.
So that you can see it for yourself.
Yeah, so that American taxpayers can have at least a proxy to determine whether or not universities are in the ballpark of colorblind admissions.
I'd like to see an overhaul of university hiring so that you have more philosophical balance on the faculty and you have an end to, again, kind of illegal discrimination in hiring and promotions.
I think also standards of civil discourse.
So for example, there should be significant federal financial penalties for any university that allows masked protesters to take over campus spaces, to any university that allows building occupations, illegal encampments, the disruption of the educational program, or violence as we've seen, for example, in the wake of the Hamas terror attack against Israel.
There should be strict penalties for that because we can't have a good university system without basic standards of civil discourse.
And in this version of a university, would anything on the curriculum be off limits?
Or would you be open to leaving that, and would the Trump administration be open to leaving that to the universities?
I mean, could there be a critical race theory class, critical identities studies class, critical ethnic studies class?
I mention those because you have talked about those as being very problematic.
Yeah, I mean, look, universities are ultimately going to have to decide what they put into the course catalog.
I don't think that the federal government should be micromanaging academic offerings to that extent.
I think that's counterproductive.
I think it's getting too far into the weeds.
So that's where your job aligned, in terms of academic freedom.
The universities need to have that.
It's a little bit more on.
So what I would say from practice, So it's a little bit nuanced.
Where you draw the line?
The federal government perspective, the most successful policy reform areas are on university administration.
That's where we have the most public support.
That's where we have the most legal authority.
That's where we have really the most kind of defensible territory for engaging in these reforms.
That said, I think universities have to reform the structure of their departments.
They have to reform their course offerings.
And, you know, as a trustee at the New College of Florida, which is one of the public universities in the state of Florida.
Right.
Governor Ron DeSantis asked you to be on the board.
That's right.
And so we did these administrative reforms.
You know, we fired the president.
Got rid of the provost.
We turned over the whole administration.
We abolished the DEI department.
We implemented a policy of colorblind equality.
You know, all of those reforms, I think, are much needed.
But we went further than that, and I think with good reason.
And we looked at our course offerings.
We looked at our departments.
And we did a systematic study to just say, hey, which programs and departments are offering students a good value?
Which programs and departments are oriented towards truth rather than ideology?
And we concluded that our gender studies program did not meet any of those basic thresholds, and so we abolished the department, which established a new precedent.
And so I'd like to see some targeted defunding of compromised and non-scholarly academic.
Departments, projects, research grants.
We've seen that happening through DOGE, and I'd like to see that become systematized throughout the federal government.
Oh, my God.
Okay, systematic study.
This is not the topic of Today Show, but systematic study when they decided to abolish the Gender Studies Department at New College.
Oh, very, very systematic.
I'm sure there was a study somewhere when they did it in a matter of days.
Yeah.
Sure that happened.
They studied the gender of the professors and the race of the professors.
Just one thing before you do your thing.
I love this idea early on that like universities need to produce reports of their admissions so that, he said something like, so that, you know, the taxpayer can judge how close to race blind they are.
Yeah.
How are you going to do that?
What is race blind?
Would it be as a percentage of the whole population?
Because I actually think we might be under that when it comes to...
But that might result in more people of color being admitted.
In which case, he's a genius.
What a great idea.
Let's do this.
But setting that aside, what would you use for that?
Because inevitably, you'd have to be like, well, it's got to be people who are qualified.
They think...
That's the backing assumption they always have.
And they think that any efforts to increase black students or students of color is necessarily just elevating people who shouldn't be there.
We've talked about this a million times.
That's what they believe.
They don't always say it.
Sometimes they do say it, but that's what they believe.
And so that's why they go for this race blind stuff.
They think that'll get it back to what it quote unquote should be.
But like, how do you judge that?
Do you have to go based on, because it can't just be based on population per se.
Would it have to be based on what percentage of kids of any race are qualified or something?
But then how would you even make that judgment?
I don't even know how you would measure that.
Yeah, he mentions class rank data, which I'm sure is wholly problematic in and of itself.
But he spends a lot of time talking about taking into account race for admissions.
I mean, students for fair admissions overturned that with the Supreme Court.
Like that's not something that.
Yeah, exactly.
So that is not something, and I guess maybe what we're looking at is like public versus private schools and what's happening there.
But I imagine Harvard is expected to follow the law when it comes to admission consideration.
So I don't think that there's really much that they can push for policy there because it already happened at the Supreme Court.
So what else are they going to say?
you're gonna continue to get that rhetoric from them, but the focus, as he mentioned here, is really like Where can they impact the administration for these universities?
