Last year, the Supreme Court held that racial preferences in student admissions were illegal, but what about preferences for faculty diversity? Doing that has been illegal since the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The Court never made a “diversity” exception such as it did (foolishly) in Bakke, opening the door to admission preferences.
And yet the diversity-obsessed people who run our colleges and universities continue to hire some people and reject others just on account of race. In today’s Martin Center article, Wenyuan Wu writes about an egregious case at the University of Washington.
She says:
In a merit-based system, the top-ranked individual should be hired. His or her race must not be factored in. Our laws, from the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to federal and state civil-rights statutes, dictate race neutrality. But in our present-day reality, wherein decisions are so often filtered through the culturally prevailing prisms of race and identity, the most qualified applicant is often refused a job offer if he or she is not a so-called underrepresented minority (URM).
Merit wasn’t the key consideration at the University of Washington, however. Race was. The Strategic Planning Committee intervened in the decision process for a new faculty member in psychology because the chosen candidate was white. Intolerable.
Wu nails the truth:
Far-left ideologues have cast an all-powerful spell on our higher-education system. Devotees to the doctrine of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are all too willing to dismiss our longstanding legal tradition of equal justice to perpetuate new forms of discrimination. These radicals certainly called the shots in the Department of Psychology at the University of Washington.
Nor is this an isolated instance. Discrimination for the sake of “diversity” is rather common, she shows.
Many education leaders are wringing their hands over the public’s loss of confidence in our higher-education system. If they want to get it back, a good step would be to return merit as being the deciding factor in faculty hiring.