The post’s title is a concise and apt description of the skin deep-only diversity obsession.
George Leef, director of research for the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, responds to an article on diversity in The Chronicle of Higher Education, particularly academia’s obsession with it. Widespread in the humanities and social sciences, diversity is making unfortunate headway in at least one school of medicine. Leef says that “Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City has succumbed and now has a three-person Office of Faculty Diversity.” (Source)
He challenges the diversity officer’s implication that the racial/ethnic make-up of the current faculty makes minorities feel less than welcome.
“You have to wonder…how often it happens that medical professionals in one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities make people feel unwelcome simply because they’re from a different background…The main rationale Dr. Leonard gives for her office is that American medical schools need to ‘model diversity’ but aren’t doing a good enough job of that because black and Hispanic professors comprise only three and four percent respectively of the faculties at American medical schools, less than the percentages of those groups in the general population.”
How would a medical school do a better job of training doctors if the faculty had the “appropriate” percent of minority faculty members? Leef notes the assumption that a “minority” doctor would be better at treating members of his racial/ethnic group, and it extends to medical school professors.
“[T]he assumption that a med school professor who is black or Hispanic knows about the cultural peculiarities of black and Hispanic patients is unfounded. It’s like assuming that every black person is good at basketball or every Hispanic is a devout Catholic.”
Leef notes that there have been “pockets of resistance” to diversity obsession in math and the physical sciences, where there is either a right or wrong answer, with potentially huge consequences. Medicals schools also should resist focusing on group representation and keep the focus on individual competence, because of the “serious repercussions from bad decisions.”
In my non-scientific, anecdotal observations, I notice that standards are dropped to achieve diversity in less rigorous professions. For example, when was the last anyone proposed dropping standards for commercial airline pilots?
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