Posts Tagged ‘diversity’

No “DEI Hire” can ever be the “best choice” for any position or award

January 4, 2025

DEI programs are part of the wokery delusion. By definition a “DEI hire” would not have been appointed to any position or received any award without having received unfair favour – to the detriment of somebody else being discriminated against. No “DEI Hire” can ever be the “best choice” for any position or award.

Claudine Gay is one of the more famous woke/DEI catastrophes. She would never have been appointed to be President of Harvard if she had not been black and female. She was neither best qualified nor most competent for the job. But she was black and she was female. The insidiousness of cancerous DEI programs is that I now assume – as the default assessment – that any black person in a high position in US academia must probably have been a DEI hire. Almost every university has its token employees and some in very high positions. I was listening to a black Dean from Columbia recently and my automatic assumption was that this was  a “DEI hire”. The Dean said nothing sufficiently insightful to change my mind during the 4 minute interview. I have written him off in my mind as a “DEI hire” but, for all I know, the Dean may actually have been quite competent and deserving of the appointment. 

Too late. DEI has struck. The label is permanent. 

I find most DEI / affirmative action / reservation schemes fundamentally flawed and unjust. By definition a “DEI hire” would not have been appointed to any position or received any award without having received unfair favour – to the detriment of somebody else being discriminated against. No “DEI Hire” can ever be the “best choice” for any position or award. No matter how qualified, the beneficiaries of such schemes will always carry the stigma of not having been the “best” for the position (whether job or student place). There is no doubt that in the US, competence has suffered as a consequence of affirmative action and DEI. The reservation system and its distorted benefits in India has helped perpetuate the caste system. So much so that the reservation system is institutionalized and corrupted. In Europe the decline in competence of public service TV employees is on continuous display with program presenters and coordinators lacking in basic competences but fulfilling some “inclusivity” or “diversity” wish. In countries with quotas for women directors, competent women are unfortunately being painted with the quota brush. The New Zealand Navy has prioritized diversity over the sinkability of its ships. It was recently apparent that the US Secret Service has also decreased its capability to protect its charges by giving priority to diversity in hiring. A small person holding up her hands, apparently to protect a very tall person, was one of the more ludicrous images that persist.

These schemes are not far short of stupid. Reverse discrimination involves actions against the innocent to favour the currently disadvantaged to try and compensate for criminal discrimination by other people to other victims. They are all inherently unjust schemes with a remarkable lack of common sense.

I try to list the failings of such schemes (mainly as practiced in the US and Europe).

  • Tokenism: DEI programs are often just a facade to appear inclusive. That ethnically diverse work places provide benefits is a religious woke belief but there is no evidence that it is so.
  • Reverse Discrimination: DEI initiatives always lead to reverse discrimination, where qualified individuals from majority groups are overlooked in favor of less-qualified candidates from underrepresented groups. This has inevitably caused resentment and emphasized the stupidity of such schemes.
  • Lack of Measurable Results: The effectiveness of DEI programs is unproven due to the impossibility of measuring their impact on organizational performance. Diversity and inclusion only bring political benefits to the program organizers, but benefits to the organization cannot be quantified.
  • Focus on Diversity Over Inclusion: DEI programs often prioritize diversity in terms of demographics (race, gender, etc.) but neglect the importance of the primary purpose of any workplace – which is to do some specified work.
  • Administrative Burden: DEI initiatives are extremely time-consuming and resource-intensive, requiring significant administrative effort to implement and maintain. This are a significant burden on organizations, especially smaller ones with no quantifiable benefits.
  • Stereotyping: DEI initiatives lead to stereotyping and perpetuating of such stereotyping.

It is often sanctimoniously claimed that DEI is “about creating a workplace where everyone feels valued, respected, and has equal opportunities to succeed”. What they conveniently forget is that a workplace is for doing work. Getting the work done is the objective not the practicing of religious rituals.

