The argument against favoring ethnic or gender diversity when choosing among different candidates for a position is that choices should be based on “merit.” But that opens up the questions, “what is merit?” and “can diversity itself have merit?”
Surely the meaning of “merit” depends on the nature of the position. For some positions, there may be an objective measure. The Army administers physical fitness and intelligence tests to recruits.
But objective measures are relatively rare, and seldomly exclusive.
Take, for example, positions in a president’s cabinet. In that field there seem to be very few objective measures. How else could we end up with a Secretary of Defense who made his living as a TV commentator and never rose above the rank of major in his state’s national guard? Or a Secretary of Education who made her money televising fake wrestling matches and whose education experience was one year’s service on a state board of education 16 years ago?
If those qualifications are sufficient for a federal cabinet position, it would seem that there are a vast number of equally qualified candidates, and using diversity to choose a person for one of those positions would in no way require a less meritorious choice.
Other professions have qualifications that are no doubt more demanding, but even then the standards of merit may be fuzzy. A federal judge may have been chosen because he was a former Congressman and friend of the president. No doubt his knowledge of the legislative process would be useful, but no one would claim his qualifications meet some objective test. Or the leader of a university may be someone with weaker academic credentials than other candidates but who just happened to have a personal relationship with the people in charge of the presidential search process. Or a patient may choose a doctor or a client may choose a lawyer because they go to the same church.
In these cases, the person or persons doing the selection may have more confidence because of the personal connection, and so be more likely to follow the professional’s advice, but connections are not objective standards. Many people may have similar connections, and taking diversity into account would not necessarily mean a choice that lacked such a connection.
Also, the measure of merit inevitably depends on the objectives of the organization. If a university’s objective is to hand out tickets to fame and fortune, then reliance on test scores may not be an unfair way to choose the winners.
But if a university’s objective is to train leaders of communities in different areas of the state, or doctors who will work in underserved communities that lack medical care, or lawyers who will appeal to juries in different types of communities, then test scores may be a very poor way to select students, and certainly not one that should be used exclusively.
In those cases, “merit” would seem to require the organization to take into account the community from which the student comes. In this regard, I have a bias. My admission to a college in New Jersey may have been boosted by the fact that my application came from Mississippi, and not New Jersey, The college then had a motto “in the nation’s service” and it took geography into account.
Also, if the success of the organization depends on the degree of confidence various communities will place in it, then taking community of origin into account would seem to be something that goes to the merit of a choice. It is important for customers to have confidence in salesmen, for leaders to have the confidence of those they supervise, for people in the justice system to have confidence in their judges, and for lawyers to enjoy the confidence of the judges, jurors, and clients whom they must persuade or satisfy. In each of these situations, confidence depends in part on community representation.
That is why the current political attack on DEI, or diversity, equity and inclusion, attacks something that may actually be critical to an organization’s success.
The three terms mean different things.
Pursuit of “equity” has long been legally suspect if it means making a choice in an attempt to redress historical wrongs to a group rather than current wrongs to a person. It also has no stopping point because there is no way to either measure a historical wrong or tell when it has been successfully redressed. The Sunnis and Shias are still fighting over who should have succeeded Muhammed in 632 AD.
But “diversity” and “inclusion” are entirely different matters. They are relatively easy to judge and until recently were constitutionally protected.
With respect to higher education, U.S. Supreme Court’s recent about-face declaration that diversity has no constitutional value in education makes no practical sense. If a university’s purpose is to train leaders or, as the Belhaven University slogan tells us, “not to be served, but to serve,” that requires outreach to different communities
And in many job categories, the measures of merit are not objective and the need for public confidence is essential.
Finally, it is all too easy for the assault on “DEI” to morph into an attack on racial minorities and women generally. Where standards of merit are uncertain, the very lack of standards makes it all too easy for someone to claim that a person is a “DEI hire” and also all too hard for a person in charge of choice to defend against that charge. That is especially true when, as one judge has said, the present national administration has no definition of what “DEI” means.
And that assault gun generally shoots only one way. White males are almost never the target.
Luther Munford is a Northsider.