And what are some areas that are problematic from their point of view that are happening there?
So that's what we're going to keep digging into if you're ready.
I need to eat something first.
God, I'm always hangry.
Okay, so two weeks.
After this podcast episode, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for the United States issued what's called a commissioner's charge.
And this was issued to Harvard University.
This is on April 25th.
And they basically allege that they believe Harvard to have violated and to be continuing to violate Title VII against white, Asian, male, and straight employees, applicants.
And training program participants through, you know, hiring, through training opportunities, through mentorship programs, etc.
In the commissioner's charge itself, there's a statistic that they mention.
They say Harvard admitted that in a span of 10 years, it went from 59% of all ladder faculty being white men to 49%.
All ladder meaning tenure track plus tenured.
Comparing that decrease in white men to an increase in the total women, non-binary, and faculty of color, i.e.
all faculty other than white men, from 41% in 2013 to 51% in 2023.
So when I read this, I was like, I don't really see a big deal here.
I mean...
When we're looking at 2013 to 2023, Christopher Ruffo will admit this too.
2020 was like a boiling point for a lot of institutions with the George Floyd protests and sort of this explosion of better awareness.
He won't call it that, but better awareness of implicit bias and microaggressions and these continued pervasive lack of opportunities for folks.
And so you start to see that at the workplace, at schools, at universities in 2020, 2021, there's higher expectations for these places to be understanding and aware of bias and these sort of like unconscious actions and behaviors and ways that we treat people.
And there were a lot of professors.
And I don't have numbers here.
I do have some anecdotes from some folks that Christopher Ruffo tends to interview that ended up leaving their positions in like 2021.
Because from their account, they're like, I've had enough of it.
Well, like white people that are mad about diversity efforts?
Yeah.
So when I see like 59% of all...
I don't know.
I don't think that's that crazy.
Do we know if the total number changed?
Like, what if they just added?
Yeah, exactly.
It's not that easy to get rid of people, right?
Right.
And so that's a great point.
And something that we're going to come to later here, too, is that we are getting very high-level statement, including some numbers with no context.
No denominator, you know, and that's going to happen a couple other times in our discussion today.
But this commissioner's charge I mentioned was, you know, two weeks after the podcast.
It also was, importantly, four days after Harvard announced they were going to sue the government over the funding freeze that was announced.
What I've been noticing is that this very, like, retaliatory situation that's been going on between Harvard and the government.
And very clearly, at least from my reading, the commissioner's charge truly reads like, in there, say they're going to sue us, let's grab some stats, plop it in here and say we're going to investigate them for Title VII.
If Harvard gave in, they wouldn't have done this, right?
Like we saw that with Columbia.
Or they would have, you know, ratcheted up with their expectations and then seen how Harvard responded to that.
So that's sort of where we're seeing the beginnings of this like back and forth, right?
Harvard saying that they're going to fight back.
The United States government not being happy about that, saying we're going to investigate you because you're violating Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
And then just a week later, from the Department of Education, you know, Harvard's already facing a federal funding freeze.
Now, Secretary McMahon, Linda McMahon of Department of Education, slash, you know, Vince McMahon's wife of WWE fame.
She wrote a letter on May 5th addressed to Harvard President Alan Garber.
I'm assuming she sent it, but she also posted it on Twitter in full, three pages, announcing that they would no longer award education grants to Harvard, federal education grants.
So some of these things are pretty amazing.
So pulling up from the Harvard Crimson and their coverage of this, it says, She says,
In every way, Harvard has failed to abide by its legal obligations, its ethical and fiduciary duties, its transparency responsibilities, and any semblance of academic rigor.
Harvard will cease to be a publicly funded institution and can instead operate as a privately funded institution, drawing on its colossal endowment and raising money from its large base of wealthy alumni.
You have an approximately $53 billion head start.
That's what she says.
Yeah, not really wrong about that.
How much did this federal money matter to their...
I mean, you wouldn't say it's like a public...
It's that they receive grants for, you know, a lot of their research efforts and things like that.
Isn't a lot of it like, I think a lot of it's like actual contracts, isn't it?
It's like they do stuff for the government.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, that's my that's my understanding.
So the Trump administration initially pulled $2.2 billion and then they were looking at And then McMahon is basically saying, don't bother to apply for any grants from my department.
You're not going to be getting any of them.
And then it says that she signed off the letter.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Yeah, it says she concluded her letter with a mockingly upbeat office sign-off.