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Posted in Behaviour, Politics | 1 Comment »

Diversity has sapped the competence of the US Secret Service

July 16, 2024

UPDATE:

It seems I was not the only one to notice that female SS agents shorter than their clients will have some difficulty shielding him, let alone carrying him out of a burning building.

NYT 

But when Mr. Trump strode onto the floor of the Republican National Convention on Monday night in Milwaukee — his first public appearance since the shooting at his rally — he was flanked by what appeared to be an all-male phalanx of Secret Service agents.

I must be feeling better since I feel a little rant coming on.

Whether you look at it from the right (a failed assassination attempt fueled by Biden’s bullseye remark) or from the left (a staged assassination by the Secret Service with one killed as collateral damage), the US Secret Service does come across as lacking in competence.

Looking at some of the video I did wonder why 3 shortish ladies (pony-tails, black suits and dark glasses) were part of the SS contingent uselessly holding up their hands to “protect” their much taller client from bullets coming from even higher up? It was not just ridiculous, it was farcical. The protective huddle around Trump – after the event – was something out of Gilbert and Sullivan. No matter how woke you are, assigning responsibility for the subject’s security to physically challenged agents is a sign of incompetence at the level of policy making (meaning of course the Director). Of course, she was hired by Biden to have a special focus on wokeness and diversity. (Interestingly she has worked for the SS in the past, but for her current job as Director, she was hired from the enormous challenges of protecting Pepsi (bottles and people, one supposes).

If the SS were behind either a real or a staged attempt, they were incompetent. If it was a true assassination attempt by a lone assassin, they were still incompetent. If it was some kind of conspiracy, then their incompetence is even greater. The SS does not come out of this well.

Generally in the social sciences there is no need for competence. The results of research are very often fiddled to suit the pre-determined results or some political agenda. There is no right or wrong after all, and diversity can be given free reign. This is also why social science studies can very rarely be replicated. For the social sciences diversity has woke upsides and relatively few downsides since competence is not required or valued. In all other professional areas of life though, diversity is always at the expense of competence and all the consequences that can bring. Using diversity as an end in itself will always promote mediocrity and is antagonistic to seeking excellence.

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Harvard, diversity, incompetence and fraud

January 23, 2024

The Claudine Gay diversity-causes-incompetence affair has hardly been put to bed before I saw this article this morning.

A prominent cancer center affiliated with Harvard said it will ask medical journals to retract six research papers and correct dozens of others after a British scientist and blogger found that work by some of its top executives was rife with duplicated or manipulated data.

The center, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, one of the nation’s foremost cancer treatment and research facilities, moved quickly in recent days to address allegations of faulty data in 58 studies, many of them influential, compiled by a British molecular biologist, Sholto David.

In many cases, Dr. David found, images in the papers had been stretched, obscured or spliced together in a way that suggested deliberate attempts to mislead readers. The studies he flagged included some published by Dana-Farber’s chief executive, Dr. Laurie Glimcher, and its chief operating officer, Dr. William Hahn.

The Harvard Crimson also has this story:

David, who holds a doctoral degree in biology from Newcastle University, alleged that three papers authored by Glimcher, 12 by Hahn, 10 by Ghobrial, and 16 by Anderson contained “data forgery,” including five co-authored by both Anderson and Ghobrial. As is typical for scientific research, all of the papers referenced by David have several co-authors, though his post focused on the four DFCI researchers.

The papers, published between 1999 and 2017, most commonly have duplications of blots, bands, and plots within images, David alleged. In a Saturday interview, David said he used a combination of artificial intelligence image analysis software ImageTwin and manual detection to look for errors in the papers.

Another case of scientific fraud with researchers manipulating data to support a desired result is in itself nothing new. The publish or perish ethos has led globally to the exponential increase of not just data manipulation but also of data “creation” where desired data points or images are just invented. Data forgery is prevalent even at the most prestigious institutions and is not just in the social “sciences”. The social “sciences” in the last 40 or 50 years have been known to have been plagued by data manufactured to support pre-determined political conclusions.

