Posted by
Steve on Friday, September 28, 2007 7:46:12 PM
For me, diversity is just not a high priority item when talking about groups of people. Now, I am all for including people from different groups. I am just not into thinking about this diversity as a goal.
I teach at a college and have had to take a couple of training classes in the past few weeks. In each of the classes, diversity was one of the high points of the discussion. For me, quality is much more important than diversity.
When our department has hired people in the past couple of years, I have heard some on the hiring committees that have had diversity as their goal. They wanted to find the best qualified black or Hispanic, not the best qualified candidate. That attitude bothers me. I feel the best qualified person should get the job, not the best black person. When you are only looking in the minority community for your next hire, you have dismissed at least half of the hiring pool. You may be losing out on a person that is so dynamic that your college will be on everyone’s list for best college in the country. You may still find that person in the minority hiring process, but you are severely limiting your chances.
In case you think I am just saying this because I am white, I have a Black son, a Hispanic daughter and a Native American daughter. My sister-in-law is Asian. That just about covers most of the world’s racial groups. If there is a person that is less likely to discriminate because of race, it is me. My objection above is not that they are not hiring the best white, but that they are limiting their hiring pool to less than one that would include the best candidate.
Now, I must say, most of the time, the department has overcome the bias for a minority hire and selected the best person. Sometimes I did not agree with the hire and it took a year or two for the person to show they really had it in them. But, for the most part, the department has gotten it pretty much right. There is one rotten egg we cannot get rid of. We even eliminated his position to get rid of him and one member of the faculty managed to get him hired as an adjunct. That person is totally incompetent. I do not know how that person ever got hired in the first place or rehired when the college had a chance to rid it self of that person. That person only knows how to do one thing, so the students get that one thing and its variations for the semester. I have heard that person substitute in biology classes and know that he does not know anything about biology.
Liberals like diversity. It makes them feel good about themselves when they can point to diversity and say look at what I have done. They do not care what damage they may have done in creating this diversity, but they are proud of creating diversity. One year on our campus, the Biology faculty was chided because all of our hires that year were white. The Chemistry faculty was praised because they had hired minorities. After a couple of years it became painfully clear, the Biology faculty was competent and will be here for a long time. The Chemistry faculty was incompetent and is almost all gone. Diversity was chemistry’s goal and they got it. Their students suffered and the chemistry program on campus has suffered severe damage. The biology program is growing wildly. We have expanded into one new room and need at least one more room. We are growing at the seams. Chemistry is bouncing along where they were 5 years ago. We have more than doubled our program. They went for diversity, we went for quality. Both got what they wanted. I hope they are happy with their flat growth rate.