Uniformity, Inequity, and Exclusion

In 1933, a young fellow who detested school, but who was now working as a janitor while paying his way for instruction at the Chouinard Art Institute, got a call from a friend, offering him a job as a cel washer at the Ub Iwerks cartoon studio. He took the job and worked his way up from one feature of the rather complicated process of cartoon making to the next, till in a couple of years he joined the team of the great Fred “Tex” Avery, the comic genius who played with the cartoon medium itself, defying the laws of physics and biology and social etiquette and everything else. The chief animators were all male, and camaraderie bound them together in painstaking, exhausting, and poorly remunerated work.

People who love cartoons will know their names: the storyman Mike Maltese, the composer and adapter of classical music Carl Stalling, the man of a thousand voices Mel Blanc, and the animators Avery, Friz Freleng, Bob Clampett, Robert McKimson, and the greatest of them all, the man whose madcap genius elevated Bugs Bunny to international renown and who invented Marvin the Martian, the amorous Pepe Le Pew, the songster Michigan J. Frog, and many others—Chuck Jones.

That was the lad who, at age 20, got the job by a phone call.

It seems unlikely that a Chuck Jones could catch such a break now. People at that time did not take schooling so seriously. Everyone understood that you might be highly literate, as Jones was, and well-versed in the arts, as Jones also was, without having the credentialed initials after your name and without any paper evidence of such from your high school. Nor was there any federal or state agency overseeing your employer when he chose whom to hire. I understand that America is still paying the price of racism, and part of me says that the nation deserves no better than what it has gotten. But our current employment laws have rendered freedom of association nugatory, and they exact a high cost to liberty, to genuine diversity among workplaces, and to the unconventional or exceptional employee. I am not the first to notice, for example, that the best-rewarded beneficiaries of anti-discrimination laws are white women with college credentials. These do not often come from working-class families or Appalachia, or from tight economic circumstances, as Jones did. Where then is the real diversity?

When I was a professor at Providence College, one of my arguments for preserving and enhancing our program in the Development of Western Civilization and for preserving and enhancing the Catholic character of the school was an appeal to diversity. Why should all colleges look alike? Why should Catholic colleges all have to be like what Georgetown has become, “Catholic” in little more than a name? You can go anywhere in the country and find an English professor whose specialty is “queer theory,” but it is rare indeed to find someone who teaches Milton in the poetic, cultural, and theological context of the poet’s time, unembarrassed, honoring Milton rather than skewing everything against him because he did not believe everything that our iron etiquette now requires.

Meanwhile, success should be its own justification. I do not demand that every cartoon studio be like the one that Jones enjoyed, which, however, was a lot closer than we are now to those that produced the greatest art in the history of the world, the studios of Renaissance Italy. I suggest that the possibility should be open. I also suggest that it is perverse to require scholastic credentials for every job beyond those involving manual labor. Of course, we want workers with knowledge and skill. But schools are often the last places where you can gain them.

There are several reasons why not. First is the nature of the boy genius. Fancy a young Mozart or Michelangelo in school. For him, it is an agony of boredom, frustration, and enforced conformity. He is a tiger in a pen. Eventually, he gives up and falls into lassitude, earning poor grades, and everybody forgets that he was once intelligent, and nobody suspects that his intellect might be revived. Second is the school’s necessary bureaucratization and standardization of learning. The main thing the child learns in school is that everything proceeds on a track, by machine, by the calendar. You are doing “well” if you are in the front of the track, even if you have been doing nothing exceptional. You are not the 14-year-old James Clerk Maxwell, in the Edinburgh Academy (schools were not so mechanical then), writing a sophisticated and original paper on the characteristics of curves with more than two foci. Third is the nature of the schoolteacher, rarely, in our time, fascinated by the subject to be taught—grammar, the periodic table, higher arithmetic, or Latin. We have, instead, English teachers who do not like Shakespeare and math teachers who do not like geometry but who do like children or who say they do. That is not enough.

Schools ought to hire teachers outside of the conventional pool—retired engineers, for example, who want to share what they know or what they can do and who ought to be given the chance, and to hell with the required courses on teaching methods. But we should expand the permission. Any employer, for reasons of his own, which are no business but his, ought to be permitted to hire outside of the pool provided for him by gatekeepers and dispensers of credentials. Nor should he have to justify his choices to anyone except for his customers or his stockholders. If it works, it works, and more power to it. If a certain cartoon studio is a bunch of overgrown boys producing the most brilliant cartoons in American film history, the question should never be why they did not hire more women, but rather why we do not have more such studios. I freely grant the same liberty and discretion to women also to do as they please, without interference. If you can hardly get through one door without an Ivy League diploma (I myself graduated from Princeton summa cum laude), let there be another door you can hardly get through with one.

That, for diversity. What about equity? It always surprises and usually pleases my students when I tell them that the classical understanding of equity implies inequality of treatment, not for some equality of outcome, but for the exercise of justice toward an individual person in his particular circumstances. Laws are for the generality, but because the lawmaker cannot foresee all persons and circumstances, the judge is granted a certain leeway, lest he violate the lawmaker’s intentions by a strict adherence to the letter. The question then is how we can treat equitably the genius without the credentials or the business or school or studio or workshop whose ambience, or synergy, or dynamism and productivity depend on hiring practices that the law looks askance at when they are enacted by vast and impersonal corporations. My instincts in this regard lean toward letting people hire as they please and take the consequences of their choices. So did the Saint Louis Cardinals in the 1950s, the slowest team in the National League to accept racial integration, and they paid for their stubborn and vicious stupidity by having their worst decade since the 1910s to the present, wasting ten seasons from one of the greatest among the great, Stan Musial.

But there is a way the demands for diversity and equity can justify those people who made the Warner Brothers’ cartoon enterprise a markedly male pursuit. People say that the school or the platoon or the business is going to be improved by the diversity they favor (and not, I might add, by other forms of diversity they do not favor). But what if it is not so? It is not clear to me that the Army is improved by the presence of women in combat roles, women who, as soon as they change their uniforms for ordinary clothes, are immediately visible as creatures who need protection, physically overmatched not just by men but by teenage boys. What if there are things that each sex does better when the other sex is not around? Or what if that is true for certain men or certain women, if not for all? Why should we compel everyone to do everything in the same way, against their inclinations, and thus compromise their work?

What about “inclusion?” Right now, the “included” have their credentialed tickets punched, and everybody else is out of luck. Suppose you had to show credentials to join a choir. That excludes almost everybody. Suppose every choir had to have the same composition: men and women. What would you lose? Who would be excluded, not by design, but no less inevitably? Wales is renowned for its all-male (adult) choirs. Why should they be otherwise? They do not require that all choirs be as theirs. England is still renowned for the all-male choirs composed of men and boys, with the boys singing treble, often for music written precisely for such choirs, because the boy treble is not the same as the fuller and richer soprano of a grown woman. Admit girls, and the boys check out; they lose interest because the main draw for them is that they are together, doing what only they can do in the way they do it.

I speak from no personal need. I have not been a member of any all-male institution since I was 13. But why should my example bind anyone else?

If we set people free—from school, too, and all implicit or explicit requirements levied by the keepers of the turnstiles—we may break the grip of the upper classes on the professions. Then we may get some diversity, equity, and inclusion to send the keepers scurrying. Fine with me.