A WEEK ago today, President John T. Casteen III delivered a riveting rendition of his annual State of the University Address. As Casteen laid out the administration's aspirations for the future, he took care to stress the importance of accountability. One of the primary reasons why schools across the country fail to achieve their stated goals, he said, is because they fail to hold their administrators accountable for the results that they are expected to produce. Interestingly enough, this shocking revelation came not far away from Casteen's mention of what he referred to as one of the University's highest priorities in the near term: the hiring of a suitable candidate to fill the new office of the Chief Officer for Diversity and Equity.
I say this pairing is interesting because one of the goals Casteen mentioned for the new diversity commissar is to substantively increase the percentage of women and minority professors among the faculty. And, as anyone can see, efforts to impose accountability with respect to this goal have the potential to quickly lead to some serious problems. Specifically, it behooves us to consider carefully how the quality of our faculty will fare as hiring and tenure decisions begin to focus less on scholarship and more on institutional goals of diversity and equity.
To begin, let me be clear that I don't mean to imply that an increase in women and minority faculty members would be a bad thing by itself. Quite to the contrary, such an occurrence might very well lead to some tangible benefits to the University. Just because these benefits have a way of being drastically overstated by zealous diversophiles certainly doesn't mean they don't exist. But even if an increase in racial and gender diversity would be a good thing in itself, the real question we must confront is what cost are we willing to bear to achieve it?
In answering this question, we must examine the two chief possible diversification strategies that the University might pursue. In the first case, University hiring personnel might decide to maintain recruiting standards exactly as they are, while simply broadening the scope of their candidate searches and vacancy advertising campaigns into areas where women and minority candidates would be more likely to see them. The aim of such a strategy would be to increase the number of qualified women and minority applicants, thereby producing an increase in the natural hiring yield of these groups.
This strategy sounds promising because it purports to serve its purpose while maintaining the University's standards of scholarship as rigorously as ever. Yet in practical application, this method tends toward failure for one simple reason: The number of competitive women and minority candidates who are searching for teaching positions is not nearly as high as we would like it to be. Particularly in the sciences but in the humanities as well, the demographic characteristics of the most qualified applicants tend not to favor the specific demands of institutional diversity. This isn't due to any inherent difference between racial or gender groups, but rather because of the complex social and historical factors which influence people's career choices and opportunities today.
It is because of this problem that many have come to advocate a second strategy of diversification, which amounts to a lowering of standards in order to meet a certain threshold of diversity in hiring. This same strategy, although many are too squeamish or too politically correct to admit the true nature of its function, is familiar because of its wide application in undergraduate admissions offices around the country. With respect to faculty hiring, however, the drawbacks of this method come into sharper relief because of the relatively greater importance for the University to maintain high standards in teaching, research and reputation.
The danger of compromised faculty quality is also heightened in direct proportion to the stringency with which the administration imposes accountability on those responsible for overseeing diversity-oriented hiring goals. To the extent that the University puts pressure on departments to diversify, they will be inclined to relax their recruiting standards in order to meet this goal.
It is clear that Casteen and his cronies have feebly given up on the old-fashioned idea that faculty applicants should be considered on their merits without regard to race or gender. The least our administrators can do, though, is to be wary of how much they let the diversity craze cut into the University's academic integrity.
Anthony Dick's column appears Tuesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at adick@cavalierdaily.com.
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