Columbia is not the only elite university
promoting exclusionary hiring in a big way. The University of Pennsylvania has
just announced
that it will spend $100 million over the next five years “on hiring and
retaining more diverse faculty members.”

George Leef asks a very
good question: “Why does it cost so much money to simply
screen out all applicants who don’t have the ancestry or other characteristics
that make them diverse’”? In any event $100 million should buy a lot of
“diversity,” whatever the reason and in fact whatever “diversity” is.

Penn President Amy
Gutmann said that data is “not available to track our progress for … types of
diversity [other than racial and gender diversity], but that in no way
diminishes the importance of all types of diversity to Penn’s educational
mission and the vitality of its campus.”

Gutmann also said that “all of those who are
employed by Penn are asked to self-identify their race and gender after they
are hired.” Left unexplained was how Penn proposed to determine the race and
gender of the new “diversity” applicants before they were hired, which
you’d think would be necessary for a hiring program whose purpose is to
increase gender-based and pigmentary 
“diversity.” (See here for an almost humorous example from my experience of a department that did not
avoid buying
a pig in a poke in attempting to make a “diversity” hire.)

Also left unexplained is how Penn can attempt
to hire and retain more “diverse” faculty members (defined whether wholly or
partly by race, gender, and ethnicity) without running afoul of its own
embarrassingly clear and forthright non-discrimination policies. Its Policy
of Equal Opportunity, Affirmative Action and Nondiscrimination,
for example, could hardly be more clear:

Penn is committed to
ensuring that all academic programs (except where age or sex are bona fide
occupational qualifications), including social and recreational programs, and
services are administered without regard to an individual’s protected-class
status. 

Penn is also
committed to ensuring that its personnel and other employment decisions are
made without regard to an individual’s protected-class status….

The blatant conflict between current practice
and stated principle is enough to have led at least one observer (and one I
know quite well) to comment on Preferences,
Principles, and Hypocrisy in Higher Education.

In her pre-presidential scholarly career Penn
President Amy Gutmann wrote widely about race,
multiculturalism, and affirmative action. Perhaps in one of
her now frequent
conversations with the press she can explain how it is
possible for the university to make a special effort to hire and retain “more
diverse faculty members” — especially a $100 million effort — while studiously
treating all prospective and current employees “without regard” to their race,
gender, or ethnicity.