Without regard for civility or accuracy, econo-gadfly Paul Krugman will accuse conservatives of racism at the drop of a hat. In a recent NYT column he:
- Accused Paul Ryan of using a “racist dog-whistle” for making comments similar to Barack Obama’s.
- Accused CNBC’s Rick Santelli of being racist for attacking Obama’s proposed mortgage subsidies, most of which would have gone to whites, not blacks.
- Accused the Tea Party of being racist even though African Americans Dr. Ben Carson, Col. Allen West, Senator Tim Scott and Herman Cain are among its heroes.
- Accused the Tea Party of being racist for opposing Obamacare but not corporate welfare, such as Wall Street bailouts. This is factually incorrect; many Tea Party people did oppose TARP.
Actually, it looks like Krugman and his colleagues in the Princeton Economics Department are not all that keen on racial diversity. Krugman may be happy to pose as the Great White Hope of America’s non-white masses, but you are not likely to find black professors occupying offices down the hall from his. Despite the University’s strong support for a demographically diverse faculty, the Princeton Economics Department has only one African American professor. Of 61 faculty members listed on the Department’s website, only one is black. That is 1.6%, whereas fully 8% of the undergraduate population was black in 2012. So much for faculty diversity. Not much has changed since the genteel, homogeneous days of F. Scott Fitzgerald in the 1920s.
Princeton’s President, in an expansive report on the virtues of diversity, intoned “Diversity is . . . a precondition for academic excellence, institutional relevance, and national vitality. Engagement with this issue is central, not tangential, to Princeton’s mission and to the maintenance of its leadership in higher education.” Well, it looks like Princeton’s econ majors can forget about getting an “academically excellent” education. They don’t have much chance of taking an economics course from a black professor. There is only one, and she is Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School, which means she doesn’t have much time to teach undergraduates.
What makes the Princeton Economics Department’s nearly lily-white hew so ironic is that the Department is packed with Democratic Party stalwarts (Krugman, Alan Blinder, Alan Kreuger, Uwe Reinhardt), and the Democratic Party constantly lambasts Republicans for their alleged aversion to racial diversity. Never mind.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m sure some of Krugman’s best friends are black. And, to recycle the lawyerly verbiage in Krugman’s nasty NYT hit piece on Rep. Ryan, “just to be clear, there’s no evidence that Mr. Krugman is personally a racist.” He’s just a hypocrite.
Copyright Thomas Doerflinger 2014. All Rights Reserved.
