In contrast with DEI, a number of bay area firms are using merit, excellence and intelligence as their hiring strategy. If you run a startup— limited by seed capital and strong external pressure to deliver immediate results— diversity is not your guiding focus; instead, you are using your limited picks to hire the most meritorious people— however you define merit, but certainly with next to no consideration of diversity as an end in itself.
Meanwhile universities continue to avoid fixing their own DEI policies. Cambridge has changed it’s plans. It is no longer investigating how a serial plagiarist/ fabulist become the youngest ever tenured Black professor— how many errors occurred to let that happen? No, instead, it is focusing solely on what Cambridge could have done to shield the professor from media attention and assist him as he contemplated suicide. For the record, I think an investigation of the latter is warranted. But surely, an honest institution must also perform the former. It appears Cambridge lacks the backbone to do this.
The issue is not confined to one side of the pond. Here in the US, the justice department is slowly working it’s way through medical schools to find title VI violations— where race is used as a sole or key factor for admission (which inevitably means discrimination to other races). These letters are now hitting close to home.
There is a major unspoken debate at the heart of this. Should we hire the people based solely on who you think can best accomplish the task— the MEI idea… Or should you take into account past injustice, and work to create a workforce that looks like the communities they serve (DEI— and remind people of that in mandatory annual seminars)?
I just want to point out some interesting things about the contours of the debate.
Not long ago being a professor at Cambridge or Harvard was one of the most desirable jobs— job protection, a guaranteed salary floor, working with the brightest minds, tremendous freedom to speak your mind, etc. Reasonable people can disagree— these jobs are still desirable— but it has become tarnished in a world of dwindling federal funds, cancel culture/ less academic freedom, and weak and numerous administrators.
Now, arguably, being a founder or first 20 in a successful company has dwarfed that. Twenty years ago it was unheard of for 10 young people to work on something for 2 years and be acquired for 60 billion in stock— and yet, now that occurs. In San Francisco, it doesn’t seem that odd. I know several people personally who went from net worth <1 mil to net worth ~1 bil in less than a decade. Many are linked to companies that are household names. This is truly astonishing.
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A core premise of DEI is to empower those who had not previously been empowered to obtain the positions in society of great influence, security and prestige. Yet, an irony is that MEI has come to dominate the burgeoning institutions that now house those positions. A pediatrician has always paid less than an orthopod, but was still far more than many other jobs, now even most entry level tech positions offer comp packaged 2 -3x as much— jobs in fintech or other more lucrative sections rival the salaries of the orthopod.
A decade ago, a colleague made the observation: too many past department chairs had been men. In an effort to combat this, the university worked to hire a woman— explicitly stating this was the goal (Never a good thing to say/ so undermining/ “my vice president will be a woman”). Then, a number of senior men in the department— arguably the runner(s) up to be chair— were given “new titles”— Endowed prof/ head of research/ etc. The Dept chair’s former power was dispersed. Thus DEI was just for show. The department chair retained only the worst parts of the job— scolding errant faculty. That was DEI 1.0.
2.0 took things more seriously, and was taken to extremes— the Jason Arday’s of the world were hired. Admissions policies openly flaunted the Supreme Court. But then, start ups started to boom. Biotech, and AI, and more, and we found that DEI carried out more faithfully dragged down institutions, with MEI used at those that rose.
My prediction is that no one has learned their lesson, and gravitating to a compromise is not in the nature of either political party. DEI will hide from the Trump DOJ, and come out like spring flowers when the next Democrat is hired. It will blossom and grow like never before, but then inevitably the retribution will be swift, and I suspect a future republican DOJ will remind universities why they should have made efforts to move to the center of the body politic. Just a prediction.
The Universities continue to conflate the root causes of the lack of “diversity”, now increasingly coupled with the lack of meritocracy, within our ranks.
The generation that follows us (I am 64 with kids in their thirties) is very open about the root causes.
They openly recognize and belittle what is recognized to be an institution specific culture that maintains local cultural identity while forsaking any effort at fulfilling institutional or National missions.
The selections of trainees and faculty ranging from resident and fellows to the recruitment of junior faculty and their retention into senior faculty creates a homogeneous, culturally and ethnically aligned environment where those of us who recognize and call out the hypocrisy of “DEI” ( a shibboleth with no intrinsic meaning) are culled from the herd.
What is needed is integrity to the missions of higher Ed, and brave voices of “children” and those others who still care about maintaining the sanctity of professions, to speak out and revolt against the gaslighting leaders of academia.
Perhaps for amusement, or a bit more. Here are the authors of a paper I'm currently working on: Sadia Farzana, Ali Moghtaderi, Ye (Andy) Yuan, Qian (Eric) Luo, Vinay Kini, and Bernard Black. One lone white guy (me), albeit a member os ubgroup that some consider privileged (Jews). I don't give a d*** about diversity and such. But if you aim for merit, you might get diversity too. Then too, if you try to hire good people to run government agencies, you might get people named Prasad or Bhattacharya. Or a gay guy runnig Treasury (Bessent). Who could have guessed.