Kevin M. Kruse: As everyone knows, when a university hires new faculty, they just stack all their credentials up in a row and whichever one is highest gets the job. Easy peasy.

As everyone knows, when a university hires new faculty, they just stack all their credentials up in a row and whichever one is highest gets the job. Easy peasy.

A lawsuit filed against Northwestern University opened a new front in the legal battle against affirmative action, alleging that its law school hires less-qualified people of color and women over White men for faculty positions in violation of federal anti-discrimination laws.

Lawsuit: Northwestern’s law school is biased against White men in hiringwapo.st The lawsuit, filed by a prominent attorney, alleges the university’s law school gives hiring preference to women and people of color.

If I could make everyone who uttered one phrase vanish from the planet, dipshits who say “affirmative action hire” would be in the running

Related, this piece made me feel like I was going insane.

Why Are There So Few Conservative Professors?www.chronicle.com The facts are beyond dispute. The causes and solutions are not.

Oh god, never read conservative grievance pieces in the Chron. Gives you brain cancer.

Yeeeeep

“Hey, this dog whistle is defective. Every time I blow it, normal people look at me with annoyed expressions on their faces.”

Or we could just label every white person a "racist hire."

Officially designate as Preferential Hire

I feel bad for agreeing so readily to this, but one thing I hate more than racists? Empowered racists.

nah. it's been replaced by "DEI hire."

It's literally code for "I can't imagine the possibility of anyone being more qualified than a white man."

When 6 Conservative justices pick your faculty.

“Leader of the Free World,” like the rest of the World outside of the US Electorate had any say in the matter.

It comes in handy for explaining why law schools hire a stream of conservative dipshits tho

Before affirmative action it was always a pure, some might even say lily-white hiring process.

Oh yeah, pure meritocracy. Your Harvard advisor would call his old Yale roommate at Princeton and tell him you merited a job there.

If you claim to want a meritocracy end legacy admissions and then we can talk

Yeah, they weirdly shut up when that topic comes up.

Yeah why has my family attended here and donated all this money just to see people with higher grades and scores and more interesting and representative life stories get in

Even more, scrub all proper names out of applications. No family names, no city names, no prep school names, no summer camp names….

No mention of summer internships either.

That is a tricky one to slip in there isnt it. Sends the signal that “I have enough money in the bank of Mom and Dad that I can work for free”

I used to work in a white male dominated agency & they'd always gripe about promotions that weren't merit based (in their opinions & often correctly), but THEN they promoted a WOMAN. Suddenly, it made 'em mad 'cause it was a gender bias. I asked what's new about bias in promotions & they relented.

In that org, it helped to be Mormon.

Or as I like to call it, "white affirmative action".

Slavery and Jim Crow could be understood as “white affirmative action.”

Even easier, they just measure each candidates skull ……

I've been on several searches and I'm always moved by solemn dignity of the Measuring of the CVs. I don't know how you do the Measuring at Princeton, but we meet in a candlelit room dressed in full regalia. The chair lays the CVs of each candidate on a table. Naturally, the longest gets the job.

I vaguely remember reading about one lawsuit from many years ago of the form, "I was denied tenure but this less qualified woman was granted tenure," and discovery unsurprisingly documented that the male candidate was rejected for being an insufferable douchebag that no one liked.

Looking at all the white male lawyers lining up with the Trumpublicans, I'd have a bias against them too as law professors.

And no two people have stacks the same height, so there's a single objectively defined order of most to least qualified.

No, no, it’s not a stack, it’s the total wall space needed to display the credentials including the size of the matting and frames chosen by the candidates

How do they stack credentials? Like the number of "PhD" and "MD" and whatever else after their name? How does one compare people's achievements objectively?

Even this article subheading feeds into the idea that affirmative action automatically means "less qualified". I remember arguing with a guy in the early 90s who used that argument about fireman/police officers, etc. I simply pointed out what those assumptions said about him.

“‘We’re just getting started,’ said Mitchell.” Extreme white male grievance personified—just like Russell Vought—in which a society that does not operate exactly as they want it to operate is intolerable.

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