Faculty hiring means finding the most capable scholars, with just a tiny thumb on the scales to help minority candidates — right?

No, argues Professor Daphne Patai in this excellent Minding the Campus essay.

She focuses on UMass – Amherst, where the Office of Equal Opportunity and Diversity does all it can to make sure that only politically correct candidates are considered. In particular, there’s a set of interview questions meant to ferret out anyone who merely claims to have a “commitment to diversity” but isn’t really a zealot. There is a “gotcha” mentality behind the questions.

“The main problem,” Patai writes, “is the overshadowing of genuine education by the demand for conformity and an explicit display of one’s politics.”

Why, it’s almost enough to make you think that “diversity” and “inclusion” are just code words for excluding people based on their ancestry and/or their undesirable beliefs.