San Francisco's Bizarre Reparations Bill

Rare image of Daniel Lurie 
actually looking to the right.

Curmie can’t remember the exact circumstances, but a few years ago a friend presented him with a check for $100 million with the warning that “it might be difficult to cash.”  That moment was called to mind recently when Curmie read about San Francisco mayor Danie Lurie’s signing a bill to create a reparations fund for black residents.

The headline on the Financial Express article, in particular, caught Curmie’s attention. “Over 4600 Californians likely to get $5M reparations under new law.”  “Likely”?  Seriously?  The first sentence of the piece by Aditi (whoever or whatever that may be) tells a more accurate tale: “San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie has signed an ordinance creating a Reparations Fund that could one day offer up to $5 million to eligible Black residents, though no city money has been allocated yet.”  Seldom have more modifiers been crammed into a shorter space: “Could.”  “One day.”  “Up to.”  “Eligible.”  Not to mention that literally no money has actually been designated for the purpose. 

<Sigh.>

Let’s not completely leave aside the whole issue of whether reparations ought to exist at all, even in theory.  Curmie thinks not, but you’re free to disagree, Gentle Reader.  Certainly there has been historical prejudice against blacks, but the same could be said in varying degrees to people who are female, gay, or short, bald, or left-handed, for that matter.  There are about 11,000 people of Japanese descent living in San Francisco.  Some of them, no doubt, were interned during World War II for no crime other than where their ancestors were born.  A good many more are their direct descendants.  Yet there is no movement to offer reparations to those whose claims to have suffered directly are so readily, objectively, provable.  Go figure.

But even if you think reparations are appropriate, lump sum payments or $5 million seem a bit extreme.  And the logistics are daunting, to say the least.  Who is eligible?  How black is “black”?  Would bi-racial Barack Obama be eligible if he lived there?  Or does the fact that he doesn’t need the money disqualify him?  How long must a prospective recipient have lived in San Francisco to be eligible, or is the city going to pass out millions to every black person who moves into the city?  Are there any criteria other than race?  For example, must an applicant demonstrate specific harm?  And on and on…

Exactly where that 4600 recipients number noted in the headline above comes from is unclear, as it represents fewer than 10% of the black population of the city.  But even that number would mean a total outlay of $23 billion.  Expand that to the entire black population of the city and the cost balloons to about $275 billion, or the entire city budget for over 17 years.

There’s literally no way the San Francisco will ever come up with anything like the kind of money we’re talking about here, especially since the city is broke, running a $1,000,000,000 budget deficit.  So no money is being allocated for this agency.  That’s the good news.  Ah, but you see, that’s where the private donations come in.  Riiiiiight.  So we’re expecting billionaires (because that’s who it would take) to fund a program that helps only black people, and only those who live in San Francisco.  Curmie would suspect that anyone interested in the general cause of helping black people would rather donate to, say, the NAACP or the Thurgood Marshall College Fund.  Still, if people want to voluntarily fund this program, that is their prerogative.  Curmie thinks it’s silly, but so is buying a Trump Bible or investing your life savings in bitcoin.  Stupid is as stupid does. 

If the fund is going to rely on individual donations, as it must, then the logical solution is to turn the whole business over to a private foundation to administer.  That’s the real rub: by signing on to this idiotic bill, Lurie is indeed committing city funds to the program.  Merely establishing the agency means someone has to run it, even if there’s no money there to allocate.  And the logistics of trying to figure out the details would not only be time-consuming, but would almost certainly lead to litigation, costing the city even more money to support a program that is unwieldy, unethical, and legally problematic to say the least.  Curmie supposes that establishing the new agency is some form of perverse virtue signaling, but he confesses he doesn’t see the virtue involved.  When Curmie was a lad, San Francisco was pretty much synonymous with drug culture.  It would appear that the hallucinogens are still plentiful there.

We are left with two possibilities as to why Lurie signed this bill.  Perhaps he’s a brilliant strategist, willing to spend a tiny fraction of the city’s budget to get the proponents to shut up for a while.  Or stupidity and cowardice are in a death struggle to become his defining characteristic.  Curmie leans towards the latter explanation.

Perhaps the Stupidest F*cking Idea in the History of Stupid F*cking Ideas

Thirty-something years ago, Curmie gave a paper at a conference called The Core and the Canon: A National Debate, held at the University of North Texas.  (A revised version of that work was subsequently published in what amounted to a Proceedings volume.)  As a direct result of his participation in the conference, Curmie was invited to join the rather newly founded National Association of Scholars (NAS), only to receive a snotty and condescending rejection letter because at the time he didn’t have a PhD (he was chairing a department at an accredited college, but that was insufficient, apparently).  Today, membership is open to anyone whose credit card payment goes through.  Curmie, needless to say, is not a member.

The NAS webpage claims that the organization “upholds the standards of a liberal arts education that fosters intellectual freedom, searches for the truth, and promotes virtuous citizenship.”  As Curmie is wont to say, “if you have to tell me, it ain’t so.”  The NAS is predictably right-wing, even de facto advocating signing on to that absurd Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.  But if the Compact was a really bad idea, one of the NAS’s more recent forays into the world of educational policy is a classic of pseudo-intellectuality and downright daftness.  Indeed, this is a contender for the coveted title of Stupidest Fucking Idea in the History of Stupid Fucking Ideas.  The NAS was apparently primarily responsible for drafting this nonsense.