But President Alan Garber wrote back on May 12th a pretty long letter trying his best to assuage very kind and polite, saying we share a lot of the same ideals, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But one thing I want to point out here was he says, Employment at Harvard is similarly based on merit and achievement.
We seek the best educators, researchers, and scholars at our schools.
We do not have quotas, whether based on race or ethnicity or any other characteristic.
We do not employ ideological litmus tests.
We do not use diversity, equity.
That's a recent change.
They pulled that back a few years ago.
We hire people because of their individual accomplishments, promise, and creativity in their fields or areas of expertise and their ability to communicate effectively with students, faculty, and staff.
And we take all of our legal obligations seriously, including those that pertain to faculty employment at Harvard, as we seek to offer our students the most dynamic and rewarding educational experience that we can.
This letter came out the same day as an article in The Wall Street Journal that was highlighting the EEOC charge from a couple weeks prior, titled, Trump Administration Takes Fight with Harvard to Universities Hiring Practices.
I think this letter made Christopher Rufo mad.
is in the background of all of this, very clearly.
And two days after this letter and that Wall Street Journal article came out citing some of President Garber's language that there is no quota, there are no, like, hiring quotas regarding race or any other protected characteristic, etc., Christopher Rufo posts a tweet and it says, exclusive, R.K. Thorpe, who is an investigative journalist with the Manhattan Institute.
And I have obtained internal documents from Harvard revealing that the university deliberately penalizes white men in hiring and would virtually eliminate supposed oppressor groups from certain occupations.
I'm sure this is totally legitimate.
Yeah, inside Harvard's discrimination machine.
Yeah, yeah.
What are you talking about?
I know.
It's so depressing that every stupid conservative scare story that was bullshit that we tried to debunk on this very show that I suppose we should have started 10 years earlier than we did, but who knows if anything would make a difference.
That all just gets to be reality now.
They all just get to pretend because they have the power.
Yeah, no, they're racist against white people.
Trump literally inviting the president of South Africa on to tell him that they're killing white farmers with these old chain email.
Fucking bullshit nothings from the 90s with examples that aren't even anything.
It's like they just get to do that now because we let them, I guess.
It's always been bullshit.
It's been bullshit the whole time.
And this is the end result of allowing this bullshit in any way, allowing any space rhetorically or in our society for these stupid reactionary ghost stories.
They're just all fake.
They're all for this purpose.
So I'm going to read a little bit from his City Journal piece, which is also what he posts on his Substack.
It just kind of goes into more detail than his.
Twitter thread on this, and then we're going to spend some time talking specifically about a couple of his claims here.
He says, we've obtained a trove of internal documents that reveal Harvard's racial favoritism in faculty and administrative hiring.
Well, if it's a trove, maybe he has a point then.
I didn't know they got a trove.
They are vectors for systematic discrimination against disfavored groups, namely white men.
As one Harvard researcher told us, quote, endless evidence suggests that the university continues to discriminate against the supposed oppressor class in hiring him.
So they call out this document called the Inclusive Hiring Initiative.
Now, when I click on that, it pulls up a PDF that they grabbed from.
Way back.
And this is like kind of, you know, really standard HR kind of stuff, right?
Where it says, here are our goals.
This is the inclusive hiring roadmap.
We're going to be developing a hiring resources guide by February 2021.
We're going to have talks related to talent acquisition and diversity.
Is that what we're talking about?
So I don't think this is a memo.
I think this was available on the HR website for Harvard because, you know, it's like strategic plan kind of stuff, right?
So it's less than a memo.
Yeah, yeah.
It's less than a memo.
There are dates tied to this.
Yeah.
And then, you know, they're going to do a training series, including stuff like unconscious bias training.
Phase one, gas whitey.
Line them up.
Send them to the chambers.
Phase two, all black college.
Then they have the hiring guide that came as a product of the Inclusive Hiring Initiative.
This is called Best Practices for Conducting Faculty Searches.
And Chris Ruffo says that in it, the university recommends several discriminatory practices.
So I looked at this.
This includes things like how to start a productive search.
So you're not just like spinning your wheels, right?
How to recruit a broad and deep group of candidates.
How to evaluate candidates fairly.
It has a section on unconscious bias and its influence on decision making.
And also how to implement and conduct informative campus visits, which is a really important part of the process, as I learned from my sister, who has been spending time visiting campuses for her job opportunities.
Yeah, but she's white.
So everywhere she sees signs, white need not apply.
Then she goes and uses the shittier drinking fountain.
It has a sample candidate evaluation sheet as part of this guide, an additional guide to acceptable interview questions.
