Is Diversity a Virtue?

 

Of course, any discussion of "diversity" has to begin with an understanding of what you mean by it.

Starship Enterprise: Making Diversity Work

"Diversity/Equity/Inclusion" banners flew over college campuses coast to coast and, as I walked by them I thought, "Well, not a bad idea," without thinking more about it.

You will not replace us

To my mind, "diversity" meant faces of different races in a college class. That did not mean a diversity of experience, as all those faces belonged to kids who were raised in the same upper class neighborhoods, went to the same schools and spoke in the same rhythms and used the same language. If you were speaking on the phone to a Black classmate, you would never know he was Black, until the advent of FACETIME.

diversity

But as my good friend, and longtime sage mentor pointed out, when she thinks of Diversity she thinks of her sister, who just got laid off from a high tech firm, one of two in her division, both of them women, the only women in that division, while younger, less competent men were kept on. Diversity in the workplace to her meant seeing women and hearing from women in that workplace.

4 women in a Residency program 

Thinking back to the transformation I saw in hospitals, the advent of more women physicians made a huge difference in the atmosphere among the interns and residents, where women were often referred to as cunts or sluts or "the town tunnel." Women insisted that if they were suffering from the flu, with a temperature of 103, coughing, they be allowed to remain at home and they insisted that during flu season, the on call schedule be designed to allow for that, which never occurred to me, as I had gone to work with that fever, likely spreading flu to my patients and coworkers. It was the macho thing to do.

Not that women weren't tough enough to do that: Speaking with an ER doctor, a woman, I noticed her red eyes and nose, her coughing, and her pockets stuffed with Kleenex, and I asked her why she wasn't home and she laughed and said, "During flu season all the folks who work in the ER are sicker than ninety percent of the patients we are seeing: If we stayed home, the ER would close down."

But Diversity goes well beyond gender and race. There is a transgender, male to female working at our town library, who is well over six feet tall, purple hair and flowing dresses. The library is the main hang out for middle school students, age 11 to 14, who gather there while their working parents are still at work, and these students glance at this unusual library employee with hardly a hitch--she is just another town character, alongside several other oddities.  That is probably a good thing--tolerance for the abnormal inculcated in the kids of a small New Hampshire town.

But, back in 1966, I well recall a student asking the professor in an English class if we could interrupt the scheduled topic to discuss the protests advocating for admitting 12% of the next class as people of color.  I made myself unpopular by asking why we should do that. If we were all supposed to be there because of some sort of merit, why were we abandoning the idea of meritocracy for the sake of injecting a certain number of students into the student body simply to achieve a mix of non white faces in the crowd?

The professor asked me what I thought consisted of merit.

I said, well, we had been told it was SAT scores, and grades.

And he asked about the kids who were admitted with lower SAT's because they were good football players, or those with lower grade point averages who came from the Pacific Northwest or the Southwest or the South, because the college liked to think of itself as a "national" university.

Southern Opinion and Perspective

Well, I replied, you might say the different perspective and values those kids brought to the college might be considered a merit, but he asked whether I could tell a kid was from Seattle talking to him about any topic, because his perspective was so different, and I had to admit everyone on campus, no matter where they were from seemed pretty alike, except for the kids from the deep South, and so "geographic distribution" didn't seem to affect the college experience much.

Unanimity of Opinion, Save One

White people and, more recently Asian Americans have argued that setting aside places for Blacks meant those places were lost to them and they had clearly been displaced from places at Harvard to allow Blacks to occupy those places.  In this, they shared the perspective of those marching at Charlottesville, White men chanting, "You will not replace us."

White Anglo Saxon Protestants saw themselves displaced from medical schools and Ivy League colleges when those institutions divested themselves of quotas against Jews.

Asian Americans with high test scores and high GPA's found they were rejected on the grounds of not being "positive personalities" i.e., not being likeable, kind, generous, widely respected.  That is, they were rejected for being competitive grinds, grade grubbers, i.e. they were rejected for playing the game, ruthlessly, by the rules, and not as some sort of gentlemen. 

If you are going to define merit as high grades, high scores but then you change that when you discover you are facing a class of 100% Asians, what do you do? Do you accept that? Or do you change the rules, and assign points to exclude those who are successful playing to win?

4 women in a class of 90, by quota rule

And that brings us to the basic problem of how do you define merit? Do we even know what qualities, talents, potentialities are required to make the best workers?

Doctors, to take just one example, need very different talents, depending on the specialty: What you want in a neurologist is light years away from what you need in a cardiac surgeon, and the pediatrician is almost a different species from the orthopedist.  

