I'm struck by the family resemblance of Trower's and U of A's position to that of the former head of CCNY, Yolanda Moses. There seems to be a lot of this going around these days.

One question is not whether U of A will continue to be a "prestigious" or excellent institution in the aftermath of this agenda, but whether it will be as good as it would have been had excellence in teaching and research been the sole criteria for hiring, tenure, and advancement. I'm having a hard time getting my arms around the wooly notion that diversity is a primary indicator of anything other than diversity itself. Try this gedankenexperiment. Substitute "lack of diversity" for "diversity" in the statement of purpose, and see if it makes sense. Wouldn't it only make sense if there was some demonstrated link between "lack of diversity" and "quality". Both propositions seem to go begging for evidential support.

Very interesting batch of comments: allow me to respond.

First, the point that John Theibault raises is an important one. Perhaps the most chilling element that I encountered in reading the U of A's "diversity" plan involved its status as a tier-1 research university. The plan argued that the faculty qualifications that made the U of A a top-notch research university were inconsistent with a "diversity" mission, and therefore needed to be reworked. This hostility to a research emphasis is a persistent strand in Trower's writings as well. And so, I would suspect, if this plan is rigorously implemented, the U of A's research accomplishments 15 or 20 years down the line will have fallen off. (To argue, as the U of A's plan does, that department chairs and deans should encourage faculty to engage in "diversity"-related scholarship provides a sense of where this argument is going.)

On Oscar Chamberlain's point, I didn't mean to leave the implication that a teaching focus implies less quality--the U of A plan posits in an unusually clearcut fashion a battle between a research emphasis on the one hand and "diversity" on the other, which is why I didn't bring in the teaching point. In fact, in Trower's writings she also takes on traditional approaches to teaching as incompatable with a "diversity" focus, and argues for reorienting job lines to make it more likely that minority candidates will be hired, regardless of the curricular needs of the institution.

On Ralph Luker's point, it seems to me that the use of "diversity" in writings such as Trower's or plans such as the U of A's is fundamentally ideological, and goes well beyond what I think most of us would recognize as perfectly appropriate affirmative action plans: i.e, aggressively ensuring that minority candidates apply for faculty jobs, guarding against discrimination, etc. One example: I attended a talk by Trower in November 2003 in which she argued that colleges should require white male (and only white male) candidates to demonstrate a "commitment to diversity" before hiring them; in the talk, she used "diversity" and "affirmative action" interchangeably. This is nothing more than a political litmus test for hiring: four members of the Supreme Court and a sizeable portion of the American electorate consider affirmative action unconstitutional. In Trower's world, these people (at least if they are white males) would be unsuitable for hiring.

And on the point about what happens if the candidate were, say, an African-American woman who was a member of the Federalist Society--the U of A proposal in the Chronicle makes it perfectly clear that such a candidate would not be suitable.

Finally, on Tim Burke's point: I basically agree with everything he says. What concerns me the most about programs such as Trower's (or, as those who have seen my earlier posts, the AAC&U)is the hypocrisy. On the one hand, they contend that they seek "excellence." On the other, they redefine "excellence" in such a way to subvert its meaning. If a college or university believes, as Trower contends or the U of A's program argues, that improving "diversity" should be its primary goal in faculty hiring, it should at least have the courage to admit that doing so might mean that candidates with stronger academic credentials will be rejected to fulfill this aim. Trower and the U of A don't want to do that, however: they want to claim that they are choosing the most accomplished candidate, but then change the criteria to downplay what most people in academia consider the traditional qualifications of accomplishment.

And one last point: I agree with Ralph's point that one can get myriad illustrations of the Fichtner Principle that have nothing to do with the Trower argument. But there is, it seems to me, an element of consistency between the two. Both Trower and the U of A contend that in their "diversity" plans, colleges have hired figures of less scholarly ability; in the talk that I attended of Trower's, she posited that an “accumulated disadvantage” for faculty of color hired under her principles is that they find that their teaching and scholarship don’t meet the requirements for tenure. Therefore, she (and the U of A) argue, the bar should be lowered in future hires, to increase their comfort level. That is nothing more than the Fichtner Principle at work.

The implication in KC's analysis is that campuses that "specialize" in teaching--for example 2 year campuses--are inherently second rate.

I hope that was a misreading on my part or a mis-statement on his.

I find Tim Burke's exploration of the issues of diversity and hiring patterns at "second tier" institutions far more compelling than KC Johnson's. I only wanted to add that one of Johnson's claims is self-refuting. The University of Arizona is by anyone's standards a prestigious research university (I believe it has a top ten philosophy department and a great history department). Perhaps it would be better to say that Arizona's attempt to implement some of the Trowers plan will be a useful test of Johnson's hypothesis that explicit commitment to hiring for diversity is inconsistent with continuing scholarly excellence. Will Arizona be more or less prestigious (or more or less excellent) ten years from now than it is now because of this decision? Maybe it's worth finding that out even if you are dubious about the value of diversity.

