There’s a clear LEGAL distinction between slavery in the US and the internment of Japanese-Americans. The interned Japanese-Americans were US citizens who were incarcerated without due process-- i.e. they were deprived of the Constitutional rights to which they were entitled at that time.
@twoinanddone - Ben Franklin was awarded an honorary degree in 1753. @canoe2015 - maybe you’re right. Davenport was the founder of New Haven.
No. As far as I know, the only association between Franklin and Yale is that he happens to be the “role model” of the doner of the new colleges.
I think in making the renaming decision, Yale is not only weighing the current students’ opinions but also their alumni’s. It seems alumni aren’t as supportive as some of the current students about renaming Calhoun. I can understand that the name and unique traditions of their RC is very much part of the memories and experiences of the alumni. On the one hand, if the name hurts some students’ feeling then it is a true impact. On the other, I don’t think anyone believes that a college name is somehow representing Yale’s position in slavery or racial equality, or that Yale is in any way more encouraging or lenient to racial discrimination than other colleges. Isn’t Yale already one of those elite colleges that pioneer in increasing racial diversity through their outreaching programs? So, while it’s fair to raise the issue, does renaming Calhoun deserve so much attention (and agony)?
To believe this would be so ignorant of business.
Diversity sitting at any desk or occupying any position cannot make up for bad management systems, an ill-conceived product, improper pricing methods, or poor distribution/supply chain procedures.
Speaking as a former CEO, I will tell you that top skill is top skill, regardless of the packaging. Therefore, if a company hires the best talent irrespective of what the person is, then, by definition, the company will do well, assuming there are good business systems in place. Anything else is only believed by people who have never done business and are pushing made up theories to satisfy their beliefs.
I would say unequivocally that diversity has nothing to do with whether a company gets worse or better if the employees are following the company system and the systems are good ones.
However, diversity for only diversity sake could make a company worse if employees think that the business is there to assuage their beliefs and are continually offended by something, such as certain clients etc. Those people can make a company worse by not knowing when and how to leave their personal feelings and beliefs outside the office - clients pick up on this very easily and quickly, and there goes some of your business out the door.
@awcntdb You obviously haven’t seen the plethora of scholarly articles, studies, and data in many major scientific journals that has proven diversity makes for better decision making… try googling how diversity makes for better decision making and innovation … hands down the proof is in favoring diversity in the workplace. You couldn’t be more wrong in your analysis of diversity having nothing to do with it.
Hear, hear, @runswimyoga
I could post literally over 100 articles and studies
from Scientific American http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-diversity-makes-us-smarter/ How Diversity Makes Us Smarter
Being around people who are different from us makes us more creative, more diligent and harder-working
http://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/better_decisions_through_diversity
New research finds that socially different group members do more than simply introduce new viewpoints or approaches. In the study, diverse groups outperformed more homogeneous groups not because of an influx of new ideas, but because diversity triggered more careful information processing that is absent in homogeneous groups.
from Stanford https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/deborah-gruenfeld-diverse-teams-produce-better-decisions
http://www.dazziemckelvy.com/workforce-diversity-creates-better-decision-making/
WORKFORCE DIVERSITY CREATES BETTER DECISION MAKING
from McKinsey &company http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/why-diversity-matters “New research makes it increasingly clear that companies with more diverse workforces perform better financially.”
http://difference-works.com/diversity-better-decisions-and-innovation/
The Next IQ, Arin Reeves explores how collective intelligence is always better than individual intelligence. She presents study after study showing the dynamics of diversity on decision making.
http://bigthink.com/big-think-edge/diversity-breeds-creativity
http://phd.meghan-smith.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Cox-T.-Jr.-Blake-S.-D…pdf
EVERY major business school teaches this principle advocating for the impact diversity has now.
Back to the topic at hand.
The question “Should Yale name a new residence hall being constructed now (2016) after Calhoun?” Is, IMO, a fundamentally different question from “Must Calhoun be renamed?” If the first question had been posed, I’d have a very different reaction.
Btw since we’re talking about Franklin, he had slaves and the Pennsylvania Gazette routinely carried ads for slave trade.
Calhoun is just a redoubt that protects Yale, Franklin and maybe other names. It cannot be surrendered.
Ben Franklin in later life spoke and wrote against slavery and became the leader of an abolitionist group. He had owned two slaves previously.
@Pizzagirl I think we are talking a matter of degree here.
Franklin owned slaves at some point in his life- yes, but he contributed far more to society that he is known for… his life’s work (and fame) was not in arguing vigorously for slavery against growing currents against slavery as Calhoun’s was.
Calhoun vehemently gave speeches in favor of slavery as a “great institution” that benefited the “inferior race” (African Americans) especially. That was his rallying cry, swan song … as CNN says:
“Calhoun’s shining, heartless paeans to keeping black people in bondage and making others believe the same can be seen as uniquely disgusting – disgusting enough that he might not furnish the name of a college, of all things, on a university campus.”