And the fact is, you do not need to be good at solving differential calculus equations to be a good endocrinologist or urologist, and your grades in organic chemistry are probably not predictive of your ability to do abdominal surgery. 

We are simply not very good as identifying talent for most fields--in this musicians are much better than any group. The audition behind a screen for the New York symphony is the purest form of meritocracy there is in human resources, but it is duplicated almost nowhere else, not even in selecting professional athletes. (Read "Moneyball.")

Sometimes, forcing institutions to look for other traits is not such a bad thing. When I was young, small fast athletes were cut from the football team, as coaches knew that only the biggest, strongest boys made good football players, at least as those coaches designed their playbooks. If your offense consisted of running the ball up the middle and had no passing attack, then you didn't need small fast guys who could catch a ball 40 years downfield. That was until, in the 21st century, driven by the big bucks that reward winning in the NFL, small, quick, elusive and, above all, fast athletes proved to be invaluable scoring machines and now you see a lot of diversity of body type on the NFL gridirons in the huddles of every team.

What is Merit?

Personally, I would like to see Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford announce that they will admit 1/3 of their classes based on just grades and test scores, and 1/3 based on some special talent (oboe playing, computer skills, kicking field goals, equestrian prowess) and 1/3 by lottery. 

Of course, that would deflate the myth that simply being admitted to Harvard means you are a certified genius, but it would likely benefit Harvard and the rest of the country.

For certain arenas, diversity is clearly a dangerous and counterproductive consideration: being a good surgeon, a competent engineer or an airplane pilot, musician, doctor should have no diversity requirement. Admissions to schools training these folks should  be color blind, sex blind, blind to everything but the attributes which make for good performance.

If that means that the next class of Harvard medical school is 100% Asian females, so be it. 

But I doubt that would actually happen. 

Mr. Trump and his White Supremacists fans are loathsome, but that does not mean they are always wrong about everything, and the attack on diversity is (often secretly) applauded by a wide range of Americans and is broadly popular, I am guessing, just based on what I hear in the office, and around town.

Is Diversity A Virtue?

 

Growing up in Arlington, Virginia, I attended segregated schools until we moved across the Potomac to Maryland, where racial segregation was not the local law, but I still saw no Negroes (as they were called then) in my elementary school classes. 

In Junior High School (grades 7-9) there were perhaps nine Negroes in a school of 1500 students. This was not because the governor of Maryland stood in the school house door blocking Negroes but because there were so few Negroes living in the redlined, White suburban neighborhoods which fed these schools. 

At a school dance, in the ninth grade there was a long line of girls along one wall and boys along the other and for some reason, I was at the microphone and was supposed to announce the next dance, which was a recording of somebody, Buddy Holly, I think, "That'll Be The Day," but I got no more than a few words out before I caught in my peripheral vision the teacher, James McFall, flying across the floor to wrest the microphone from my hand. 

When he arrived he pulled me aside, looking hugely relieved, "Oh, I thought you were going to tell the two lines to walk across the floor and dance with the boy across from them."

"No," I said, "But what why would that have mattered?"

"Because," Mr. McFall told me, "Then you might have some white girl having to dance with a Nigger."

Later that year, the name of the new high school opening up which we would all be attending, got announced, and we heard about it in Mr. McFall's science classroom. 

"You hear who they named it after?" he asked me, under his breath.

"Yes, Walt Whitman."

Mr. McFall looked around, under his eyebrows and over his shoulder, "You know about him, right?"
"Not much, actually. He was a poet, right?"

"Queer as a three dollar bill," Mr. McFall informed me. "Can you believe it? Named that school after a faggot."

I was 14 years old and I was not at all clear what a queer as a three dollar bill or a faggot might be. They did not teach that in science class. 

Mr. McFall taught "star science" to the star students. I was not one of those. Maybe if I'd been, I'd have known about queers.

Anyway, those were the times. Diversity in our nearly all white, nearly all Christian, nearly all WASP or Catholic school of the descendants of families from alpine, British or Scandinavian places was nearly non existent.  

Our high school had 20 or so Black students out of 1500.

I don't know, but I may have been a better or wiser person if I had gone to school with more Negroes, or even Asians for that matter.  

My college had a little more diversity. One day a student interrupted the professor and asked if we could talk about the "Twelve percent thing," and the professor said yes.

Apparently, the university's board of trustees was considering mandating that 12% of the next class admitted to this Ivy League institution be Black. 

I was genuinely perplexed. "Why would they do that?" I asked.

"Because 12% of our country is Black and only 3% of students at Brown are Black."

