The Washington Post reported Friday that in a presentation to a gathering of his paper’s business and news managers, New York Times Chief Executive Mark Thompson
identified three areas toward which diversity efforts must be channeled: recruitment, hiring and promotion. Supervisors who fail to meet upper management’s requirements in recruiting and hiring minority candidates or who fail to seek out minority candidates for promotions face some stern consequences: They’ll be either encouraged to leave or be fired.
The Post adds that Dean Baquet and Arthur Sulzberger Jr, respectively Executive Editor and Publisher of the New York Times, have made similar comments.
It is often (and usually correctly) said that ignorance of the law is no excuse. If someone files a complaint against the Times for employment discrimination, it will be interesting to discover whether Thompson, Baquet, and Sulzberger are dunces or scofflaws — that is, whether they don’t know that Title VII prohibits the racial preference policy of which they are obviously so proud — there is no “diversity” exception to Title VII — or simply don’t care.
Also interesting is the Times’s tacit admission that the “diversity” it demands of its managers has nothing to do with diversity; it is all and only about numbers. How, after all, and to whom would a “diverse” accountant or secretary or graphic designer provide diversity?
The New York Times, of course, is not alone in its ignorance of or disdain for Title VII’s prohibitions against racial discrimination in hiring or promotion. According to an article today in Inside Higher Ed, the number of doctoral degrees awarded to minorities in the humanities (except philosophy) has declined, which IHE editor Scott Jaschik states in the article, “could complicate the efforts of colleges that have pledged to make set percentages of their new hires or faculties as a whole come from minority groups.”
I wonder how many of those colleges have law schools where surely someone on the faculty, or if there is no law school even a summer intern in the general counsel’s office, could have informed the administration that even liberal judges and maybe even a stray lawyer or two in the Justice Dept. or the EEOC tend to frown on setting “set percentages” of minorities that must be hired. As Roger Clegg asks pointedly, “Can You Say, ‘Quota’?”
Hans Bader explains here that this sort of discrimination is illegal. And Roger Clegg posted the following comment to the Post article: “It’s illegal to discriminate on the basis of race, ethnicity, and sex in recruiting, hiring, and promotion. Oh, and it’s also unfair, divisive, inefficient, and immoral.” And then he immediately posted a second comment: “Oh, and remember Jayson Blair?”
