Diversity Thursday

forgive? sure...but first we need to drag out and discuss what we cannot forget

Last week, SECDEF Hegseth put out a very welcome clarification to what is expected of our Service Academies when it comes to how we select the next generation’s leaders in uniform.

For those visiting us on Thursdays the last couple of decades on this topic at the OG Blog and here—this does give one a chance for a sarcastic chuckle.

For the two decades we’ve been covering this topic, I’ve lost count the fudging, spinning, and outright lies claiming that race, ethnicity, and sex were not factors in admissions…even though those screaming back while calling us all sorts of slanderous things knew better. We served. We saw it. Heck, many of us participated in it.

If there were never special considerations/quotas/goals in action, then the SECDEF would not have to put out a, “In case I was not clear…” memo.

Of course, we need Congress to act to make this permanent, but to achieve this, we need the full truth revealed.

Just as we now know what Harvard was doing, we need to uncover what the service academies did.

Via Christopher F. Rufo and Ryan Thorpe;

For years, Harvard’s DEI department has explicitly sought to engineer a more racially “diverse” faculty pool. The university-wide Inclusive Hiring Initiative provided “guidelines and training” for those involved in the hiring process and was explicitly tied to Harvard’s DEI goals. The stated mission of the initiative is to “[i]nstill an understanding of how departments can leverage the selection process” to build “an increasingly diverse workforce.”

In another hiring guide, “Best Practices for Conducting Faculty Searches,” the university recommends several discriminatory practices. At the beginning of the hiring process, Harvard instructs search committees to “ensure that the early lists include women and minorities” and to “consider reading the applications of women and minorities first.” The university counsels that committee chairs should “continually monitor” the racial composition of the candidate list and, as they narrow it down, “attend to all women and minorities on the long list.”

Harvard deliberately factors race into the hiring process. The university gives committee chairs privileged access to “self-identified demographic data, including gender, race, and ethnicity” and encourages chairs to “use this information to encourage diversity in the applicant pool, long list, and short list.” Harvard admits that some of its hiring programs have explicit “placement goals” for women and minorities—which, despite the university’s denial, function as a soft quota.

We all know, especially in the areas of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), that the Service Academies benchmarked the Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTP) of the Ivy League that they have always been so thirsty towards.

So, how did USNA’s faculty searches parallel the DEI TTP?

Until we have a full Truth and Reconciliation Commission-like public accounting about the active discriminatory behavior of the last few decades, there will be no justice for those injured in the zero-sum game that is hiring for tenure-track positions, when things settle down, the institution—if not changed—will regress to the mean and fall right back into its bad habits.

Of note, the U.S. Naval Academy still has a DEI office running. It is the same office with the same people doing the same mission. All they did, as we discussed at the time, is change its name to Engagement, Retention, and Equal Opportunity.

Yes. It is time.