Academic cheating is as old as academia. “Positive discrimination” to combat discrimination (whether for affirmative action in the US or with reservations in India) has been misused to favour the undeserving (and thereby disfavouring some of the worthy). What is new is that the false wokeism god of diversity is not only being used to cover up for incompetence, it is also downplaying competence as a criterion for selection. And, it would seem, diversity is also used to cover up for or to excuse fraud.

Claudine Gay got her job because she was black and female. Those attributes overrode any requirements not to have plagiarised or any requirement to be competent in front of a congressional committee. I would not be very surprised to learn that Glimcher was appointed primarily because she was female. And did that allow her greater licence in manipulating or creating data?

I see all around me in Europe, cases where a religious adherence to “diversity” is allowing and even promoting greater levels of incompetence in many fields. I see it in entertainment (with TV presenters and news readers, with actors, with scripts and even musicians). I see it in media with reporters and presenters and “fact checkers” and “research staff”. I see it in academia (though my exposure here is limited). My point is that being “diverse” has become more important in selection for any post than the competence required for that post. But it is getting to the stage where being “diverse” now even compensates for a lack of competence.

And that, of course, gives us the modern versions of freak shows.

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Of course Claudine Gay was selected because she was black and female

December 13, 2023

UPDATE!

It becomes increasingly clear that Dr (?) Claudine Gay has committed many small plagiarisms starting perhaps even earlier than her doctoral thesis. Each plagiarism event does not, in itself, seem very serious. But taken altogether they have a weight which makes it crystal clear that having plagiarised or not is just not relevant for being Harvard President. She is, after all, black and female.

If Claudine Gay was not black and female she would not be President of Harvard.

In my view, ethnicity and gender are perfectly valid criteria for selection of people for particular tasks and specific positions. I am surprised at the clamour of politically correct voices trying to claim that these were not the deciding factors in selecting Claudine Gay. It borders on stupid to deny common sense. I don’t see anything wrong either in choosing an administrative leader who fulfills the primary condition of being seen as politically correct. For whatever reason the Harvard search committee decided that it was necessary to have a female, black President. Fine. That is/was their prerogative. For many positions – and not least President of Harvard – the image projected by the incumbent may be paramount. There are many instances where style and form are more important than substance. Technical competence is of secondary concern when skilled subordinates are available. What I find quite ridiculous are the attempts to claim that Claudine Gay would have been chosen as President if she was not black and not female. There is nothing wrong in being selected for being black and female. The stupidity lies in denying that.

It seems the duties of the Harvard President are primarily administrative and for fund raising.

Recently, however, the job has become increasingly administrative, especially as fund-raising campaigns have taken on central importance in large institutions such as Harvard. Some have criticized this trend to the extent it has prevented the president from focusing on substantive issues in higher education.

Each president is professor in some department of the university and teaches from time to time.

Harvard’s current president is Claudine Gay, having become Harvard’s 30th president on July 1, 2023. She succeeded Lawrence Bacow who retired on June 30, 2023. – Wikipedia

Since only Professors are eligible to be selected as President, the available choices of black, female professors must have been fairly limited. Of course it could be critically important for the selected person to project the desired image and to be seen to be politically correct. I do not see any objection to using these as criteria for selection. Droupadi Murmu would not be the President of India if she was not a woman and belonging to the tribal community.