In trying to create a campus that is inclusive of black Americans (so we can create a more inclusive diverse educational environment) its not hard to imagine how awful it would make black students feel to have to live and sleep in Calhoun College, wearing Calhoun merchandise and becoming Calhoun fellows… thats awful. The students themselves are telling us this.
A Black kitchen worker in Calhoun College smashed the old stained glass window that depicted slaves working in the fields because walking by the degrading image every day was so infuriating and demeaning to him that he couldn’t take it anymore. He was arrested but the students protested so much for him that the school dropped the charges.
How Scientists Lie About Their Data
http://news.stanford.edu/2015/11/16/fraud-science-papers-111615/
“As Yale continues to debate the legacy of John C. Calhoun, an alumnus and leading 19th-century politician and slaveholder for whom one of its residential colleges is named, the university said on Tuesday that it would not press charges in the case of a black dining hall worker who smashed a stained-glass panel depicting slaves carrying cotton.”
“No employee should be subject to coming to work and seeing slave portraits on a daily basis,“It’s 2016, I shouldn’t have to come to work and see things like that.” Mr. Menafee told a police officer, according to the Yale Police Department’s incident report.
“Yale has to decide which is more valuable: a stained-glass window, or the dignity and humanity of the black people who live and work at Yale,” said Megan Fountain, an alumna and volunteer with the activist group Unidad Latina en Accion, which helped organize the rally.
Yale said in a statement that it had requested that the state’s attorney not press charges, and that the university would not be seeking restitution for the broken window.
Yale also noted that after Mr. Menafee broke the window, a committee recommended that several windows related to slavery be removed and “conserved for future study and a possible contextual exhibition.”
The name of Calhoun College has long been the target of student activists, who say it celebrates a slave owner and makes minority students feel unwelcome.
Also makes for a hostile work environment…
I’m willing to bet Yale was “sorry/not-sorry” the window was broken and hence that’s why they didn’t press charges. But whether or not the window was broken or whether or not they pressed charges doesn’t really have anything to do with anything.
Of those articles you posted, the ones that dealt with executive boards are correlation studies, not causation studies. Do you have something that suggests a causal effect at this level?
This encapsulates the problem with sociology. Anything can be correlated, but nothing can be causally-linked unless one wants to do a real, hard scientific study.
I would bet that when one looks at those executive boards and companies, they will belong to specific sectors that showed growth regardless of board make-up, and the percentage of growth and profitability are insignificant with respect to the diversity of the board.
FWIW, here is the stained-glass window the employee smashed:
https://tribwtic.files.■■■■■■■■■■■■■/2016/07/window.jpg?quality=85&strip=all&w=628
I don’t feel this image glorified slavery, rather it just depicted reality at one point in our history. But maybe that’s my ethno-centrism coming through?
I will say that the multitude of vignette images in the glass, in the stonework around campus really give Yale a lot of its charm.
The evidence is growing – there really is a business case for diversity
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/4f4b3c8e-d521-11e3-9187-00144feabdc0.html?siteedition=intl#axzz4HHC6DA9D
Involving more than 40 case studies and 1,800 employee surveys, it looked at what it termed “two-dimensional diversity”, namely “inherent diversity”– such as gender and race – combined with “acquired diversity” – such as global experience and language skills.
It found that publicly traded companies with two-dimensional diversity were 45 per cent more likely than those without to have expanded market share in the past year and 70 per cent more likely to have captured a new market. When teams had one or more members who represented a target end-user, the entire team was as much as 158 per cent more likely to understand that target end-user and innovate accordingly.
A 2012 research report from Deloitte, “Waiter, is that inclusion in my soup?”, edges us further towards causation. It is based on the experiences of 1,550 employees in three large Australian businesses. It identified an 80 per cent improvement in business performance when levels of diversity and inclusion were high.
An American Sociological Association study supports this, finding that for every 1 per cent rise in the rate of gender diversity and ethnic diversity in a workforce there is a 3 and 9 per cent rise in sales revenue, respectively
Researchers Horwitz and Horwitz reviewed 20 years of research on team diversity in 2007 and identified a positive relationship between diversity and team performance.
An experiment by Massachusetts-based Tufts University demonstrated that diverse groups perform better than homogeneous teams by when it deployed 200 people in mock juries – the mixed juries all performed better than those comprising only white or only black jurors.
http://amj.aom.org/content/42/6/662.short
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08874417.2003.11647535
http://asq.sagepub.com/content/44/4/741.short
http://asq.sagepub.com/content/45/4/802.short
http://www.raeng.org.uk/publications/other/the-business-case-for-equality-and-diversity
https://web.duke.edu/equity/toolkit/documents/DiversityMatters.pdf
I don’t think anyone here is arguing against diversity any more than anyone is arguing for slavery.