This gem of a story is about how one Aussie university went to the logical endpoint of the diversity-trumps-merit controversy: Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane is apparently about to hire solely on the basis of diversity, and has erased any mention of the word “merit” in its hiring policy. This of course is ridiculous, intolerable, and a recipe for academic disaster (see our big article, “In defense of merit in science“). But it’s very “progressive”!
The big taboo that people can’t discuss is that there’s a tradeoff between merit and ethnic diversity, a tradeoff that results from members of minorities having lower traditional qualifications—a result of both historical bigotry and present cultural circumstances. To achieve ethnic equity, then, you simply have to lower the merit-based standards you’ve used before. This is why colleges left and right are getting rid of standardized tests like the SAT for college admissions, and adopting what they call “holistic admissions”. At the same time, high-school graduation standards are being lowered for similar reasons (see this article about New York State considering ditching the Regents exams once required to graduate.) But few people will openly admit why this happens.
Well, Queensland University of Technology is making no bones about it. In their frantic search for diversity, they’ve binned the idea of “merit” altogether. This piece comes from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, so I assume it’s kosher. Click below to read it:
The article is short, so I’ll put all of it up. I’ve bolded the telling bits, but of course this isn’t really a new tactic. What’s novel is that they do it so blatantly and explicitly:
Queensland University of Technology’s vice-chancellor has defended the decision to remove all references to “merit” from its hiring policy.
Staff were told about the move via an internal email, which informed them that they would be moving away from “the merit principle” towards a “more inclusive suitability assessment”.
Vice-chancellor Margaret Sheil told ABC Radio Brisbane the suitability assessment would consider factors such as gender and ethnic backgrounds.
Professor Sheil said it would also consider the current demographic breakdown of their various schools and disciplines.
She said women, for example, were under-represented in science and engineering at QUT whereas men were under-represented in teaching and nursing.
She dismissed suggestions that the hiring process should be colourblind, saying that was impossible in practice.
“When people say things like ‘We do this on merit’, they’re actually reflecting the bias of their own experience,” Professor Sheil said.
“There’s so much data on this around selection, whether it’s recruitment into orchestras or into universities.
She said staff undertook unconscious bias training, and that the selection committees were chosen with diversity in mind.
She said they would aim to hire a diversity of personalities, such as recruiting more outgoing scientists who were good at industry engagement.
Professor Sheil denied the policy was a “political” decision, insisting it was a practical move to improve the university’s talent pool.
“We need to access the entire talent pool, and we don’t want everybody to look the same,” she said.
“We need the workforce to reflect the students coming through, and we also know people look at things differently when they come from different backgrounds.
Professor Sheil said she was the first female professor of chemistry in Australia and has subsequently spent her life trying to get more women into science.
QUT claims the suitability assessment is based on the Queensland Public Service Commission’s hiring strategy.
The ABC attempted to reach the QUT Liberal National Club and Young LNP for comment.
I had to resist putting the whole thing in bold! Now if inequities are the result of “systemic racism or bigotry,”—that is ongoing codified bias or widespread bias that is keeping people out of the university—then yes, that must be remedied. But is it? Now I don’t know what the situation is in Australia, but there’s no substantial evidence of systemic racism or sexism in America, at least in STEM (see this debate at MIT). This is also the case in other fields, so if you have inequities in any field, you have to determine the causes before you can create equity.
But is equity really a desirable goal? What if differences between groups are due to differences in culture (or biology) that lead to differences in preference? I’d suggest, for example, that the overrepresentation of women in teaching and nursing might be due not to biases against men in those fields, but to a difference between men and women in preferences: women prefer jobs that allow them to interact more with people, while men are more object-oriented. That is an alternative hypothesis for inequity, and one supported by other behavioral studies.
At any rate, you need to know whether it’s preference, bias, or a combination before you start preferentially hiring men to get degrees in teaching and nursing. In fact, an important new meta-analysis of both male-and female-dominated professions in 44 countries (including Australia) showed that, after 2009, gender bias against hiring women in male dominated fields disappeared. In female-dominated professions there was a slight bias in hiring females (see a general discussion here). In other words, the paucity of women in professions apparently isn’t due to bias against them. This of course says nothing about race.
As for what kind of diversity they’re looking for beyond that involving gender, Vice-Chancellor Sheil shows her hand when she argues that it’s impossible to have “colourblind hiring”, and that “we don’t want everyone to look the same.” That’s a code for “we want racial diversity,” of course, although Professor Shiel adds that she wants a diversity of personalities and viewpoints. But do you really get that when you ditch merit for ethnic diversity? Why even take ethnicity into account if you want groups to “look at things differently”? Wouldn’t you want to find out what people think instead of using “how they look” as a proxy for “how they think”? It has yet to be demonstrated that greater ethnic diversity leads to greater viewpoint diversity, much less that viewpoint diversity increases more when viewpoints are assessed directly rather than through the proxy of ethnicity. And is “personality” the same thing as “viewpoint”. An outgoing person can, for example, be either liberal or conservative.