Claudine Gay may prove to be a very able administrator and brilliant at garnering funding. That would be a great bonus since she was selected for being black and female. She certainly was not chosen for her unimpressive research record.  Her research publications consist of six while at Harvard according to Research Gate and up to 13 in total. (The titles are not very enticing and indicate rather mundane work. To me most of the abstracts read like sociological psycho-babble). This is rather a flimsy research record but this was not the guiding criterion for her selection. Now Claudine Gay has even been accused of plagiarism. It is a little more serious but seems not to be a major breach. Of course she is being judged much less harshly than a plagiarising student would be. So what? College Presidents are not students. Different standards tailored for different people sounds sensible, correct and perfectly logical to me. In any event, her few publications could not have been of any great significance in her selection. She has no great track record in administration either, but this probably does not matter very much when the Harvard President’s office has enough lackeys to administer the necessities. Clearly the primary target for the search committee was for a female, black professor who could project the right image and be politically attractive in the funding stakes.

Should she resign? Perhaps. Of course her recent inept congressional testimony was embarrassing. It demonstrated incompetence in the key task of representing the college. She is now a point of weakness in any future attacks on Harvard. She brings to a head the inherent conflict between “diversity” and competence. Only her future achievements may mitigate the general perception that she was selected for displaying “diversity” purposes rather than for any displayed competence. Her position – and Harvard’s –  on condemning terrorism also seems very suspect. (My perception is that she along with most Harvard academics blindly condemn all Israel’s actions but are apologists for even the most heinous Hamas actions). Obviously she cannot provide any kind of unifying point between the Palestinian supporters and the Jewish community. In fact she will find it difficult to get away from her now self-established position that “calling for the genocide of certain people in certain contexts” is acceptable. She may herself find the heat not worth bearing and resign. But if the Harvard Corporation thinks she can still represent Harvard’s values and be a good President then they have no need to call for her resignation. Their unanimous support for Gay was announced yesterday and that now places them directly into the firing line. There are many allegations and accusations flying about. If the allegation turns out to be true that during “her tenure as Dean and now as president, Gay has squelched speech she disfavors while defending and thereby amplifying vile and threatening hate speech, exhibiting a remarkable double standard”, then the Corporation’s support may vanish. With the President and 11 Fellows the Corporation consists of 12 members. The Fellows can all now expect to face critical scrutiny themselves from nosy, hostile parties. They should all ensure that their tax returns are in order. I note that their letter does at least acknowledge that the University should have ‘immediately, directly and unequivocally’ condemned Hamas terrorism, but nobody is being held accountable for that imbecilic lapse.

There is no question that the selection criteria and her selection by Harvard were perfectly proper. Not very smart but perfectly proper. But let us not pretend that Claudine Gay would be President if she was not black and female.

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Back to basics with an all-white US presidential election

July 23, 2016

The line-up is now Hillary Clinton /Tim Kaine versus Donald Trump/Mike Pence.

The US has persisted with its “diversity” experiment with Barack Obama across two terms and 8 years. That experiment has not worked all that well and the US is now returning to an all-white, all-Christians election. Not a minority in sight.

Back to basics.

all white election

  • one woman, three men
  • all white
  • all from relatively privileged backgrounds
  • all with good college educations. Clinton attended Wellesley and Yale; Trump graduated from Wharton; Kaine went to University of Missouri and Harvard; Pence was at Hanover College and Indiana University
  • all from Christian households. Clinton is a Methodist, Kaine a Catholic, Trump is Presbyterian and Pence is a Catholic turned Evangelical
  • Trump is 6’3″, Clinton is 5’5″ (but her PR claims 5’7″), Pence is 5’11” and Tim Kaine is 5’10”.
  • Trump is 70, Clinton is 69, Kaine is 58 and Pence is 57 years old.

Not all WASPs, but not very much “diversity” either. Of course, if Hillary Clinton wins, she will be the first woman to be President (though women really cannot be considered a minority in the US with 97 males for every 100 females). The Trump team is 11″ taller than the Clinton team. Both teams add up to the same age. Trump is the only one with a non-politician background. Three lawyers and one real-estate developer. All straight. No giants, no dwarves. No blacks, no Latinos, no Asian-Americans, no blue-collar experience, no military service. No Muslims, no atheists, no Buddhists and no Hindus.

The US has no need for a “white-supremacist” movement.

 

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