AFTER THEY'VE TRIED EVERYTHING ELSE, WILL THEY TRY SOMETHING THAT WORKS?

Years ago, I made a simple request.  "[J]ust once I'd like the diversity advocates to spell out precisely their trade-off between quality and inclusiveness. (If there is no such trade-off, there ought be no controversy over hiring for diversity.)"  The poobahs of higher education weren't interested in responding then, nor were they nine years later.  "But when higher education is in bad odor already, can pretending there are no standards really work?"

The answer is apparently yes.  "The Exclusivity of Inclusive Excellence."  That's an Inside Higher Ed contributor called Andrea Y. Simpson, and what follows defies parody.

I am reflecting on how a similar focus on “excellence,” as it is interpreted at so many institutions, can also undermine the goals of diversity and inclusivity, as well as limit the scope of first-rate scholarship.

Most institutions define excellence in candidates for the professoriate using the status of the candidate’s graduate program, publications, teaching evaluations (if available) and letters of recommendation. If the recommender(s) are luminaries in the discipline, they boost your bona fides. What is inclusivity? It prioritizes building a campus community with various races, ethnicities, gender identities and research interests who are part of college and university life at all levels.

With time, members of hiring committees get a feel for which luminaries give glowing endorsements of all their students, irrespective of how good they really are, and which offer candid evaluations mentioning strengths and weaknesses. Moreover, a careful reading of the essay will reveal that the box-ticking is central to "inclusivity" in a way that "research interests" is not.

That's not my objective today.  I limit my grousing to noting that Ms Simpson wishes the standards away.

The phrase “inclusive excellence” conveys that if an institution consciously welcomes students and faculty of different races, ethnicities and socioeconomic strata, it will not sacrifice “standards.” That appears reasonable. We all want an excellent education provided by excellent instructors. However, “excellence” is too often a code word for upholding the status quo and eliminating all those (ideas and people) that disrupt it.

On the surface, seeking “excellence” sounds like a fair and well-intentioned pursuit. However, it does not do the work of diversifying a set of values and ways of thinking in academia. Instead, it often reinforces the double standard that those of us invested in equity and fair play seek to destroy. The word “excellent,” in all its forms, frequently supports one of the axioms of critical race theory: institutions often do not adopt policies that promote equity and fair play unless they benefit whites. Moreover, “making inclusivity excellent” as a phrase or slogan is increasingly so ubiquitous that it has more or less become meaningless.

That's a missed opportunity to call attention to the proliferation of business bafflegab that crowds out scholarly rigor. It's also a missed opportunity to encourage institutions such as her University of Richmond to lift their game.

Using the traditional and mainstream industry standards, we can all agree on the status of various university graduate programs. Ivy League institutions and those with outstanding research records are “excellent.” Scholars with numerous publications and accolades are “excellent” and more than qualified to judge “excellent” candidates.

Well, Harvard just drummed Tony Roland Freyer out, and if you're on a hiring committee at a mid-major that still has research ambitions, do you offer your interview slots to middling-to-getting by dissertators out of Harvard or Minnesota or take a look at some of the highly recommended job candidates out of departments that don't have such a lofty reputation?

It's possible that has occurred to Ms Simpson.

In contrast, “inclusivity” is measured by the number of minority students and faculty members recruited and retained. We count minorities using self-identification. The truth is that one can be classified African American but not be at all familiar with the culture, history or folkways of the group with which one is legally identified. Meanwhile, the status of the university from which candidates for faculty positions graduate influences outcomes. The scholars who write recommendations from high-status institutions influence outcomes. Both may distract us from the quality of work done by candidates. Our challenge is to consider institutional and recommender status, along with identity, with the same scrutiny we bring to research assessment. Each metric has built-in biases. For instance, many excellent institutions exist outside of the Ivy League circle, and many excellent candidates emerge out of non–Ivy League institutions.

in that paragraph, we're in accord. But then she steps all over her argument.

We can apply “excellence” and its iterations to anything. However, when applied to diversity and inclusivity efforts, its ambiguity is part of the problem. Established and widely known experts act as gatekeepers and define excellence in any field. Such experts usually populate the mainstream of the area of study, and they are rarely those who challenge accepted paradigms. In contrast, those who challenge the paradigms are often marginalized, working on the outskirts of their fields and encountering hostile work and research conditions.

What’s more, a diversity of ideas should not be confused with “viewpoint diversity.” The claim that universities are leaning entirely left is based on the notion that the lack of libertarians or conservatives in the professoriate means that the viewpoints of people in those groups is not represented. However, as do many scholars, my practice is to include all ideologies—conservative, libertarian, liberal and radical—in my pedagogy. Ideological bent or partisanship are not proxies for minority groups, or “outsiders.” We cannot recruit underrepresented groups for a diverse campus while denying that group membership matters. And by focusing on ideology, we automatically eliminate members of minority groups who are more likely to identify as Democrats or consider themselves liberal. But personal partisan identification does not automatically translate to the indoctrination of students.

Perhaps not, but once a hiring committee places a value on checking boxes, and questions, perhaps at the urging of the administration, criteria of competence as themselves racialized, the department is on a path to a faculty of faddish box-checkers that the students will recognize as symbolism over substance.  It's not possible to wish that away.

Under the banner of “inclusive excellence,” institutions are reassuring constituents that they are not lowering standards while seeking minority faculty. In an analysis of discourses at 20 institutions of higher education, Susan VanDeventer Iverson found that the following phrases frequently appear when referencing recruitment efforts: “high-achieving,” “high profile,” “talented” and “scholarly distinction.” Aside from the semantic problems with the slogan— we cannot make “inclusivity” or “excellence” do anything—these are just words. They reflect the institution’s intention, but they also demonstrate how easy it is to reify established notions that diversity implies that the institution is willing to “settle” for mediocrity.

Sorry, nothing in that paragraph disabuses me of the notion that there is, in fact, a tradeoff between quality and inclusiveness.

Our universities are being destroyed by terminally stupid people.