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.

Meritocracy, Again

 Reading a book called "The Meritocracy Trap" by Yale Law School Professor, Daniel Markovits, and having watched Michael Sandel's series of lectures at Harvard, in which he finally crystalizes his major objection to the idea of "meritocracy" as the psychological and social damage done by the idea--that meritocracy means the losers are made to feel they deserve to be losers and are unworthy--I was struck by how very prosaic and fundamentally banal the product of thought from these two ultra-elite professors really is.

Professor Markovits had a stellar career at Yale in math, graduating summa cum laude and then off to Oxford and the London school of economics where he got degrees in "econometrics" and other stuff before returning to Yale, where he got his J.D. 

But when you read his book, you find yourself saying: This is what all those highfalutin degrees gets the writer and the reader? Somewhere in the muddle of his argument the professor finds that meritocracy is responsible for deaths of desperation, a decline in life expectancy among non college educated white men, and stagnation in central Michigan near Lake St. Clair. 

Not getting into Yale did all that to those dying Midwesterners in those stagnant communities in the Rust Belt. 

He employs  a case study--a bartender who found he could live better in a small, stagnant middle class town in Michigan than he could in Seattle, where he felt like a loser compared to the high tech rich guys working at Amazon, Microsoft and Boeing. Yes, professor, as so many of us knew already, you can live better on less money outside the glamour cities, where rents and mortgages are set by the upper 1%. 

So far as I've got into his book, Dr. Markovits seems to blame the Ivy League and elite institutions for the ills of meritocracy, rather than the clueless titans of industry who make a B.A. degree a requirement for jobs which should not require a college education at all. 

As so many of us know, there are folks among our own friends and families who had the experience of being better at their jobs than those who were hired to manage them simply because those incompetent hires had  a college degree. 

General Electric wanted to make my friend a manager because, after 15 years on the line doing ultra high tech welding on airplane engines, he knew more than any of his managers, and all the managers kept going to him to find out how to organize the production line. When they called him in to promote him to management, they discovered he never did finish at the University of New Mexico and so, for want of that diploma, they couldn't promote him. He shrugged and said, "Fine, I like being a union worker."  He retired at age 54, after 35 years with the company, with a good pension, well before any of his siblings, all of whom had advanced degrees and professional careers.  He sits in front of his computer in his den watching the graphs and curves of his investment instruments, including several Vanguard accounts, and he travels with his wife all over the world.

His story reminds me of that classic Thomas Hardy poem, "The Ruined Maid" about the woman who laughed off the socially prescribed mores defining success and saw the truth by rejecting what society said was merit:

The Ruined Maid

BY THOMAS HARDY

"O 'Melia, my dear, this does everything crown!

Who could have supposed I should meet you in Town?

And whence such fair garments, such prosperi-ty?" —

"O didn't you know I'd been ruined?" said she.

— "You left us in tatters, without shoes or socks,

Tired of digging potatoes, and spudding up docks;

And now you've gay bracelets and bright feathers three!" —

"Yes: that's how we dress when we're ruined," said she.

— "At home in the barton you said thee' and thou,'

And thik oon,' and theäs oon,' and t'other'; but now

Your talking quite fits 'ee for high compa-ny!" —

"Some polish is gained with one's ruin," said she.

— "Your hands were like paws then, your face blue and bleak

But now I'm bewitched by your delicate cheek,

And your little gloves fit as on any la-dy!" —

"We never do work when we're ruined," said she.

— "You used to call home-life a hag-ridden dream,

And you'd sigh, and you'd sock; but at present you seem

To know not of megrims or melancho-ly!" —

"True. One's pretty lively when ruined," said she.

— "I wish I had feathers, a fine sweeping gown,

And a delicate face, and could strut about Town!" —

"My dear — a raw country girl, such as you be,

Cannot quite expect that. You ain't ruined," said she.

And I think of my son's high school girlfriend, who was a star student, and the daughter of a mother who was a Yale graduate and who wanted her to go to Yale.  

She chose to transfer from an Ivy League school to join my son at a lesser institution, Vanderbilt, where he had spent a desultory first year, struggling to keep up his grade point average. When she arrived, she told him to stop studying more than he had to in any given subject. He would get fascinated by some topic and read beyond the assignment, leaving less time for other demands. "No," she told him, "You've done what you need to do for your 'A' in zoology,  now move on and do enough in the next subject for an 'A' there. this isn't about learning or fun or getting deep into things. This is about grades."

 From the time of her arrival, my son got nearly straight "A's" and he graduated magna cum laude and got into Columbia P&S, a very elite medical school. He did that by hardening into cynicism and he was a star there, as he reverted back to his tendency to get absorbed in subjects which fascinated him and he won the prize for best student in surgery and went on to become a vascular surgeon, a specialty which put to use some of his great strengths. We had despaired of his ever graduating college. 

The former girlfriend went on to get a PhD at Yale. But her ultimate career is instructive. After all those glittering academic prizes--she had as stellar a summa cum laude career as one could have--and then on to Yale, what did that mean for her ultimate financial and career fate? 

She went to work for the federal government, as had her mother before her.  The former girlfriend worked briefly at Ft. Dietrick, in a virus lab, but the went on to a more administrative job with the Department of Health and Human Services.

So how much does that elite education really determine the economic fate of American generations?  Markovits and Sandel think the meritocracy is pervasive and fate determining--like the university admissions process in Japan, where you either leap up into the stratosphere because you have got into the University of Tokyo, or you wind up stuck in the middle with the hoi polloi, working every day, living with your wife and her parents in an apartment at the outskirts of the city.

Of course, those graduates of the U. of Tokyo are also living with their wives and children with her parents in crowded apartments, but they are living in better neighborhoods.

Which makes me wonder what happens to all those wunderkind folks whose wedding announcements (advertisements) you read in the New York Times.  That woman who graduated from Princeton, went on to study at the Sorbonne for a degree in semiotics, and then Cambridge in philosophy and corporate anthropology and then a degree from Yale in public health and finally an MBA from Harvard. And she marries a guy who went to Princeton and then Yale Law and got a job with a fancy Washington, DC law firm, which is the actual source of their income, and none of those degrees earned by the wife mattered much to their status or income, because she now works for a non profit devoted to preserving architectural landmarks. 

So, yes, the academic pedigree might buy a job at Goldman Saks or some fancy law firm, but how long does that last? As so many of these high achievers discover the wash out rate at these places is high,  and they wind up working at less glamourous places, for less inspiring salaries.

Meanwhile, my HVAC guy visited my house this week, and the electrician is due any minute. And the plumber was in last week and all those guys live in New Hampshire in houses which are as roomy and comfortable as my own, but unlike me, they don't have diplomas from three different Ivy League institutions framed on their walls. I always ask them when they plan to retire and they tell me they could retire any time but they are having fun and they don't know what they'd do with their time that would be more satisfying.

I tell them about the Midwestern businessmen I meet on Viking tours and and they tell me they've been on Viking cruises and had fun, but they wouldn't want to live on a cruise boat.

And I have to agree with them. 

Harvard is just down the road and the folks wandering those lovely green yards are convinced they are masters of the universe and in the drivers' seats. But I'm not so sure.