this entire crusade against diversity in hiring and admissions is based on the supposition that all white men are necessarily more qualified than any nonwhite person or woman who might be considered for the job. like, this lawsuit more or less states that outright.
for these people the mere presence of any nonwhite person, and especially any black person, in a desired and prestigious position is on its face evidence of anti-white discrimination and unfair preferences.
it’s why you have people still blaming affirmative action for why their kids couldn’t get into harvard et al. it’s not legacies or the fact that these places are hyper-selective. it’s that there is *a* black person who took *your* spot.
Moreover, if you’ve ever actually participated in hiring anybody, you know the idea that you can arrange the applicants in a line in order of how objectively qualified they are with one at the top is silly anyway. Most hiring processes involving choosing among multiple perfectly qualified people.
exactly. the idea that there is a single and reliable way to judge “merit,” that this can be purely quantitative and that job performance is a straightforward function of “merit” should be ridiculous to anyone who has held a job
I’m on a hiring committee at my uni every year. We have a multipoint quantitative screening procedure that is pretty obviously an exercise in CYA. It shows we “measured their merit.” To some extent it does, but we could measure it just as much, much faster, w/o the procedure.
I think those things can be helpful, to be honest, as one element of a process. Obviously incomplete, but given the biases that seep in when people hire by “feel” or “fit,” I think it’s worth trying to put pressure on your own measurements. But yes, it’s inexact in the extreme.
