Roger is absolutely right to call the justification for preferring faculty members of a particular race or gender because they allegedly serve as “role models” nonsense. There’s another aspect of this nonsense: the argument that colleges and universities need to have “diverse” student bodies so that the white and Asian students will see that black and Hispanic students can be successful, thus breaking them free of their racial stereotyping. This is patently absurd. College students already know that individuals of all races can succeed in the US. Bringing in students (or faculty members) with dubious qualifications merely for the sake of raising the percentage of “minorities” on campus doesn’t help in the slightest.