Reading through the stuff, this is all, like, I'm not surprised seeing this.
Yeah, you give me a lot of headings.
What is it actually?
Well, let me tell you what he says is in it.
Okay.
That's probably what's in it then.
Yeah.
At the beginning of the hiring process, Harvard instructs search committees to, quote, ensure that the early lists include women and minorities and to, quote, consider reading the applications of women and minorities first.
The university counsels that committee chairs should, quote, continually monitor the racial composition of the candidate list.
And as they narrow it down, quote, attend to all women and minorities on the long list.
So he says Harvard deliberately factors race into the hiring process.
What is happening in this, though, is it's factoring race to make sure that people aren't being excluded.
Because of their race or minority status, etc.
It's not giving them like, okay, now they jump to the front of the list.
It's make sure you don't lose track of those people who are great candidates because research shows that that happens.
From the initial webpage that this was on, this specifically said a blurb for this guide itself.
We have drawn on and recommend Searching for Excellence in Diversity, a guide for search committees by Eve Fine and Joe Handelsman, as well as materials from Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the Association of American Colleges and Universities, National Science Foundation's Advanced Program, MIT, Stanford, Columbia, UC Berkeley, University of Michigan, and the University of Washington.
All of those things are linked.
I clicked on the first one that they say they've drawn on and recommend, the Searching for Excellence in Diversity, a Guide for Search Committees.
It's 131 pages of well-sourced material in here about what's happening through peer-reviewed research, scholarly articles about what we see in hiring practices and how can we fix it?
Right, because, I mean, you start from the premise, from the observation that, whoa, it's a really white place.
Everything's way too white.
And that doesn't seem fair.
Yeah, exactly.
And so, you know, that's 131 pages, all the different other sources that they talked about there.
And the guide itself is 28 pages.
And so Christopher Rufo is like, he's really, honestly, it's cherry-picked and devoid of all context because that's how he's going to get people mad.
And he got me mad, so.
Yeah, you know, there's one thing I do want to say, which is that we've been a little bit pushed into a frustrating place.
When it comes to this, in that the truth of the matter is, if you read a fucking book, you cannot make up for systemic racism with race-blind policies.
You just can't.
not, what has happened is fundamentally we've deprived people of color of the same opportunities as white people times a gajillion times 200, whatever years you want to say, like you cannot make up for that without using...
You just can't.
And what people want to do, including Clarence fucking Thomas and mostly other white racists, but conservatives, you know, what they think, and even a lot of Democrats, honestly, what they think is, well, no, you can't.
That's more racism.
If you use race to do anything, that's more racism.
Martin Luther King taught us that racism was bad.
And so if we use any race in any way to try to fix the problem, then we're being just as, aren't we just as bad as the KKK?
And it's just stupid.
It's fucking stupid.
The truth is, yes, we should use race.
Yes, we should make sure, ensure that we are providing not just the same opportunities now, but more opportunities because people of color are in a massive deficit in terms of opportunity here because that's what this country has done.
That's what the society has done.
So to make things fair, if you had any interest in making things fair going forward, you would need to account for that.
But we've been forced into this place, and it happened with a lot of the affirmative action argument, too, where it's kind of once, you know, white America gets mad enough, then you're kind of forced to say two things at once.
Like, well, no, we're actually not, we're not using race, really, you know?
it's also just a factor, you know, and I do think that like, I'm not sure what the right answer was there, but I do feel like we were a little bit, or I say we, and I have nothing the fuck to do with it, but like, I feel like progressive people who are trying to fix this.
Sometimes I think And maybe I'm wrong about that because it sounds like the science that you're referencing is talking more about just not writing historical wrongs as much as, say, fixing and accounting for problems that happen in the here and now in the hiring process, which, fair enough, I mean, that's kind of the same thing in different words.
But, like, I think that it's this weird place where no one wants to, and maybe they're right to not.
No one wants to say, yes, we need to do a reverse racism.
Literally, that's reversing racism.
That's how you would have to do it.
There's just no such thing as a solution that does not factor in race.
There just isn't.
That's how we got here.
You've deprived certain people.
You can't then say, well, now what we'll do is we'll treat everyone the same from there on because that is just perpetuating the problem.
And so I don't know.
It's, I think, I feel like I'm not sure what my point is other than.
Maybe it should be doing something.
Maybe it should be increasing the representation of people of color.
It feels like they have the power now, so we're fucked either way.
I don't think it matters, but I don't know.
I guess maybe I'm arguing for America 2 or 3.0, whichever one we're on.
