WHEN DIVERSITY DICTATES LOWER QUALITY HIRES

MindingTheCampus: Progressives at Tier 1 research universities and top liberal arts colleges sit at the summit of the higher ed hierarchy, where their eminence rests upon high standards of academic work.  But they are fervently committed to hiring and retaining more persons of color.  They have attempted affirmative action of the official and unofficial kind for a long time, but gains in the percentage of professors of color in elite departments have been disappointing.  If you listen to them, you can hear a rising dismay in their voices.  They want so much to have more non-white colleagues, but the years pass and nothing seems to change.

This is a case of bad faith.  People are in bad faith when they think and act in way that deny the reality of what they otherwise enjoy.  The behavior is to demand more non-white hiring and promotion and retention.  The reality is a combination of the meritocratic system of selective schools plus the limited pool of minority candidates.  The number of African American and Hispanic PhDs falls well below the proportions those groups constitution of the general population.  And in the humanities, Asian Americans, too, are underrepresented.

‘Inclusivity’ vs.  Prestige’

This means that superior institutions must compete vigorously for faculty of color who have the qualifications that put them into the ranks of high-achievers.  Inevitably, they must lower the bar for them, setting up a showdown between a top school’s prestige and its “inclusivity.”

It has happened recently at Dartmouth College.  A female Asian American English professor has been denied tenure even though the department’s tenure committee voted unanimously to promote her.   MORE