The diversity mania that has swept over American education for the last 50 years or so has had a malign effect on the quality of professors. Many of those hired to fill quotas for certain groups are, to be blunt, not especially qualified. Moreover, such hiring violates the law against discrimination.

What should we do?

In today’s Martin Center article, David Randall of the National Association of Scholars suggests that we should adopt the Faculty Merit Act.

He writes:

Political discrimination as often as not is camouflage for breaking civil-rights law and straightforwardly discriminating by race and sex. The search for X Studies is meant outright to select a member of X group to get the teaching job — and to make sure that white men (above all) don’t get hired. National Association of Scholars (NAS) researchers FOIAed the hiring-committee professors’ emails, and they said outright what they were doing. Colleges and universities systematically discriminate, systematically undermine the principles of individual merit and freedom of inquiry, and break anti-discrimination laws whenever they can get away with it.

Disappointed faculty candidates can sue, but their lawsuits are often stymied by the “black box” of faculty hiring — there is no objective data on the capability of the pool of applicants. The Faculty Merit Act would solve that problem by requiring schools to get the SAT scores of all applicants.

Randall explains why that would matter:

An SAT score isn’t the same thing as being able to write an interesting book or discover something interesting in a lab. But a standardized test score isn’t a bad proxy for student merit in undergraduate admissions, and it isn’t a bad proxy for faculty merit in the hiring process. If the public and policymakers can see that a faculty search had 300 applicants, that the standardized test scores dropped during each round of the selection process, and that the person who got the job had a lower SAT score than 290 other applicants, then they can see that something is wrong.

This is a very good idea.