Like, maybe if we ever get that, which I don't think we will, maybe we can just be like, yeah, we want to do a reverse racism.
Maybe not in those words, but like, yeah, you need to actually account for this.
You need to actually look at race in order to fix racism.
That's what you have to do.
Yeah.
Another point I want to make is like, keep in mind that this guide did not come out, you know, like, Yeah.
Right.
This came out years ago during the previous administration, the Joe Biden administration.
And here's a point that kind of helps illustrate this regarding the developing a broad and deep group of candidates.
It says, The chair should consult with your school's Office of Faculty Affairs to learn if there is an affirmative action placement goal for faculty positions at the advertised level.
A goal is by no means a quota, but in searches with a placement goal for women or minorities, it is that much more important that the committee conduct robust outreach.
So this guide is operating under the laws and the obligations as a federal Now, does this magically change with an executive order from Trump?
Not necessarily.
It obviously didn't change with the Supreme Court ruling, at least on paper.
But that doesn't mean that they weren't implementing changes at the policy level to make sure that they're following the law there, too.
And again, that was for students and not for faculty.
So what you're saying is it already was a very watered-down thing, which, I mean, is better than nothing.
But I don't know, it just strikes me that it just comes down to if the Or is that Justice Roberts?
Now I'm blank.
Now I'm doubting myself.
One of them always says that.
In order to stop discrimination on the basis of race, you have to stop discrimination.
It might be all of them.
One generic conservative asshole.
If they're right about that, then all this is right.
Yeah.
If their version of things is right, that, oh yeah, no, racism is right.
Then, like, I suppose it follows that, yeah, any effort to try to make sure there's more racial equality inevitably involves accounting for race.
And so therefore is racist.
That's what they believe.
Yeah.
I just think they're wrong.
Yeah.
And it's not fair.
Like, you can't ensure fairness without looking at what we've done historically.
And so it's just this frustrating thing where I do feel like as it's, you know, being dismantled, I think there's attempts to kind of moderate what it is a little bit, you know, and I get that because maybe saving something is better than nothing.
I think it definitely is, but I worry that it's going to turn out we just lived an incredibly unique time where for Isn't that crazy?
Oh, I did too.
I thought the conservative assholes were kind of an exception and they were just going to scream loudly against the inevitable wave of progress kind of thing.
And I don't know now.
I really don't know, especially with The way they phrase stuff now is so much more deferential to that point.
You can just tell that even the way the media is covering this is more deferential to these arguments in a way that's really disturbing to me.
It's just sad.
Speaking of the media, the coverage has been after Christopher Rufo posted this Twitter thread.
And specifically, we're talking about this document.
It was public facing on the website.
Oh, so the thing they uncovered was already- so there's two things that they talk about this is the public facing one that is not But he knows what he's doing.
Rufo is really good at this and he knows that if he calls it a trove, it's like we found their secret trove of discrimination documents.
And an unnamed source from Harvard who can't reveal their name because they're afraid of retribution.
They'll be put in the white gulags along with all the other applicants.
So specific.
Just a bunch of people in suits.
I just came for an interview!
You're white!
Stay in there!
So specific to this document, which was public facing, it is no longer on the website.
And so naturally, the coverage has been, after activists exposes Harvard illegal hiring practices, Harvard pulls it off their website.
Yeah, that's why you don't fucking back down!
Yeah, I think I understand what's happening here.
So you can still find it.
The racist, fascist one?
No, but on Harvard's side.
This is my theory.
Let me know what you think.
You can still access it through the Wayback Machine.
Not really the PDF.
That's really hard to do through the Wayback Machine, but, you know, I had access to that otherwise.
But I could see everything else that's on that webpage.
It's a recruitment best practices webpage.
And it's not just this guide, right?
There's other things that exist there.
Things like disability resources for current and prospective faculty.
I would think that, you know, folks who have a disability, that's not something that Harvard is, like, trying to hide, like, resources for their current faculty or anything like that.
They have that sample candidate evaluation sheet as a separate link on that website, background reading and resources about, you know, implicit associations, unconscious bias, some of the programs that they use to help develop the guide itself.
And because the whole page is gone, it's not just the guide that is gone.
The whole page, it just says that the address is invalid.
My guess is that it was moved to like an internal only access, you know, web access page by the IT department at Harvard based on legal suggestion at Harvard.
And they're reviewing it to make sure that like that they're all comfortable with the material on the page.
I don't think they're taking it away to hide it.
That is what everybody is saying.
