SPELL OUT THE TRADE-OFFS. At Phi Beta Cons, Roger Clegg has the Trenchant Observation of the Day. He's referring to some Chronicle of Higher Education material on diversity that's behind the subscription wall at home. (Look for an update with links when I get to a computer at work).

But let me focus on the prominent pull-quote in the first piece on old-fashioned diversity: “One of the most damaging beliefs is that diversity and quality are mutually exclusive.”

Let’s analyze this. By “diversity,” it’s clear from the rest of the piece that what’s meant is, indeed, more people of particular races and ethnicities. And I suspect that the “damaging belief” is not that such diversity is itself inconsistent with quality, but that selecting individuals (whether faculty or students) with an eye on achieving such diversity will compromise quality.

With that elaboration, let me explain why this damaging belief is so persistent: It is true.

And not only true, but undeniable. If your aim is to select individuals based simply on quality A, then if you weigh factors other than quality A in making your selection, you will fail in your aim. You will be giving quality A less relative weight if you weigh other things along with it than if you don’t. If you want to choose the tallest people, then you cannot make your selection based on height and weight. And if you want to hire people of the highest quality (smartest, hardest working, etc.), then you cannot make your selection based on quality and skin color.

Old-style affirmative action, as practiced 40 years ago, encouraged search committees to treat minority status as a plus factor in a choice among candidates of otherwise equal quality. The tradeoff became the dirty little secret in the aftermath of Bakke.

To some extent, the Chronicle articles and the Phi Beta Cons reaction strike me as more obsession over a very small part of higher education. It does no good, for instance, for a search committee at a cash-strapped mid-major to sit through diversity training and make special efforts to diversify the candidate pool, when the cash-strapped mid-major authorizes a pay package and job description that are not competitive with those offered elsewhere.