July 30, 2009

Henry Louis Gates, Pointy-Haired Boss

Craig Offman wrote a Salon article in 1999, The Making of Henry Louis Gates, CEO, on the making of the Encarta Africana encyclopedia, "edited" by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Kwame Anthony Appiah with funding from Microsoft:
On a logistical level, Africana's 15-month gestation was fraught with complications. Grueling deadlines led to overexertion. Editors contended with bouts of plagiarism. Open revolt broke out among nearly a dozen staffers. All this turmoil eventually led to a crippling worker slowdown in the middle of the project. Most startlingly, a very low representation of African-Americans on the core editorial staff (four of 17 writers at the most) inspired a dozen employees to ask the management team to hire more African-Americans. ... What made this project so beset with bitterness?

Perhaps it was the great expectations of Gates the public humanist. Though Gates is only one of four Afropedia partners, he is Africana's front man and biggest personality. Politically, Gates is neither radical nor neo-conservative, but rather a thoughtful, learned voice of black progressive liberalism who has consistently been able to translate his intellectual ideas into books and articles geared toward non-academics. Pundit Adolph Reed Jr. called Gates "the freelance advocate for black centrism," while Time once voted Gates one of the "Twenty-Five Most Influential Americans." An outspoken advocate of affirmative action, the 49-year-old West Virginia-bred Gates also has voiced his concerns about the responsibility of corporations to soften capitalism's rougher edges. "A more humane form of capitalism is about the best I think we can get," he told the Progressive last year. "Which might sound very reformist or conservative, but that's basically where I am." While the notions of better business practices and affirmative action may mean different things to different people, some Africana employees told Salon Books that when it came to working for Gates the CEO, they encountered a split between Gates' progressive theories and Africana's bottom-line practices. ...

Eventually they would be rejected by publishers at Random House, Simon & Schuster and by new-media companies Voyager and Prodigy.

A publishing industry insider tells me that reference book companies figured Gates' encyclopedia would turn out to be both high profile and a piece of junk, so why trash their corporate reputations over it?

So in 1997 when Microsoft agreed to underwrite the project, the team jumped at the opportunity.

... To lure writers, Africana posted advertisements around Cambridge offering 15 cents a word to temporary writers. The writers who signed up on salary were mostly students between undergraduate and advanced degrees and would receive somewhere between $25,000 and $28,000; editors, some of whom were Harvard fellows or professors, received salaries in the $50,000 range. (For a university town, Cambridge can be costly. One-bedroom apartments generally rent for around $1,000 a month, which would be half a writer's salary, before taxes.) Writers would have benefits packages only if they had a previous arrangement through Harvard as a student. ...

With a large deadline looming at the end of August, the staff grew desperate. Writers had to meet the first milestone by August, a numbing 250,000 words that the group had to submit to Microsoft so that Africana would get its first advance. "It was as if they said, don't worry about quality, just get quantity," the senior employee said. According to one observer close to the project, the writing turned out to be lousy. "I was appalled by the quality of material. The entries were woodenly conceived. They had linear chronologies," he said. "These writers were not very experienced. They were at the low end of the freelance chain." When writers turned over their sources, an editor discovered that some entries were barely rephrased versions of the entries from the Macmillan. In the end, Africana had to hire a temporary staff to rewrite the plagiarized sections, all of which were purged and replaced. "There were huge, huge mistakes that never would have eluded Skip [Gates] had he seen them," the senior staffer contended.

... On Oct. 3, 1997, writer Hendricks and 11 other staffers sent a memo to Gates, Glenshaw and the rest of the management team suggesting significant editorial and personnel changes for Africana. The memo specifically asked Africana for a clearer mission statement, benefits for writers -- which would include medical and dental coverage -- and an employee-matched retirement plan. As Hendricks explains, "We wanted to hold it to a higher standard." Employees also wanted more specialists, and last of all, suggested that Africana hire more people of color.

Some editors now maintain that had Africana spent $10,000 more on writer's salaries, it could have hired more seasoned candidates and tempted more African-American scholars in the process. Among writers on the core staff, African-American representation never reached more than four out of 17 and none of the core editing staff was black. "We took a look around and said, 'Jesus, we're 90 percent here and we're not comfortable with this,'" said the senior staffer about the paucity of blacks. "I wouldn't buy an encyclopedia about women if it were written by men." It seems that despite Gates' formidable reputation, few blacks applied to work on Africana. Moreover, the editors whom Salon Books spoke with say that they were never given any directive by Gates to pursue African-American applicants. Part of the affirmative-action agenda involves seeking out applicants who have been previously denied opportunity.