Like they're trying to pretend like it was never there.
I know, but it's just it's the language around it.
And so I feel like most legal departments of places are going to be like, OK, we're getting like ripped apart here.
Let's take a breather.
Let's, you know, pull it off public facing so we can take a look at it, sit down, make sure that there's nothing that's violating any laws.
That's my theory.
You don't think so?
Do you think Harvard?
I don't.
think Harvard's giving in at this point.
I'm not so...
I mean, it's possible that's what they're doing, but I just know that if there was any legal trouble here, taking it down doesn't really do anything.
The fact that it was up and was what they were doing this whole time, unless I don't think they are.
I don't think taking it down even does anything.
So it just looks weak to me.
It just looks like panicked PR response that ends up fueling the fire and making you look even weaker.
Just stand by your fucking shit.
Yeah.
Stand by it.
It's interesting, though, because like they have other pages that kind of highlight these diversity initiatives that stand by.
Maybe they actually are going to ultimately change this and say it was wrong.
I don't know.
I don't know.
But like their recruitment dropdown menu still includes things like building a pool of applicants, which has directory and job board listings like the American Association of University Women Directory, diverse scholar and minority postdoc directories and job board, the Black Doctoral Network.
Like these are all things that are currently available on.
Otherwise, why wouldn't they take all that stuff down, too?
Because Rufo hasn't gotten to it yet.
I don't know.
I let him know that it exists.
Yeah, because this is a panic PR response.
They're only doing this to when people complain, because that's the stupid world we live in, where people can't just stick to their guns.
they're afraid and they're constantly trying to like Yeah.
But I don't know.
I'm not sure.
Maybe you're right.
Yeah.
I mean, I guess we'll see as things continue to develop here.
The other document that Christopher Ruffo really wants to make sure everyone knows about is something that appears to be internal.
Now, it's a single page.
So the internal trove of documents we get is one that is public-facing.
And a one-pager.
I'm going to send this to you because...
I'm sorry.
Word police, that's not a trove.
Yeah, I'm going to send this to you because I might need some of your thoughts, Mr. Math, on figuring out what we are supposed to learn from this.
Oh, joy.
So this is titled Global Executive Summary, and it was part of their annual plan from 2024.
From what I can figure out here so far, it's basically a PDF of an Excel spreadsheet where it lists the location of a particular entity at Harvard, like Harvard Business School, Harvard Medical School.
And then there are job groups within that, you know, things like staff assistants or like library technicians, et cetera, et cetera.
And then That's the column next to it.
And then a specific characteristic, a protected class.
So sometimes it'll say minority, sometimes it'll say female.
And a percentage to show like the makeup of that protected class to the total number of employees.
So we have an employment percentage number, which I think is the number of people of that protected class that make up the total employees.
Yeah, but it's weird that it's just like either minority and then some are female.
What would that be?
I feel like there's a filter on it or something that we can't see.
And then the next percentage over is the availability percentage, which initially I was like, is that a vacancy percentage?
But the numbers start getting higher.
And then there's also a current year goal at the end, which is equivalent to the availability percentage.
So I wanted to send this to you.
Yeah, why is that the same number?
Yeah.
It's literally the same fucking number everywhere.
And that's what I'm saying.
Like, I can't figure out what we are supposed to learn from this.
How Christopher Rufo explains it.
Okay.
He says, Employers seldom set goals like these if they don't intend them to be acted on.
These particular goals are hilarious.
Harvard has a few job categories that are already female dominated, sometimes with over 70% of its employees in those categories being female.
Rather than being concerned with why more men aren't applying, Harvard sets a goal to make these job categories Even more female-dominated.
Now, all we get is this one page.
There's very little context here.
I feel like even the footnotes at the bottom here don't help us understand there is clearly something that is not included in this PDF because this footnote at the bottom, underutilization for large groups, underutilization for small groups, is indicated using, you know, standard deviation, etc., etc.
We don't get any of that data in whatever's been PDF'd here.
Something's missing.
Why wouldn't they include, if this is such a damning document, why are we only getting this one pager with nothing else from somebody else?
supposedly someone from inside Harvard who had access to all of it.
Yeah.
OK, so just So I was just thinking like, if that's a percentage of employees, then it wouldn't make sense.
If one of these says 70.59%, it would be weird if that didn't give you a full number because if you're dealing with, you know, for that one, for example, it says 34 under the number of employees.
So I'm just trying to check like in case this is totally something different than we think.
Like, if you multiply, I multiplied a few of them out, and it does tend to, within very close rounding, give you a whole number every time.