I think this is an extraordinarily tangled set of problems and issues that takes a lot of careful sorting.

KC rightly observes, for one, that there are some strange arrangements of imagined hierarchy within the job market for academics, and that these constraints long predate the drive for diversity, going back into the early 1980s at the least. A newly minted Ph.D in history from a university commonly regarded as a "top" program has far less chance of getting a job in a university or college that imagines itself to be vastly less selective. The prestige of one's credentials don't carry all the way down. There are other reasons for this beyond what KC cites--for example, less selective colleges and universities, especially those in remote or rural areas, know that a candidate from a highly competitive doctoral program is almost certainly going to go back on the job market the moment they're hired, and stay on the market continuously until they succeed in leaving or get stuck staying. There's a tangible cost associated with that--some departments can end up having to hire every single year from AHA for the same position if they just make offers to restlessly ambitious candidates who got overlooked by top programs in that year's job search. So looking for someone you know can be happy from the outset makes a certain kind of sense--it isn't all about a negative or fearful protection of one's own mediocrity.

It's also easy to see how programs in this position might want to choose to turn a negative logic of hiring (find someone who will be happy teaching at an institution in a remote or undesirable area with low pay, high teaching loads, and minimal support for research) into a positive principled logic (search with a commitment to diversity). In a way, KC may be suggesting that those institutions should just admit that it sucks to be them. Because it simply isn't practical for a relatively poor institution that is non-selective that it should hire on the principle that it is trying to build a faculty that can be competitive with top institutions in terms of research output. At the end of the day, research productivity is only one part based on the intellectual capability of any individual researcher--it's also a matter of institutional and professional support. You can't publish a lot of scholarship with a 5/5 teaching load, no sabbaticals and a $25,000 salary unless your scholarship is entirely based on locally accessible archives or materials and you have few personal obligations outside your work life. On the flip side, if you can't produce at least some scholarship with regular sabbaticals, 2/2 teaching loads, research and travel funds and networks of extra-institutional support, you aren't trying. No institution wants to self-consciously conceive itself as a poor relation, and the logic of diversity hires are an attractive way to think you're doing something socially productive when you go looking for faculty.

Beyond that, it seems to me that there ought to be a way for us to accept some of the insights that drive the search for diversity while maintaining some skepticism about both premises and outcomes. For one, it seems to me that selective and non-selective institutions based around residency by students are right to think that a wide range of backgrounds, life experiences, and so on in both their faculty and their students enriches a community of inquiry and is a subtle but important additive in teaching and the production of knowledge. If you have to choose between being on a faculty that is almost entirely drawn from one demographic and economic background and a faculty that is more varied, I think most of us would choose the latter, not because of "political correctness" but because we recognize some kind of complicated transaction gain that you get out of membership in the latter configuration of a community. Grit in oysters makes pearls; there's a confirmation bias that foreshortens your intellectual horizons when you're surrounded by people whose personal histories almost entirely conform to your own. Secondly, there's the older wisdom of affirmative action programs of certain kinds, which is that when you've got a workplace that is almost entirely composed of one kind of person, you can get, entirely unintentionally and unconsciously, a bias effect where like people hire like people because like people is all that they see. Now it may be that we're now well past that point as far as race, ethnicity and gender go in the academy, and there's no need to push further. That strikes me as very possible. But the initial push to diversify--and the reminder of its importance at institutions that are still mostly white and male--is not necessarily a bad thing.

It's only really problematic, in my opinion, when it becomes the only thing, or the dominant logic of hiring, and yes, it's clear that it sometimes does, and Trower's agenda seems to me to provide an argument that might lead more precipitiously to that bad outcome.

KC, It seems to me that the Fichtner Principle ante-dates the current emphasis on "diversity" and that it largely prevails in the academy regardless of current fad. Mediocre departments shy away from excellent hires because they threaten self-satisfied mediocrity. The other debilitating rule of thumb is a "don't rock the boat" one. I recall a second-tier department which was almost paralyzed with fear of change because it thought significant improvement was largely unimaginable -- that the only significant change might drop it out of the second tier.
It does seem to me, however, that your use of the word "ideological" in this piece is problemmatic. "Diversity" as a valued end isn't an "ideology," is it? It might be interesting to see what a department might do if confronted with the opportunity to hire a reasonably strong conservative African American female candidate. Would race/gender trump ideology and result in a hire?

I wonder if David Horowitz's group is aware of the Trower argument: if not, there's some remarkable parallel development going on.