"But we all killed ourselves competing for grades and SAT scores to get in here. I thought admissions were supposed to be based on merit."

"But Black kids don't have a fair chance in that game."

"But why make it 12% for Black kids? Why not for Asian kids or 1% for American Samoans? Or how about 60% for the kids of blue collar workers?"

I was making myself very unpopular in that class. But it was really a novel idea to me. I hadn't heard anything about this. 

The main argument seemed to be that our college ought to look like America and that having diverse racial groups would bring new and important perspectives to campus.  I didn't know about that, never having been exposed to new and different perspectives from Black people having never been exposed to Black people at all.

My brother at another college later told me some Black students on his campus had formed essentially a Black fraternity because they felt they needed a place to connect and feel welcomed, which sounded like resegregation to me, but then again, when they attended classes or played on teams they might share a different perspective with their White classmates.

Later, I learned many corporations wanted a workforce which "looks more like America" by which they meant physical appearance, as in race. To me, looking like America might look like someone with piercings and tattoos and green hair and jeans with big holes around the thighs. 

On youtube I saw an interview with Warren Buffett and Charles Munger of Berkshire, Hathaway and they were asked about a photo of the board of directors which was, apparently, bereft of Black faces. Buffett said they chose board members for a variety of reasons, mostly having to do with their capacity to think innovatively, be motivated by things other than simply making money, essentially saying he did not consider race a merit. 

Munger was more explicit: He told a story about one of their law firms which handled business for the archdiocese of Los Angeles. Munger's lawyer told the archbishop they were happy for the business but there were surely a fair number of Catholic lawyers in LA who could handle the affairs of the archdiocese. The archbishop replied:  "Last year I was facing some serious surgery. I did not look around for the best Catholic surgeon."

Living in New Hampshire after living in the Washington, D.C. suburbs and having jobs in the city both my wife and I have noticed how odd to seems to see so few Blacks in our every day lives.

"I miss seeing them," my wife said, simply.

"I hadn't noticed, but now that you mention it, it does get a little dull dealing with just New England Yankees day in and day out."

When I go to my office near Lawrence, Massachusetts, I see Hispanic folks from all over the Caribbean and South America. I don't know that experience enriches my life or changes my perspective, but it does require me to make adjustments in how I communicate.  There are some Blacks, mostly from Africa, rather than from the American South, and they are more foreign than Black, if you know what I mean. I might forget a name and ask my secretary, "Do you remember that name of the lady yesterday from Nigeria?" I wouldn't say, "That Black lady."

We see people from South Asia (the subcontinent) and from all over the Middle East in the office.  

Many of these people are different not because of their race but because of their educations or lack of it.  Hispanics, in our office at least, are from a certain socioeconomic group and they miss more appointments are often very early or very late and engage in magical thinking, as when one lady told me she rubs iodine over her mothers neck because she heard it was good for the thyroid. That is not a Hispanic perspective, but it may represent a type of thinking from a specific subculture, uneducated, poor, unscientific.

Would I have been broadened by exposure to her children when I was in college?

Some have argued that globalization has meant Americans have to compete in world wide markets, and for that we need a work force comfortable with diversity, comfortable with people who look different and who make think differently from us. But I buy most of my stuff on Amazon and it's made, mostly in China, South Asia or Vietnam or Japan and I've had next to no exposure to their different perspective. You may say we can import stuff and remain parochial, but we need to be more open to others to sell to them, to export. But how many American farmers speak Japanese to whom they export beef or soy beans?

England voted to withdraw from the EU, mostly because the British did not like the new multiracial/multicultural society and wanted to clamp down on immigration and they wanted to be "more like us." Or something like that. Donald Trump reacted to Brexit saying, "They wanted borders."  For once, he may have got something right.

I always liked the look of Starship Enterprise which had Black, Asian, White all sorts of crew members working together apparently harmoniously.

My father in law, a White Mormon from Utah, whose Church forbids Blacks in the clergy, had a long career in the Army and in all the years I knew him and saw him interacting with Black people I never detected a whiff of him seeing or treating a Black person differently than a White person. In fact, he was in uniform coming through a hotel door and a Black man held the door open for him, as he was loaded down with a long russet bag and he thanked the man and shook his hand, and after he passed on into the lobby the Black man grinned at me and said, "I spent twenty five years in the Army and no general ever shook my hand. I hold a door open for that one and he does."

The army my father in law knew was totally integrated, especially in the Medical Corps, where all that mattered was competence.

I think he benefited from that perspective, but I'm not sure that applies to what happens in college.