So I guess that tells us that whatever that employment percentage is does seem to, at least that makes sense, like that it does seem to represent some whole number of those employees.
But is the number of employees listed here, is that the denominator?
And then we don't have the numerator because we have the percentage.
Possibly.
This is just the first thing I'm checking.
I don't know.
But in terms of the availability percentage, that is incomprehensible.
That makes no sense.
Right.
So if you look at the Harvard School of Dental Medicine for staff assistants, there's 27 number of employees, 70.37 percent.
Or female, I guess.
And then it says availability percentage is 91.76%.
91.76%.
What's the availability?
Why?
And there's nothing regarding those footnotes there about...
Like, there's no indication that it says it should be indicated.
Aren't your goals in pink?
Yes.
Indicate the same location, job, group, protected class combination had a placement goal in the previous AAP.
Yeah.
What?
I don't know.
And so they're treating this as like a smoking gun.
two-thirds of them are already female, but they're not going to be happy until 91% of them are female.
Okay, let me find that one because this doesn't make...
Do we really think 72.54% of them are women?
Because these numbers are wild.
Yeah, but some of those positions do tend to...
Lean more female heavy.
Could it be that there's no way that it's like the number of employees is also the protected class total and we need to find the denominator?
There's no way, right?
Because wouldn't that be a lot of...
It might make the availability percentage make more sense, maybe?
No.
So, this is bizarre.
So, there's nobody's, like, explain this yet?
That is the best explanation I have gotten.
I haven't seen anything from Harvard regarding this.
Like, for example, okay, the availability percentage and the current year goal, those being the same, make no fucking sense.
Like, there's no explanation for that.
And while the employment percentage ones do indicate we're dealing with whole numbers, The availability and current year goal ones don't.
Yeah.
So it seems a little weird that you would do that.
So like take, for example, Graduate School of Education Publication and, I don't know, Communication Manager.
Yeah, it looks like it.
It says 10 and then there's minority.
Zero.
Zero percent.
And then under.
Availability says 33.93%.
So that's what I was saying.
Initially, I was looking at this and I was like, oh, are those vacant positions?
Even that doesn't make sense.
But it doesn't make sense because then when you look at some of the other examples, there's no way that there's 90% vacancy in some of these.
What also doesn't make sense is why would you have, for only some of them, and just listing minority, for one, what minority?
That matters.
And also, Wouldn't you expect that you would have, say, for example, central administration guards?
Wouldn't you expect each line like that to have, like, I don't know, five or six lines that are all central administration guards, central administration guards, and one would be female, one would be male, one would be minority.
One would be minority, too.
Like, it doesn't make sense that only sometimes is it female.
None of this makes any sense.
It feels like it's really out of context or something.
Yeah, yeah, it does.
Utilization.
Utilization?
The heading is Utilization and Goals Detail.
What would that have to do?
Well, so that's tying to those footnotes we see.
Underutilization for large groups is indicated, and underutilization for small groups is indicated.
But we don't have anything about the small groups, the large groups.
We don't have, like, there's nothing regarding the utilization.
I just feel like there is so much missing from this, and we're supposed to just look at the numbers and interpret the way that Christopher Rufo says we should interpret it.
And I just can't.
Like, I don't see that.
It doesn't make any sense.
That's definitely not.
Correct.
Yeah.
So no matter how I try to interpret this, the availability and the current year goal being identical just is, that's useless.
That doesn't make any sense.
Yeah.
I will definitely include this link in the show notes, folks, so you guys can check this out for yourselves because this is just impossible to understand what this is supposed to mean and why we should be pissed.
Like, it just doesn't make any sense to me.
Yeah, it doesn't at all.
Yeah.
No sense.
Well, now you've given me something that I'll never stop thinking about.
Have you tried running it through ChatGPT?
No, you can.
I'm going to try it just for fun.
While you're running that, let me read a little bit more about what Christopher Rufo says we should glean from this.
He says, these goals also potentially violate civil rights law.
Dan Morinoff, executive director of the American Civil Rights Project, suggested that the document may legally expose Harvard.
But does Dan Mornoff understand, like, what the heck they're talking about?
Doesn't make any sense.
And as I said, Harvard has not responded about this.
I have not seen anyone try to offer a different explanation about what this means.
As far as I know, we're breaking it down, and we're the only ones to have done this.
So no one from Harvard has been like, because I think you're right that there's got to be columns missing.
There's got to be something.
Yeah.
Because there's no fucking chance that it's what they're saying.