Yet making an airtight case of hypocrisy against Gates isn't so easy. How far does an employer have to pursue it? How much time, for instance, should be spent searching for diverse candidates before such searches are deemed inefficient? And if such searches don't yield competitive candidates, how important is it to give an opportunity to a worker who is not qualified, but might rise to the occasion if given a chance? Still, it's remarkable that Gates -- a black luminary -- wasn't simply surrounded by bright, ambitious young African-American scholars who could foresee what their participation on this project might mean to them or their resume.

Or, perhaps Harvard blacks had too much sense and better things to do with their time than toil in Skip Gates' sweatshop?
Does the fact that Gates was somehow stymied by the problem of affirmative action hiring say more about him, the shortage of highly educated black candidates willing to work for peanuts or the very problems inherent in affirmative action itself? After all, it may be an easy practice to embrace in the abstract, but when you're running a fast company, who has the time for theory?

For meetings, Gates would have the staff convene in Barker Center, a humanities building where the Afro-American Studies Department is based. Indeed, every staffer interviewed for this story contended that they never once saw Gates step foot in the central Africana office in Vanserg itself, despite the fact that Gates' own house is right across the street. Not surprisingly, such aloof management only exacerbated worker resentments. In October, he drew the staff together and gave them an ultimatum: For those who don't like the project, there's the door. Gates also said that plagiarism would not be tolerated. The Oct. 3 petition was rejected out of hand -- and on the delicate issue of hiring more African-Americans, Gates apparently told staffers: "Affirmative action? I'm Mr. Affirmative Action. You think I'm not all for affirmative action? But look, what we hire here are qualified people, people who can do the work. White people can do this work, and black people can do this work."

Yes, but these are jobs blacks just won't do.

By the way, that reminds me of Ed Rubenstein's recent VDARE.com article on the huge percentage of economics Ph.D. students in American universities who are foreign-born. One reason that tenured economics professors are about as pro-immigration as strawberry farm owners is that they both profit from cheap immigrant labor.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

23 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm getting tired of all these litteratis. Where are the railway, agricultural, hydraulic and civil engineers of Africa? Only the Boers in South Africa? Why do blacks not get down and fix their f. continent which is teeming with natural resources? It’s so f. easy. Just 4 million whites in South Africa turned the place into a contender for the First World club, in spite of being harassed by terrorist campaigns and sanctions. Why do blacks have such problems with the built environment and food security? Instead they wax about literature and bully themselves into the power structures of foreign peoples or go live on the dole in the US or Europe. If they got their act together in Africa they could become a world power.

l'art du cum f'art said...

"If they got their act together in Africa they could become a world power."

When did you start reading Steve Sailer? Just now?

An important part of human biodiversity and Steve's writing is that the sentiment you express above is much, much easier said than done.

Anonymous said...

All the waffling here smells like black privilege.

I'd like to see equivalent waffling on behalf of whitey in a Salon piece. Or maybe several, since weighting by demographics (to say nothing of practicality - black men have to answer for violating the AA rules how often, exactly?) isn't an unreasonable request.

Maybe I shouldn't be too hard on Salon. Putting black face on might be the only way these sissies can broach the subject.

"I wouldn't buy an encyclopedia about women if it were written by men."

LOL. Ceteris Paribus, men would write a better one.

Also, isn't the reader more important than the writer? And doesn't that become more so as one ventures into "Who? Whom?" territory? E.g., wouldn't either sex be better served with a product created by and intended for their own sex?

Why do blacks have such problems

Throw this idea (blacks are whites with different surfaces) out the window.

It's a racist idea, btw: everyone in the world can/should/will be just like whitey if they try.

~Svigor

Billare said...

One reason that tenured economics professors are about as pro-immigration as strawberry farm owners is that they both profit from cheap immigrant labor.

This makes no sense to me. First, of all, as academics, on average these economists are center-left, certainly more leftward than the mainstream. Do you think really such a justification could sit well in their minds, when many of their kind belong to a belief system that demonizes talismans like "lobbyists" and "Big Business"? It might well be an ultimate justification for their support, that helps to subtly and unknowingly preserve the status quo, but there is no way that it could be the proximate motivation, as it might be to someone of a more "capitalist" bent. Only sociopaths and the truly demented would act in such Machiavellian fashion against their own precepts.

And then, why on Earth would university faculty be concerned with administrative issues anyway? Anyone who has been near a university campus recently knows that the low-skilled work there, e.g., a work-study type job, usually pays better than similarly skilled work elsewhere. Whenever wage negotiations begin with the unions who represent the hired help, leftist professors are often the ones combating against the administration petitioning to give higher wages to lower-skilled workers. You can see one such case of this related within this Harvard Crimson editorial. It's economists (as bloggers) who argue to raise universities' costs by pushing for idea like compensating college athletes as professionals. It does not accord well with psychological mindset of the academic to believe that they would care more about nuts-and-bolts departmental accounting over higher held academic and philosophical ideals. Highly-intelligent people such as economists do not take relatively lower paying jobs than they are otherwise able to then concern themselves with the pecuniary aspects of Life -- or policy.

