BY

Ariel Fernández, Ph. D.

This short essay upholds the view that there is a dichotomy between diversity hiring and meritocracy in the academic realm. Not everyone shares this view.

The academic establishment in the US spends billions of dollars implementing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) strategies for hiring. Anyone associated with academia knows there is a huge pressure to hire for diversity in US universities. For all that diversity hiring is encouraged, dare call someone a “diversity hire” and you’ll be instantly branded a racist pig.

This paradox may be also formulated through the question: If there are no diversity hires, why is academia devoting so much money and time to foster diversity hiring?

The dichotomy exists in so far as we cannot call “diversity hire” by its name.

Many people get outraged at the suggestion that Claudine Gay, the beleaguered Harvard president, was a “diversity hire.” For example, an op-ed at The Daily Beast emphatically notes that this term is typically used as an “insult for successful black people”.

On the other hand, Vice President Kamala Harris has been branded a “diversity hire” without raising any eyebrows. I, for one, fail to see how she is not a “diversity hire”. Black women constitute a major component of the Democratic Party, and hence it made sense for Joe Biden to pick a black woman as his running mate. In fact, Joe Biden committed that he would appoint a woman to be vice president. People celebrated his choice, and we not only got a woman but the first ever Asian-American and Black woman vice president. The trouble is, Kamala Harris was a poor choice, not because she is a black-Asian woman, but because she is not an able politician.

In fairness, we cannot assert that Claudine Gay was a diversity hire at Harvard, but surely being a black woman helped. For one, being a black woman perfectly befits Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences manual on “Recruiting for Diversity.” As in the case of Kamala Harris, Claudine Gay was a poor choice, not because she is a black woman but because she is an inept president. How many lawyers do you need to advise you that calling for the extermination of Jews constitutes unacceptable behavior on campus?

 “Diversity” carries a bad connotation for the conservative right, just as “merit” is scorned by the left wing. If you don’t agree, read Against Meritocracy. There are countless efforts on behalf of the DEI champions to demonize “merit”. They assert that “merit” is bad when it stands in the way of diversity, but an alleged reason for celebration when the DEI crowd gets its way and a diversity hire materializes.

For this very reason, Jews collectively constitute a threat to DEI ideology. Jews defy the need for diversity hiring. Their record of success within the boundaries of standard meritocracy stands glaringly at odds with the claim that merit is an unfair category when applied to a minority. Jewish success in academia simply does not need any DEI crutches: it is mostly based on merit, at least today. This helps explain why Claudine Gay couldn’t unequivocally condemn the anti-Semitic flares at Harvard in the same terms she would adopt for other vulnerable minorities under the aegis of DEI.

Furthermore, we now learned that Gay is guilty of plagiarism. Devastating? Hardly, as there is no “proven” intent to deceive, according to The Harvard Crimson – although time will tell if that view can withstand the attrition. The DEI champions argue that because the “wrong” people were the ones to point it out about the “right” kind of person, the white hegemonic rules and regulations upheld by the wrong people against plagiarism cannot be applied. This poses a problem for the DEI champions, because Gay’s academic merit hinges pivotally on her scholarship. Based on Harvard’s own standards, her scholarship turned out to be not nearly as stellar as once claimed. Therefore, it is not far-fetched to think that, based on Gay’s case, Harvard’s extant rules against plagiarism will be branded as representative of the archaic racist and patriarchal system of “merit” upheld by the white hegemonic class.

Evidently DEI has not come of age. Will it ever? That will depend on our ability to draw lessons from cases such as those described. I, for one, remain optimistic.

UPDATE January 2, 2024: Claudine Gay has just resigned as Harvard’s president.

Ariel Fernández is an Argentine-American physical chemist and mathematician. He obtained a Ph. D. degree in Chemical Physics from Yale University and held the Karl F. Hasselmann Endowed Chair Professorship in Engineering at Rice University until his retirement. Fernández currently heads the Daruma Institute for Applied Intelligence.