And not because they're always liars, which they are, because what they're saying doesn't make any sense.
Yeah.
I have not seen anywhere where they have responded to this.
This was part of the same exact piece where they were talking about best practices guide, and their response to that was just pulling it down and not responding to it publicly.
Yeah.
So I feel like they're probably treating this as the same thing.
Maybe we'll get an explanation from them eventually.
Maybe a release of the entire annual plan, you know, redacted with any sensitive information that they can't share.
I don't know.
But it's the pinned tweet for Christopher Ruffo right now.
So it's getting like, like primo exposure and it's nonsense.
Well, you've given me a problem that will haunt me for the rest of my days.
This doesn't make any sense.
There's no way.
That they are trying to increase the percentage of female staff assistants from 77% to 88.5%.
Yeah, or 91.57% or whatever.
And the Harvard Business School staff assistants from 72.54% to 91.57%.
There is just no way that's what they're trying to do.
It makes no sense that those columns are the same because what is it even doing if they're the same?
It doesn't make any sense.
Availability percentage.
ChatGPT thinks that's the relevant job market, but I don't really think that actually makes sense either.
There's no way that the relevant job market has 88.5% of female staff assistants.
That doesn't seem right.
And it also just doesn't make any sense that you'd have one quote-unquote minority line item.
And they're wildly different.
It's one thing for the female ones, some of the jobs like guards or something, maybe it kind of makes sense that there's that discrepancy, but the numbers for minority all over, which suggests to me, are they Are they different minority groups that they would be doing?
Or does this mean something else entirely?
Like, is something else going on here?
Yeah.
To your earlier point, too, why wouldn't we see an additional line item for Minority for, you know, central administration staff assistants.
Why do we only care about increasing the number of females in those jobs?
Why wouldn't we also want to increase the number of minorities in those jobs?
But trades and grounds workers were focused on increasing the number of minorities there, but not females.
It makes no sense.
I'm sure there are hidden columns.
There are other pages here that we're not seeing.
I wish someone would clarify this.
I know.
I know.
I do not know.
Is it made up?
I don't know what this would be.
I can't even imagine.
And remember, Christopher Ruffo has the ear of the Trump administration.
So whatever he says this means, that's what they're going to run with.
Those are the talking points that they're going to use when Trump starts talking to the media about this.
When the fight with Harvard continues, because it will continue, this is the material that they're going to be using.
And it doesn't make sense.
Crazy.
I don't understand this.
Yeah.
Well, my final thoughts on this, just want to leave you with some of Christopher Ruffo's reflections after his daily appearance.
On April 16th, he wrote a piece called The Right is Winning the Battle Over Higher Education.
Yeah, I mean, sure.
It doesn't seem like he's wrong.
Yeah.
So specifically from this, it's after mounting a successful fight against DEI, the political right has come to accept that if there must be a civil rights regime, it should be one of its own making.
Rather than continue to defer to left-wing interpretations of civil rights law, the right can now advance a framework grounded in colorblind equality, not racialist ideology.
So it should just be not civil rights.
The first field of battle is higher education.
The Trump administration has set its sights on the Ivy League universities, which have not only advanced the ideologies of left-wing racialism, but made them administrative policy.
Critics have called this approach weaponizing civil rights law, but civil rights laws have always been a weapon.
Conservatives have finally decided to wield it.
Wow.
Yeah, I mean, kinda, yeah.
It's just horrifying, but wow.
Wow.
Look, this is a mystery.
We have a lot of people who are academics and stuff, people who might not know.
Incredible thinkers, yeah.
Put the link for this in the show notes, please.
Oh, I will.
I will.
Somebody tell me what this is.
This is haunting me.
It doesn't make any sense.
There's no way it's what he's saying it is.
Like, I guess I don't really know why you would have, like, line items for minority for female.
No, I don't.
So is it made up or is it something so out of context that it, I just don't know.
So weird.
I know, it's a mystery.
It's a mystery.
So, yeah, folks, if you have any idea on how this should be interpreted.
Boy, you can be the debunkers.
Yeah.
Yes.
Yeah.
Please.
Please chime in.
Well, that's a bummer.
He sucks.
On behalf of Sacramento, we're sorry for Christopher Ruffo.
We need to recall him.
Yeah.
Well, this is what happens.
This is what happens, everyone, when you don't listen to Where There's Woken Up.
This fucking sucks.
All right.
Well, please, somebody solve this mystery.
I cannot wait to know what this is.
Yeah.
We'll be talking more about Christopher Ruffo in the future, too, unfortunately.
