Heather Mac Donald: 'Being female is not an accomplishment.'
Her opening statement in a debate on Diversity, Inclusion and Equity (D.I.E.!)
I start from the following proposition: being female is not an accomplishment. My being female should play no role in my being hired for a job. Of course, my sex undoubtedly has made me the target of sex preferences on numerous occasions, thus casting doubt on any actual qualifications I might presume to possess.My being female should be particularly irrelevant in a university. Until recently, universities were dedicated to the Enlightenment ideal of universal knowledge. A male Chinese engineer and a female Nigerian engineer may have no spoken language in common, but they can communicate through the universal languages of mathematics and physics. Whether the buildings they erect stand or fall depends not on their nationality or sex but on their mastery of engineering principles.I will go further. Being black, gay, or gender-fluid are also not accomplishments, and should have nothing to do with faculty hiring or student admissions. The only thing that should matter when, say, a medical school hires a researcher in pancreatic cancer is whether that oncologist is the best in his field.The diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) bureaucracy is the nemesis of the Enlightenment ideal of knowledge. It puts relentless pressure on every academic department to hire on the basis of race and sex, not on the basis of intellectual achievement. Every faculty search today is a desperate effort to find even remotely qualified minority or female candidates. Being female or a non-Asian minority confers an enormous advantage in the hiring and tenure process.Read the whole thing here.
Brilliant article. The quota system insults the intelligence of us all. Those who benefit from quotas as well as those who are punished for not meeting the requirements of quotas. The judgment of people based not on the color of their skin but on the content of their character has been lost long ago. The present obsession with race is, ironically creating conflict between races. Corrective measures must first, do no harm. I will never forgive the DNC for race baiting to advance their fortunes. It is destructive and immoral.
Affirmative action is structural racism against Black people.
The dirty little secret is that affirmative action hurts Black people and the people who run affirmative action programs know it. I don't have access to my files, but they admitted to this in the Michigan cases.
It's obvious why. Black students thrown in with a class of stronger students drop to the bottom or out at a high rate.
The consequence of this is that Black people have not been able to close the gap. The solution, instead of getting rid of harmful programs, is to make racism worse everywhere and call it "equity." And they are drawing in more groups as a smokescreen.