A “Diverse” Candidate In Every Pool. Or Else

A Wake-up call at Marquette:

If the finalists for a faculty job are all white, it’s a sure thing that the new professor will be white.

That obvious statement is behind a directive issued by Madeline Wake, provost at Marquette University, to deans and department heads. No proposed hires for full-time faculty jobs will be approved, she said, unless there is at least one “diverse” candidate in the pool. (Diverse, for the purposes of the directive, is not only non-white Americans, but also people from other parts of the world.)

Do the people from the other parts of the world also have to be non-white to be “diverse,” or is other-worldness enough? Who knows.

Wake, of course, doesn’t believe in quotas. No one does.

Wake stressed that pools might be defined in different ways for different disciplines, and that a minority candidate may not always end up in the final two or three. But in a department that receives hundreds of applications and then interviews a dozen to pick a few finalists, she said that she would want to see a minority candidate in the dozen, and that just having had some non-white résumés in the original stack of applicants wouldn’t suffice. In the past, she said, many finalist pools for faculty jobs have been all white.

“I’m not looking for less qualified candidates, but I want a good faith effort to get people in the pool,” she said.

Why would anyone think that just because you all but require “diverse” candidates in the final pool that, if you hire them, you might indeed wind up with “less qualified” people than you would otherwise have gotten? Oh, I know. Anyone who would think that must be a racist.