It’s all a huge mess, and Sheil doesn’t seem to know what she’s doing except that she wants to be au courant by promoting diversity. What’s new is that she makes no bones about ignoring merit.
Ditching merit is, as I said, a recipe for disaster. The staff at this university should be rising up in anger, for by completely eliminating merit and hiring on the basis of “personality” and “looks” (i.e., race), they’ve guaranteed that the academic quality of the university will drop. And as for gender, there’s no evidence that there’s any bias, unconscious or otherwise, leading to inequity of sex in fields like nursing or teaching.
I wonder if this policy will really be put in place, but the Australians should be up in arms against it lest it spread to other Aussie colleges. Are we going to see Australian academics become like those in New Zealand?
h/t Luana, Jon
This is horrifying. To be progressive, something must make progress. If anything, this is regressive.
Indeed. This strikes me as tokenism by another name.
Respectfully disagree, Stephen. In tokenism, you hire a few black people and sprinkle them around the organization without giving them any power to change the institution. This move instead is putting people in positions of power who, through their lack of merit, can actually wreck the place, and that is the intent of the policy.
We cynics would say that’s what “progressive” policies are really meant to do in any case. You just daren’t tell people what the destination of the “progress” is for fear of reactionary pushback. Until now. It guess they aren’t afraid of reactionaries any more. Strange times.
Thanks for your perspective, Leslie. Since wokism became a force to reckon with, I’ve been on the alert for tokenism and its relative, the quota system.
A case in which bias, or discrimination, is valid. In life you have to make choices. Over time you determine that certain choices are always better, and those become biases. Merit is a bias that is defensible. I assume that Sheil’s academic progress, if not here administrative progress, was upon merit. She would, presumably, think she is an example of bias.
Before entering administration, she had an academic background in science as according to her cv, her BS and PhD are both in Physical Chemistry.
Yes, this is a common misunderstanding. It’s not that discrimination itself is bad, it’s when it’s done for invalid reasons such as race and gender that it’s bad.
As a teacher, I discriminate between my students based on their performance, giving preferential treatment to the best ones in the form a better grade. I fear that I might be called to carpet over this practice some day.
Other Aussie colleges? I fear to soon see the first performative administration in the U.S. do a “me too” in a race to the bottom. You kids get off my grass!
“There’s so much data on this around selection, whether it’s recruitment into orchestras or into universities.” I thought the whole point of blind auditions for orchestras (I assume that’s what she’s referencing) was to remove everything from the process *except* merit.
Exactly. I think she’s got the wrong end of the stick and actually has no idea how orchestral auditions work.
I think she knows how they work, but does not like the results. Blind auditions have benefited female musicians, but not racial minorities. New York Times music critic Anthony Tommasini: “The status quo is not working. If things are to change, ensembles must be able to take proactive steps to address the appalling racial imbalance that remains in their ranks. Blind auditions are no longer tenable.”
The goal is not so much excellence as equity.
Wanna go to the remedial orchestra symphony tonight?
Just to note that the idea that blind auditions benefitted female musicians is actually a myth.
Blind auditions benefit all good musicians, regardless of race and sex. That is the whole idea of blind auditions.
When I reviewed papers, the authors and their institutions were dutifully blotted out, on occasion I could guess the authors, since I knew more or less who did what.
But it still is the best -or the least bad- way. Regardless of whether or not it gives an advantage to females or ethnic minorities.
Heart surgeons selected by gender, looks and personality, not merit? Be still my beating heart.
My guess is that elite people will still pick their suppliers and health professionals by merit because they will have the inside track on who is good at their jobs. The little people will just have to accept whatever is offered to them.
“If you choose the quick and easy path…you will become an agent of evil.”
“When people say things like ‘We do this on merit’, they’re actually reflecting the bias of their own experience” … is itself a statement heavily influenced by bias.
It may be the bias of my own experience as a mom back in the 80’s and 90’s, but the rhetoric of the Diversity-Over-Merit crowd reminds me of parents “helpfully” restructuring children’s play groups, school systems, and learning materials to make sure all kids were included and an emphasis on Heart-Over-Brain inculcated.
“It’s better to be nice than right” and “Be kind” might be useful advice in an elementary schoolyard scuffle, but seems seriously out of place in an advanced academic STEM setting.
Yes it’s coddling all the way down.
Good to know that they took “unconscious bias training.” We wouldn’t want hiring decisions to be based on unconscious bias!
Oh how I would love to sit in on a physics course taught by someone who knows no physics. But, I suppose that’s part of the point. We don’t want physics classes that are burdened by the meritocratic poison that produced the Standard Model. That would be very wrong indeed.