Instead, let me suggest a couple of reasons of my own. I'd venture that since probably an increasing percentage of those faculty's most capable Ph.D students are increasingly East Asian / Indian / talented and exotic minority groups ("Asian"), so that inclines them to be favorable to foreign immigration. That is the aspect of immigration that is most salient to them personally, and accordingly that should most shape their ideological views. Also, in my experience, within a cohort of talented students, of those more Asian students than White tend to aspire to the kind of academic and esoteric work which an overseeing professor would tend to favorably look upon. I.e., after the awarding of the Ph. D, its the Asian kid who heads off to a post-graduate position at UCLA while the White kid is heading off to make his big bucks at Ren-Tech. I saw this idea illustrated recently by the Audacious Epigone, a comrade-in-arms, who said within a similar debate: "....[s]till, I can't reconcile myself to an immigration policy that would keep a Razib Khan from attaining citizenship."

Billare said...

I have yet another possible reason, or perhaps to yourself, a "bias". Economists deal frequently within their scope of their work with the GDP statistic. Keep in mind that there is little dispute that Asian immigration is more Pareto-efficient than other types of immigration -- not only do they raise their own wages, they pay out to the government more than they take in. (To raise the wages of bureaucrats and...academics?) In other words, if it were codified in some Bible somewhere, Asian immigration as policy would pass a primary test of "citizenism". Indeed, since economists hang out with like-minded people, they are well aware of studies that demonstrate how much of the paradigm-shifting and GDP-enhancing entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley was caused by Asian immigration. So it is innocuously understandable that this debate is framed and their beliefs formed by the language of their studies.

Now of course the fact that Asian immigration doesn't fail that one test does not completely remark upon the possible distributional issues that such immigration may raise within a specific field or sector. Your political philosophy seems to be a bit more than pure citizenism, so I understand how you would be concerned about the manner such immigration impacts other native-born, mostly White, Ph.D candidates. However, those distributional questions cannot wholly frame the metric that fully measures the desirability of Asian immigration, since to my knowledge the United States of America also is not known as the People's Republic of America. What I'm saying is that it is not prima facie clear who is on the correct side of the immigration debate -- save of course for the major plank of stopping majority Mexican illegal immigration -- you or they. In fact, I tend slightly more often to default to the positions of economists such as BC and TC of GMU, since too many of those arguing against them default to relativistic, and IMO, weak "cultural hegemony"-type haranguing.

Billare said...

Why do blacks not get down and fix their f. continent which is teeming with natural resources?

Anonymous #1,

I think J. Philippe Rushton would say: "...because it's teeming with natural resources."

Billare said...

"I wouldn't buy an encyclopedia about women if it were written by men."

I'm so often astonished when I discover how many leftists actually believe this. I'm kinda interested in the history of such thinking - does anyone know if the idea was prominent in another philosophy before this century? I.e., the "critical" view that if you're from one culture, and I'm from another, we can't possibly interpret one another?

Anonymous said...

l'art du cum f'art,

u dont have to preach to me, i'm from that continent. i know about their dysfunction and am accustomed to all the prejudice against blacks. but aren't we supposed to believe that they can slowly develop themselves? is it just going to be this game of dispossession of whitey's assets, enabled by another much more powerful group in the shadows?

AMac said...

"But look, what we hire here are qualified people, people who can do the work. White people can do this work, and black people can do this work."

I think that quote somehow strayed in from another post. Wasn't that what Mayor DeStefano was proposing for the mission statement of the New Haven Fire Department? Or was it the NYFD?

The mixup is understandable, Steve. It can be hard to keep track of which animals are the more equal ones.

Truth said...

"You think I'm not all for affirmative action? But look, what we hire here are qualified people, people who can do the work. White people can do this work, and black people can do this work."

Hey, you guys should love Skip.

John Anello said...

Good point. Economists especially libertarian ones are the biggest open borders anarchists out there

Anonymous said...

"I wouldn't buy an encyclopedia about women if it were written by men."

In fact, why constrain this brilliant dictum to encyclopedia?

Why not go the whole hog?

Why not say, "I'm not going to go to any gynecologist who relies upon medical studies written by men."

Anonymous said...

I want to hear more about this plagiarism. We know from the Finkelstein-Dershowitz saga that Harvard turns a blind eye to plagiarism, but that doesn't mind it won't matter to the rest of the world.

