Goldman, JPMorgan Cut DEI Efforts Over Lawsuit Threats - Bloomberg (archive.is) Goldman Sachs Group Inc. has made a surprising change to its “Possibilities Summit” for Black college students: It’s opened the program to White students. At Bank of America Corp., certain internal programs that used to focus on women and minorities have been broadened to include everyone. And at Bank of New York Mellon Corp., executives are being urged to reconsider hard metrics for workforce diversity. Lose them, lawyers have advised. This is what diversity, equity and inclusion looks like on Wall Street today: anxious, fraught – and changing fast. The seemingly small changes — lawyerly tweaks, executives call them — are starting to add up to something big: the end of a watershed era for diversity in the US workplace, and the start of a new, uncertain one. “We’re past the peak,” said Subha Barry, former head of diversity at Merrill Lynch.
I am a New Yorker who started law school at UF in the fall of 1972. A few years after that, I was playing basketball on a team in the Gainesville City League when I played against Willie Jackson in a city league game. It was then that I found out that Willie was the 1st black football player to play in a football game for UF. So, my guess is that many good old Florida boys are against DEI because they liked the way things were before Willie put on the UF uniform. Of course, nowadays, they would make an exception for the football and basketball players.
Here is a link to a letter sent out to the faculty about what they know about the internal deliberations into the decision to remove DEI positions from UF. Just if anyone cares.
Meritocracy sounds good on paper until the measurement of merit changes the moment you thought you merited into something.
the idea that we live in a meritocracy is hilarious to me. There are some truly horrible people making tons of money across tons of different industries because of who they know and not in anyway because they are good at something or hard working. I can think of plenty of examples in higher Ed too. For eff sake just look at Congress… you think all those people are there on merit? Lol.
The problem with those calling for pure “meritocracy” is that those pushing for that pretty much are of one race. It’s almost comical at times. The GOP itself needs a little DEI and perhaps some self awareness. I’m not in favor of pure affirmative action or firm quotas, although I do think if racial disparities are shown in data (and they are, abubdantly) that needs to be examined and addressed. Not sure the way DEI is presently done is all that effective, seems to me alot of it’s just sort of PR, but I’m definitely sure the people attacking the concept as they are have alterior motives… and for many it ain’t meritocracy. It’s segregation.
I wish racism was still in the past. Charlie Strong has some modern stories. So does Mike Holloway. And countless others who don't have enough name recognition for anyone outside their families and friends to care.
Sasse could have effectively repurposed those people and scaled their actions to remove the halloween counseling nonsense. He chose to toe the company line.
I don't think anyone here is for segregation, or denies that racism, sexism exist and are terrible. That's clear. However, you should pause to consider whether every disparity you see is caused by racism, sexism or any other "ism". It may or may not be.
Beyond hilarious. One need only look at the right-wing take over at New College to see what a farce the right's claim of "meritocracy" is. It has become a jobs program for Republican politicos and DeSantis friends, and they immediately implemented "affirmative action" for conservative men. The folks who screech about "merit" had a chance to put their money where their mouths were. Instead, they proved yet again that instead of "merit," we get cronyism.
Is racism still in our country? Yes. Is it as prevalent as the MSM says? Not even close in my opinion.
No one actually wants it for themselves, especially rich people who need their idiot kids to get into a good school or to land a prestigious job. Meritocracy is a buzzword that applies to other people usually.
I completely agree that cronyism sucks, but I think it would (unfortunately) exist whether we focus hiring, admissions, promotions, etc. based on merit or based on satisfying some kind of DEI criteria. DeSantis is a clown.
The point is that "merit" isn't happening. So decrying DEI as inconsistent with "merit," while not true to start, also flatly misstates what the reality will be without DEI.
Merit happens all over the place. The fact that "cronyism" also exists in some cases doesn't mean that merit isn't driving decisions at many places.