The proposal in question is something called the Faculty Merit Act.  It would require:

… all parts of a state university system to publish every higher-education standardized test score (SAT, ACT, CRT, GRE, LSAT, MCAT, etc.) of every faculty member, as well as the standardized test score of every applicant for the faculty member’s position, of every applicant selected for a first interview, and every applicant selected for a final interview. The Act also requires the university to post the average standardized test score of the faculty in every department. It finally requires everyone in the hiring process, both applicant and administrators, to affirm under penalty of perjury that they have provided every standardized test score.

Predictably, the National Review proclaimed this “a very good idea.”  It is not.  It is not in the same universe as a good idea.

This inanity is based on a series of, shall we say, dubious speculations masquerading as facts: that universities “draft job advertisements with specializations that will ensure only radicals need apply,” that “few close observers believe that the average professor of ethnic studies is as acute as the average professor of physics,” and above all that a standardized test score, albeit that it “is only a rough proxy for academic merit,” nonetheless will “provide some measure of general intelligence.”  All of this suggests a quantification fetish, completely oblivious to the fact that such a measure is virtually meaningless… or, perhaps, not so much “oblivious” as “fully conscious of the fact but seeking to avoid admitting it.”

First off, even the NAS admits that “Some professors will have a greater ability to teach and do research than appears on a SAT score.”  Please substitute the words “virtually all” for “some” and add “or lesser” after “greater” in the previous sentence, Gentle Reader; then it will be accurate.  The idea that a 40-year-old PhD should be judged at all by how they did on a single day when they were 17 is beyond laughable.  Standardized test scores are determined by a lot of variables.  Native intelligence is one, but so are the quality of teachers a student has had up to that point, socio-economic status, whether the test-taker has taken this kind of exam before, whether they’re running a fever or just heard some bad news about a dear friend of family member… 

Curmie has written about his own experience with standardized tests several times.  He won’t link them all here; you can use the word search feature on the blog page as well as he can, Gentle Reader.  But it might be worth mentioning that Curmie did better on the GRE than on the SAT, and better on the SAT than on the PSAT.  Did he learn something between taking those exams?  Sure.  But so, presumably, did everyone else in his age group, and the competition was presumably getting tougher: in Curmie’s day, at least, everyone took the PSAT; you took the SAT if you were part of the smaller percentage of students intending to be college-bound, and the GRE only if you were looking at grad school.  Curmie did better because he’d learned how to take that kind of test, not because he’d grown appreciably in intellect.

More to the point, those scores tell us literally nothing about someone’s skillset, only about a very rough approximation of their aptitude.  (That’s the “A” in “SAT,” after all.).  Curmie actually got a perfect score on the GRE in math.  But he’s never been more qualified to teach a college-level math course (except perhaps what is euphemistically called “College Algebra”) than his colleague in the Math Department is to teach Theatre History or Acting.  Even at the most introductory collegiate level, specific disciplinary knowledge and teaching ability are both vastly more important than intelligence, even if those standardized tests really did measure the latter.

But then we get to what the NAS considers the principal benefit of their proposal: “Perhaps most importantly, this information will provide a mass of statistical information that can be used for lawsuits…. The Faculty Merit Act will provide a mass of information that can be used by plaintiffs against discriminatory colleges and universities” (emphasis added).  Were Curmie of a cynical disposition, he might suggest that the NAS’s real goal is to dismantle public post-secondary education: add to the administrivia, costing a mountain of time and resources; limit applications because there will be a lot of prospective candidates who decide it’s none of anyone’s damned business how they did on a standardized test decades ago; and, above all, open the university up to frivolous lawsuits just because some rejected candidate who would put coffee to sleep got good board scores.  Curmie hasn’t received a single offer to teach math despite his GRE score; he’s a white male and therefore a victim of woke ideology, and dammit, he’s going to sue somebody.  😉

Curmie also notes that David Randall, the director of research at the NAS who seems to be running point for this operation, does indeed have a PhD and some scholarly publications.  What he doesn’t appear to have is any experience whatsoever as a university faculty member.  Imagine Curmie’s surprise.

This proposal is particularly diabolical because some of its foundation is indeed true: there have been plenty of DEI hires that didn’t exactly work out to the benefit of the university or its students.  Are job applicants individuals or representatives of a group?  The answer, of course, is “yes.”  To the extent that they’re the former as well as the latter, the impetus for this proposition is understandable.  That doesn’t make it anything other than moronic.

Curmie first learned of this proposed legislation from Peter Greene at Curmudgucation.  Unsurprisingly, we’re in agreement.  But you might want to check out his take, too.  Let’s give him the last word, shall we? “The Faculty Merit Act is just dumb. It's a dumb idea that wants to turn dumb policy into a dumb law and some National Review editor should feel dumb for giving it any space. If this dumb bill shows its face in your state, do be sure to call out its dumbness and note that whoever attached their name to it is just not a serious person.”