Workarounds!

Ever since the Supreme Court’s decision striking down affirmative action in college admissions, liberals have vowed to find workarounds.   The Democrat Party, the media and liberals in general have been elevating victimhood over achievement for years.  And like every action-reaction, there are always unintended consequences.  And perhaps the most significant of these consequences is that more people than ever are misrepresenting either their racial or gender identities in pursuit of advantages in professional and academic positions.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education’s 2020 and 2021 surveys of a combined sample of 57,000 undergraduate students at top U.S. universities showed significant increases in non-heterosexual identification from 2020 to 2021.  And while age made no statistically significant difference, students in 2021 were 42% more likely to identify as LGBT than those in 2020.  Rather curiously though, a separate study also revealed no corresponding increases in sexual behavior tied to those identities.

Recently, former Republican presidential candidate and former Louisiana Governor, Bobby Jindal, wrote a spot-on op-ed citing how aptitudes, interests, and effort aren’t always evenly distributed among shifting politicized racial categories, and by giving special consideration to specific minorities in admissions and hiring decisions we inevitably bring about a hierarchy of competing victim-hoods.  Jindal believes the situation has deteriorated to the point where the left has moved beyond debating which minority groups deserve preferential treatment and now create distinctions within groups, e.g.,  that recent black immigrants, their children, and children of biracial couples are less deserving of preferential treatment than descendants of American slaves.

In their determination to go down every rabbit hole in search of victims, they embarrass themselves trying to quantify or compare the ancestral loss of one group versus another.  It’s ridiculous and insulting to compare Holocaust survivors to American Indians; or victims of American slavery to those who suffered from European colonization.  And as Jindal opined, “just how long should we penalize those who didn’t commit these evils and reward those who didn’t suffer them?”

The Founders envisioned a society organized around merit.  They even gave us a road map—the U.S. Constitution, which for nearly two-hundred and fifty years has proven to be the single best antidote to inherited advantage the world has ever seen.  Our nation was founded on the predicate of equal opportunity.  But liberals who find patterns of racism everywhere are concerned only with equality of outcomes.  Meanwhile, one can argue that’s precisely why race and gender have taken over the humanities and social sciences on American college campuses.

Sadly, the situation is getting worse.  The left is now encroaching on science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) where the big question is, how can we promote more women and minorities by changing (read lowering) the requirements previously established for graduate level study?  The National Science Foundation NSF a federal agency that funds university research exemplifies this approach and argues that the STEM workforce requires diversity, but then fail to support their position with any evidence.

Recently the physics department at UC San Diego advertised for an assistant professor position with a specific emphasis on contributions to diversity such as the candidate’s awareness of inequities faced by underrepresented groups.  Interestingly, all five candidates on the UC San Diego short list were females.

The same diversity obsession now extends to medical schools as promoters of identity politics are literally playing with people’s lives when medical schools admissions committees are told to overlook the low-test scores of black and Hispanic applicants.  Between 2013 and 2016 medical schools admitted 57% of black applicants with low Medical College admission test scores of 24 to 26, but admitted only 8% of whites and 6% of Asians with identical scores.

One of their rationalizations is that minorities want doctors who look like them.  C’mon, does anyone really believe a minority patient with a serious illness is more concerned about having a doc with the same skin color instead of one who’s skilled?   Now, I have to be honest about something here, six years ago when my cardiologist told me I needed quadruple by-pass surgery, it never once occurred to me to ask about the color or sex of my surgeon, but hey, that’s just me.

The unique accomplishments of western science were achieved without regard to sex or skin color; nonetheless, many industry leaders and academic administrators now want us to believe diversity is the key to our future.   But the truth of the matter is the exact opposite.  Black, brown, white, or yellow; male or female, I think most of us want our most qualified people designing our bridges, flying our airplanes, and attending to us in our hospitals, don’t you?

Quote of the day:  “Strong arguments don’t depend on fallacies; weak arguments rely on them.”- Dr. Kenneth P. Thompson