Does unconscious bias training make you consciously biased?
I’d rather think that training something makes you better at it. In this case they excel in unconscious bias.
Your emphasis on the importance of merit-based standards in maintaining academic quality is a valid point, and I share your concerns about the potential risks associated with abandoning such criteria. It is crucial to ensure that diversity initiatives do not compromise the foundational principles of academic excellence. Thanks again for sharing!
“She said they would aim to hire a diversity of personalities, such as recruiting more outgoing scientists who were good at industry engagement.”
Can I suggest this is possibly the most horrifying part of the whole mess? Selecting against introverted nerds in favour of cluster B personalities will give you a science faculty full of good-looking, charming charlatans like Brian Wansink, Amy Cuddy, and Dan Ariely.
We look forward to a new, Progressive dispensation in which professorships in Physics, heavyweight boxing championships, and employment to perform the Sibelius violin concerto, will no longer require any ability to do Physics, do boxing, or play the violin. BIPOC female members of the “2SLGBTQIA+” population will be preferred in all these roles, to enhance restorative social justice. The results for Physics, boxing, and violin playing are easy to predict, but a different outlook in regard to ability will no doubt be maintained outside the Anglosphere.
Indeed. Interesting that it does indeed seem to be a largely Anglosphere problem. The French came up with this shit — how come they aren’t infected?
“…by completely eliminating merit and hiring on the basis of “personality” and “looks” (i.e., race), they’ve guaranteed that the academic quality of the university will drop.”
Indeed, and I can only imagine those in management at QUT have taken the cynical decision that they don’t care. If they regard themselves primarily as a teaching institution rather than a research one, and the most important priority for them is maintaining a healthy income from student fees rather than research grants, they are going to do whatever it takes to maintain popularity with current and potential future students — academic quality be damned. It could work both by disproportionately attracting those students they so desperately want to look like, and by getting the reputation as an academic “easy ride”, where students can get good grades without having to work hard.
What they haven’t thought through is the ultimate effect of this policy: degrees from QUT will quickly come to be considered worthless by employers (and for a university of technology, that will actually matter), their students won’t get jobs, and eventually the supply of students willing to incur debt to go there will dry up. Margaret Shiel will have retired by the time the shit hits the fan, and she surely knows it, so I suspect she simply doesn’t care.
University administrations are under pressure to increase enrollment and graduation rates, while deflecting criticisms of gender and racial inequality that might hurt the institution’s reputation. The quality of education then becomes a secondary issue, a nice ideal but not a priority.
I can’t speak to holistic practices in education but in my holistic approach to diet I never consider the nutritive value of food because it biases me against sweets.
“She said staff undertook unconscious bias training…”
That so-called unconscious-bias training is actually a conscious bias-training, because the staff are intentionally indoctrinated into a certain ideological bias.
““We need to access the entire talent pool, and we don’t want everybody to look the same,” she said.”
If merit is irrelevant, then so is talent. Napoleon Bonaparte said “la carrière est ouverte aux talents” (“the career is open to talents”), and that is certainly a meritocratic principle.
If there is a white-males-only class, is she insinuating that all people therein look the same? What a racist and sexist thing to say! 😉
““When people say things like ‘We do this on merit’, they’re actually reflecting the bias of their own experience,” Professor Sheil said.”
She’s out of her mind if she seriously believes, for example, that the reasons for awarding the Fields Medal (“the Nobel Prize of Mathematics”) to mathematicians don’t reflect any objective merit, being nothing more than discriminatory expressions of subjective bias or prejudice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fields_Medal
“She said they would aim to hire a diversity of personalities…”
Good news for psychopaths looking for a job! 😉
oh the hypocrisy
““When people say things like ‘We do this on merit’, they’re actually reflecting the bias of their own experience,” Professor Sheil said.”
and then
“Professor Sheil said she was the first female professor of chemistry in Australia and has subsequently spent her life trying to get more women into science.”
There’s nothing wrong with trying to get more women into science—only with trying to get more untalented ones into it.
I mentioned the Fields Medal in a previous post. Girls interested in mathematics should admire Maryam Mirzakhan not only because she was the first woman to win that prize, but also because she was a genius deserving it independently of her sex by virtue of her scientific merits, i.e. her seminal contributions to mathematics. (Note that she was doing mathematics as a female without doing female mathematics!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maryam_Mirzakhani
my comment had nothing to do with women, it was about the hypocrisy in her statement about bias of experience, and then promoting a system based on exactly that – her own bias of experience.
While I don’t exactly disagree with the basic motive (in fact I want to see more from different backgrounds make it big), the process has its issues as we can all see.
Even NASA may be doing it, they insisted on a woman and a person of color on the first of the new Moon missions. Ironic as NASA used to be so open.
I assume that merit will also be removed as a criterion for admission and course grading as well. I find it difficult to see the distinction.