Trump orders all federal DEI employees placed on paid leave

After graduating, I was Visiting Asst at UF. They brought in a new guy for the tenure line (no, I didn't apply; had no interest) and gave him my office. He was an OSU grad. I set the office screensaver to this image:

 

Yes, I suppose if you hire a black person at your racist company, it can become a problem for you. And I say, good. No sympathy from me. But the law protects you if you fire an incompetent employee, as long as you have documentation and standards to back up your claim of poor performance. But it seems many employers think even that is a burden. So again, if you are sloppy and dont CYA I dont really have much sympathy either. If you are big enough for those laws to apply to you, you are big enough to hire help to make sure you arent sloppy. And at the end of the day, no one can sue you for just laying off people because you want to make more money or you dont want to pay them anymore.

 

From AA, to EEO, to DEI. Changes in nomenclature over the decades. But it became a cult. Seems familiar …
AA was a noble idea. Govt gets involved and attaches quotas, changes hiring or promotions to define anyone within a pool to be equal.
The bastardization of affirmative action has become such that hot topic that it is all but dead.

 

What you describe is pretty old school / hard core music like conservatory or pro orchestra auditions. We do not do it that way, but we admit & award scholarships largely based on merit. Needs of the Dept are a factor too and for my particular degree, I wanna know their GPA and their ability to articulate a coherent thought. I guess we could get that from behind a curtain, but I don't feel the need.

 

I get it. Real diversity as opposed to "diversity" as a political term.

 

Back in the late 70's I did all the hiring and training of all management personnel for a restaurant franchise. I did not hire a gentleman who had some good experience but he had dirty fingernails. He took us to court. When we got there it was me and the guy I did not hire, the 2 attorneys and the judge and his clerk. They laid out there case and then the judge directed questions to me as to why I did not hire the man. I asked the judge if the man and I could approach the bench and he said yes(would never happen like this today). We went up to the desk and I asked the man if he would place his hands on the judges desk, and he did. Then I asked the judge to look at the man's hands. The judge looked and then I asked him if he would want his food prepared by someone who's fingernails were not only long but filthy. The judge look at me for about 30 seconds and then said no. I said that is why he did not get hired. Why in the world would you show up for a job interview, especially in the restaurant business with untrimmed and filthy fingernails. The case was dismissed. As I was preparing to leave the judge asked me to come over the the clerk's desk to sign something. In reality there was nothing for me to sign. The judge then told me to make sure there was something in the employee handbook about trimmed and clean fingernails. I thanked him and when I got back to my office, I immediately had that inserted in our Handbooks and made it a part of our orientation checklist.

 

Fun conversation.
This is why I rarely weigh in.
You didn’t read my response and tried to paint me as a racist.
Just too predictable.
Sad and predictable.

 

If I wanted to paint you as a racist, I would have asked you to explain what you meant by "the wrong person of color" ...

 

Its about time, government wastes too much money on this nonsense

 

I’ve mentioned it before, but the problem DEI foisted upon itself is that they always had to find the next problem to solve in order to be relevant. That put them way far out on the branch away from where most people were. We are ended up with things like companies forcing their white employees into seminars where they had to deal with their white privilege, Coca Cola employees told to act less white (whatever the hell that means), TV commercials that don’t help their sponsoring companies because they don’t even represent their primary clientele anymore (golf is probably 90 plus percent white males watching and one commercial break I watched didn’t have a single one in an ad), making trans issues central even though it impacts almost no one and is devisive etc. heck my company encouraged us to add our preferred pronouns to our email signature and profile.. Just about no one did, not even the younger folks. It was DEI for DEI sake and so someone making six figures could check a box on what they “accomplished”.
I think most people, outside of the real die hards, wouldn’t have a problem with someone in their company being tasked with making sure employees were treated fairly, that hiring practices are fair etc. but that’s not what it became, it became a political tool. And like most recent political movements, just had no concept of how to navigate politically outside of their tiny safe space where everyone agrees with them. They set their own path to extinction.

 

In most places things won't be and there's a reason such things were created.

 

to be clear, I am not arguing that DEI makes things better or worse. I am simply arguing that merit based is not the default setting. I have seen some pretty bad outcomes from DEI efforts in higher ed.