The Bulwark has published my new article further debunking the Heritage Foundation’s unsupported claims that campus DEI programs are bastions of anti-Semitism.
Here is the gist:
Are University Diversity Staffers Rabid Anti-Semites? A New Report Would Like You to Think So.
Serious social scientists observe some basic principles. They do not report selective or exaggerated results. They make their data available so others can evaluate its accuracy and significance. They are responsive to questions. Politicized studies, which are unreliable by nature, do not adhere to these simple conventions. A case in point is a recent report from the Heritage Foundation purporting to show rampant anti-Semitism in university diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs. Although there has been an alarming increase in anti-Semitic incidents on many campuses, the Heritage report does not support its conclusion about widespread anti-Jewish sentiments in DEI programs—a problem exacerbated by the authors’ refusal to respond forthrightly to inquiries and criticism.
In fact, the reported figures tell us nothing about “DEI staff” in general, or even the relative prevalence of anti-Israel sentiment in the ranks, because they do not include the number of individuals responsible for the negative tweets. The report confuses the volume of speech with the number of speakers. There may have been only a handful of rabid DEI officials tweeting hundreds of times each, while the overwhelming majority said nothing about Israel or China at all. If even twenty or thirty staffers hate-tweeted dozens of times apiece, we would still have virtually no valid information about DEI personnel as a group (including over 2000 non-tweeting staffers identified by Greene and Paul but excluded from the study).
Anti-Semitism is a real and serious problem on some campuses, as recently described in a bipartisan letter from 39 members of Congress to the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, and I do not doubt its venomous presence among some cohort of DEI personnel. I have written often about the need to confront progressive and left-wing anti-Semitism, but that cannot succeed when overheated accusations are founded on manipulated data.
You can read the complete article here.
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