More cries for diversity at 2007 State of the University.
Just prior to this year’s spring break, Provost Biddy Martin delivered Cornell’s first annual State of the University address to a crowd of students, faculty, and alumni gathered in the Kennedy Hall Auditorium. Going in with no prior ideas of the particular “State of the University”, one could only imagine the simplest complaints and areas of improvement. Students have their gripes with school policies, the Code of Conduct changes are causing a minor fuss, the school’s snow maintenance may not be perfect. However, the place isn’t burning down, the riots are being kept to a minimum, and the snakes are safe in the zoo and far away from the plane. In other words, all is pretty much hunky-dory.
The Provost opened her address with great praise of Cornell’s achievements in scientific research and the great resources it had at its disposal. Of specific note were Steven Squyres’ and Jim Bell’s contributions to astronomy through the Mars Rover exploration program, Maury Tigner’s particle accelerators, and Harold Craighead’s nanoscale accelerator used to mass extremely small objects, such as single E. coli bacteria. She moved on to praise the student body for their willingness to propose changes that seem necessary and beneficial for the University, naming specifically the new sustainability movement. Provost Martin also recognized the importance of listening to future proposals, giving the new Diversity of Thought Initiative, authored by Student Assembly Representative Jimmy Salem ’07, importance not only as a movement for fair teaching but also as a test of this commitment to student opinions. If the administration makes good on these claims, all is indeed hunky-dory.
The Provost then moved on to the University’s current and future problems, the most pressing of which was the imminent retirement of 600 teachers, a third of the University’s current faculty, over the next decade—made all the more urgent by the recent retirement announcement of noted conservative government professor Jeremy Rabkin. Such a massive departure of faculty necessitates an aggressive hiring policy on the part of the administration, but is not anything beyond Cornell’s reach. Indeed, the Provost announced that the university had a plan to fill the gaps about to be left by these departures.
Exit hunky-dory. Enter the family of airsick rattlers in coach.
The university’s replacement strategy, in trying to “avoid the tendency to replicate ourselves”, has opted instead to go hog-wild on building a racially and sexually diverse faculty (with lesser emphasis on religious diversity and passing mention of ideological diversity). According to Provost Martin, “we will not be able to boast a world-class faculty […] if that faculty is not diverse,” equating diversity directly with great capability to teach and research, a claim tantamount to saying that difference is, in and of itself, the backbone of excellent teaching. To this end, the Provost identified several possible means by which to fulfill this commitment.
Firstly, the Provost stipulated “that every department or hiring unit build pools of women and underrepresented candidates well in advance […of] a particular hire or search” to ensure diversity, in effect “recruiting” faculty of minority gender or race. Aggressive hiring policy is necessary and even encouraged as a response to this imminent need to replace a massive portion of the university’s professors—so long as the proper qualities are selected for in the hiring process. Teaching quality and research ability should be the primary criteria considered in hiring: if a black candidate has better qualifications for a history professor than a white one, the black should be hired; a woman looking for a position in the physical sciences should be selected if her male counterpart’s resume is less impressive. However, the hiring of women as instinctive practice, as a knee-jerk reflex to avoid association with the arguably misogynistic views of Harvard’s ex-president Lawrence Summers, sacrifices the university’s dignity and devotion to excellence in teaching.
Provost Martin also cautioned against an unspoken bias leading “to the assumption that the white male candidate is the right choice, even when qualifications are equal.” However, when prefaced by remarks asking for a pre-composed pool of well-qualified minority and female potential faculty, the presence of a pro-white male bias seems hardly a realistic complaint. This claim, corroborated by “some of the best research [N.B. from sources unnamed],” if true, is lamentable—assuming that in any real-world situations two individuals could ever be found who had absolutely identical credentials. Nevertheless, the answer to passive bias, real or imagined, is not an active bias in the other direction. It is fallacious to assume that a white male applicant is by default more capable of teaching than another applicant, but assuming that a minority applicant will make the faculty more competitive as a rule repeats the same fallacy in the opposite direction.
What the Provost’s proposals hold as the central unquestioned (and unquestionable) principle is that diversity, by its very nature, enhances the quality of education Cornell students receive, despite a complete absence of scientific data confirming or denying that assertion. The administration is attaching undue importance to diversity, failing to realize that different is different, excellence is excellence, and any case in which the two overlap is merely by the merits of the individuals involved and not as a general rule. The university, in order to be truly competitive, needs to recognize this simple fact and realize how it can best commit itself to the service of its students—by devoting its time to ensuring that the best teachers are hired and not using the university’s faculty positions as the testing grounds for its pet social experiments.