Erin O’Connor, a tenured English professor at the University of Pennsylvania, has a must-read post about officially imposed discrimination there (Link via InstaPundit).
She cites a Daily Pennsylvanian article (which she warns may not be available long. She has a copy, and now I do too) that reported on an open meeting at which the university policy of offering “incentives” to departments to hire women was described and, somewhat more unusual,
[Penn Provost Robert] Barchi said that disincentives are being instituted on an individual departmental basis. He said that he had discussed recruitment policies with all the deans and that they were doing the same with department chairs.
As Prof. O’Connor notes, imagine the outcry if a university announced that it imposed “disincentives” on departments hiring women or minorities.
People and institutions have now been doing this sort of thing for so long, and it has become so accepted, that they’re no longer embarrassed about saying it out loud. They’ve forgotten how shocked some of us still are — not so much at seeing it, which we’re used to as well, but seeing the degree to which our traditional ideas of fairness have morphed into a new version whose racial/ gender/ethnic/(religious next?) engineering to achieve “diversity” actually requires discrimination.
UPDATE [11/1/2002]
