Building “Diversity,” Block By Block

In an article about building “diversity” at the State University of New York at Buffalo that is a tottering edifice of cliche built upon a foundation of cliches, Mattie Rhodes, an associate professor of nursing and chair of the university’s affirmative action committee, had two proposals that I found especially interesting.

The Affirmative Action Committee has several suggestions for increasing the diversity of the UB faculty, beginning with the recruitment of candidates from underrepresented populations.

“Don’t assume there aren’t any out there, they’re unavailable or they’re unqualified,” Rhodes said.

Among the ways colleges and universities can increase their diversity are “grow your own” programs—which involve recruiting and hiring doctoral students from within the institution—and hiring senior faculty members who already have tenure at other institutions

But if you “grow your own” minorities but then monopolistically hold on to the resulting fruit of your labors, aren’t you preventing the growth of “diversity” at other institutions? Of course, if you also engage in “hiring senior faculty members who already have tenure at other institutions,” you obviously don’t care about that, since luring away tenured “diverse” faculty affirmatively reduces “diversity” at the other institution.

Of course, if an institution were truly concerned about the social fabric as a whole instead of its own particular patch, it probably wouldn’t choose to inflict the long-term damage of reinforcing racialism, increasing the importance of racial classifications, and actually engaging in racial discrimination for whatever the short-term benefits are of exposing its students to the “diversity” for which skin color is the only proxy.

But wait; there’s more.

Rhodes also mentioned “block” hires, which involves hiring several women and/or minorities at one time, especially for departments that have not had such hires in a number of years, and offering employment opportunities to spouses of candidates as an effective way to secure a good hire.

Silly me. When George Wallace used to rail about “block voting,” I thought he was being racist. I didn’t realize he was simply making a prematurely preferentialist argument.