Anonymous said...

I would emend your last point to: many tenured economics professors are in facor of immigration because they themselves are immigrant labor. Expensive immigrant labor, in their case, of course, not cheap.

Anonymous said...

This is the reason why my blood boils when I see Gates referred to as a scholar. Scholars are, almost by definition, nerds. They're people who spend their lives digging through obscure books looking for obscure info because they enjoy that kind of thing. African mentality is antithetical to nerdiness. Smart blacks aren't nerds, they're smooth-talkers.

The Salon article tries to blame blacks' unwillingness to sign up for this Afropedia thingie on low salaries. I'm sure that the result would have been the same if the salaries were tripled. If you're not a nerd, then spending 8 hours a day doing research in libraries would seem very, very unpleasant to you. More than unpleasant, it would seem perverted.

testing99 said...

In the US, Booker T Washington expressed just that sentiment. That a Black Middle and Working class, trained within an inch of it's life on the Prussian model, would win economic power and from that wide/deep power, political freedom.

WEB Dubois argued that political power through agitation by a "talented tenth" of the Black community, it's natural aristocracy, was the path to political then economic power by virtue of White concessions. Sound familiar?

Guess who won the argument?

Melykin said...

Speaking of South Africa, the other day I heard a surprisingly politically INcorrect piece on CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) Radio. They were interviewing a white farmer in South Africa about the so called land reform that is going on there--whereby farms owned by whites are sold to blacks under some sort of government program. The white farmer told of a nearby farm that had been sold to blacks. It had been a productive farm that employed many people, but the new owners have abandoned it after taking all the wire and pipes and anything else they could to sell as scap. Now no one works there and the farm produces nothing.

Maybe South Africa is going to go the same way as Zimbabwe.

Eman said...

Henry L. Gates isn't as Black as he says - he has partial Jewish ancestry:

“Consider the story of Harvard University’s Henry Louis Gates, Jr., an African American, who was both shocked and bemused to learn that his DNA on his mother’s side did not track back to the Yoruba people as he had long thought. The Yoruba have a rich mythology and are believed to have been among the most culturally sophisticated of the African cultures before the arrival of Europeans. “A number of exact matches turned up,” Gates wrote, “leading straight back to that African Kingdom called Northern Europe, to the genes of (among others) a female Ashkenazi Jew. Maybe it was time to start listening to ‘My Yiddishe Mama,” he quipped.”

- from http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/10/10-questions-for-jon-entine.php

Polistra said...

>>I'm kinda interested in the history of such thinking - does anyone know if the idea was prominent in another philosophy before this century? I.e., the "critical" view that if you're from one culture, and I'm from another, we can't possibly interpret one another? <<

Yup, that was the theoretical basis of Mussolini's version of fascism. He called it "subjectivism". (Not that he -really- based his dictatorship on any theories, but this was the nominal core.)

Anonymous said...

u dont have to preach to me, i'm from that continent. i know about their dysfunction and am accustomed to all the prejudice against blacks. but aren't we supposed to believe that they can slowly develop themselves?

No. E.g., how do you maintain a telephone system when there are more people pulling down the wire for the copper inside than there are people willing to make it work?

Okay, that's a poor rhetorical question, since it's been answered (wait for whitey to invent cell phones), but I trust you get the point.

This really is the point you have to get; it's not that there are no intelligent blacks, it's that the proportions (smarts, medians, dumbs, psychos, etc.) are such that the smarts can't really get anything done before the dumbs and the psychos tear things down again.

What's the point of creating a business to make money to buy that nice new car when the locals are going to strip it down to the blocks in short order? I exaggerate, but that's the gist.

~Svigor

David Davenport said...

IMO, weak "cultural hegemony"-type haranguing. ...

Please define "cultural hegemony"-type haranguing.

Do you mean to say, Asian cultures and mores are as good or better than older stock American culture and values?

Nine-of-Diamonds said...

"The Salon article tries to blame blacks' unwillingness to sign up for this Afropedia thingie on low salaries."

Hey, don't let it make your blood boil. What makes you think that Salon would be honest about the reasons for this fiasco in the first place? Their (& the rest of the media's) reason for being is to prop up a mediocrity who'd be bagging groceries right now if it weren't for Stanley Ann's "noble savage" fetish. "Race Realism" WRT intellectual giants like Gates, Sotomayor, & the Majick Negro himself is a bit much to expect.

The disproportionately Jewish/SWPL Salonistas have objectively good reasons for inflating black accomplishments & minimizing black failure, & there's simply no reason to expect them to act against their interests.

estetik said...

post thank you for the beautiful share with us, respect