The "Diversity Commissars"
The latest, on which I wrote an op-ed last week, concerned the college's institution of what some on campus have termed"diversity commissars"--a requirement that all search committees include minority faculty, and when departmental minorities are unwilling or unavailable to serve, minorities from outside the department be brought in, regardless of academic expertise. At a school where a quarter of the hires over the last eight years have been minorities, the reason for this new procedure was never articulated.
Looked at practically, the policy is downright absurd. A committee evaluating applicants for a professorship in particle physics, for instance, could conceivably be ordered to include an Inuit who specializes in Eskimo environmentalism instead of a non-minority faculty member with a physics Ph.D. from MIT. Moreover, given the increasing reluctance of today’s Americans to identify themselves exclusively with any ethnic group, would even the most qualified minority faculty member necessarily be ready to sit as a “diversity commissar”? And would there be a generational cutoff for official status as an African-American or Latino?
Yesterday's New York Sun brought the following reply from the provost, Roberta Matthews:
Robert David Johnson, a professor of history at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York Graduate Center, should look at the whole record before he attacks Brooklyn College [Diversity Comes to CUNY,Opinion, July 21, 2004]. Since 1999, we have hired 147 new faculty members, Professor Johnson among them. Like him, they were trained at some of the best universities in the world, including Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Oxford. While many are at the beginning of their careers, not a few have already achieved such distinctive honors as the Pulitzer Prize novelist Michael Cunningham and journalist Paul Moses, who joined us in 2001 and the MacArthur Award painter Elizabeth Murray, in 2003.Rather than embrace any hiring scheme untested or otherwise Brooklyn College seeks the best candidate for the position. The long-term results are evidenced by the consistent excellence of the students we graduate.
The reply raises the question of why, if the college has consistently been hiring such stellar people, it chose to change its hiring procedures. Or perhaps Matthews believes that the college's new policy of requiring white male applicants--and only white male applicants--to demonstrate a" commitment to furthering diversity" is consistent with seeking"the best candidate for the position." History professor Margaret King addressed that point in today's Sun:
Over the last three years at Brooklyn College, I have heard amazing things — that highly qualified young scholars should step aside so as not to demoralize less capable colleagues, for instance, or that patently incompetent job candidates should be hired because their ebullient personalities qualify them as great teachers. I have seen senior professors “mob” and bully vulnerable untenured juniors. I was there when Cathy Trower explained why Asians are not minorities except when it is useful for them to be minorities, and why white males must be, effectively, brainwashed so as to promote — regardless of considerations of merit — only those of other genders or skin colors — a difficult point to me, the mother of two sons, who happen to be white. I was not aware that such behavior was to be tolerated in academe, yet at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, where I teach,it is not only tolerated but rewarded. But perhaps the advent of “diversity commissars” will arouse those in charge to stop the nonsense now.
CUNY Trustee Kay Pesile, in a letter to the Sun, wondered why the college would need new lines giving such hiring criteria. That's an interesting question.