But your hire took pressure off someone else to make a bad choice due to AA… plus; sometimes there are tax benefits (but at the moment I do not believe there are any).

Still wrong but if I were in HR I’d count the hire towards any ‘goals’ for the above reasons…. If the candidate found out and didn’t like it; hey, they’re free to vote republican. 😉

I don’t think, however, that they are in the majority (yet) in this country, much less the overwhelming majority. However, they influence the overwhelming majority by having control of education and the media, and probably in short order they will have a true majority.

You see, this is the kind of situation that did violence to my soul, because I’d have to stifle a riposte, e.g., “Thank you for the kind sentiment. For my part, I certainly hope that your two little sons don’t grow up to join a gang and get smoked by a rival gang. But from the statistics, I wouldn’t put any money on it.”

People on the receiving end of racism can be so hypersensitive, but oblivious in the extreme when dishing it out. A lot of what goes on is no more than taking power and keeping it from one identifiable group to the benefit of another.

I once had the pleasure of attending an indoctrination class in a military setting some 30 years ago, which mainly consisted of a black woman telling us how all white people are evil racists especially the male white people. I kept my mouth shut for most of it, but at some point I foolishly pointed out some breach of basic common sense which almost got me thrown out of the service as a racist.

After the class a number of people approached me. One guy said that he had just come from a unit in which he (a human resources type) was ordered to go through all the evaluations past and present of all the blacks and mark all the gradings up one level across the board and then recalculate the scores and resubmit them to the central authority for promotions. Another woman from my company took me aside for some friendly advice (really friendly) telling me to keep my mouth shut and we’ll all get through the stupid b*tch’s class.

For years I thought she gave me good advice, but I really wonder now. Look where it got us. Look who is in power and getting more power year by year, and are they really going to wake up one day after some epiphany and decide to stop?

I’ve known a black friend for a few decades who graduated from a top university. I sincerely believe he would not need affirmative action to have gotten in to that school. I’ve talked with him on many topics and he is extremely intelligent (but still often wrong unfortunately) but on one in particular I find it almost unbelievable. He sincerely believes that ALL affirmative action is merely favoring the minority candidate over two otherwise equal people. That if the white has better qualifications then they are chosen. That’s his story and I’ve never gotten him to budge from it.

A wise phychologist once said that a paycheck makes cowards of us all. Usually the bigger the paycheck, the bigger the coward.

Just to add to Occam’s answer to Oldflyer’s question: Tenure doesn’t protect one from the constant mental assault that comes with being a conservative in academia. I know… the answer that is coming: buck up! Be strong! However, after literally 15 years of the isolation, along with the usual liberal hatred we all know, it gets wearing.

Case in point: during the Iraq War I put up some resisitance to the usual “Bush Lied, People died” line running through the faculty. A public response I got from a black faculty member was, and I’ll never forget it, “Take your little white boy khaki pants and loafers and just go away. In fact, I hope your two little daughters grow up, join the military and then die!” The response from the rest of the faculty was crickets chirping.

Later on, in a meeting with the president, he actually expressed shock at the person’s behavior. When I asked him why he didn’t respond, or why the person was not “charged” with hate speech as I would have been if I had made such a statement, he said, “Oh no, I can’t do that to minority faculty.” At that point one realizes tenure means nothing to a white male conservative in academia.

Tenure doesn’t really help as much as you might think. Within a university, deans and department chairmen can still make life miserable for mavericks in their decisions regarding, e.g., the nature and location of lab and office space, the nature and time commitment of teaching and administrative assignments, and the timing of sabbaticals. Signing off on consulting and corporate research agreements is especially problematic, because it’s easy to find a pretext to scotch them, and thereby cutting your personal income or cutting off vital research funding, respectively.

Outside the university, you might get a rep for being a crank or just not “one of us.” Doesn’t sound so bad, but these are the people who will be — anonymously – reviewing your papers and grant proposals, i.e., deciding whether your career prospers or withers. Top drawer academia in a given field is like a small village, with maybe 1000 players worldwide tops, and we pretty much all know each other. (Think MLB players.)

It’s probably not so different among flag rank military officers. They know which of them went to a service academy, where they’ve served, who’s being groomed for greater things, right? (My father was passed over for flag rank in the Marine Corps, so I have some passing familiarity with that world.) Being a maverick can exact a steep price in both endeavors.

It is true that in the USN there were factors at play, and diversity was possibly one of them Certainly, Nepotism was. We used to joke that Admiral’s sons were entering the family business. John McCain comes to mind. But, the organization was large enough to absorb some of that. I retired before the diversity push got too bad; although it was beginning. Even so I felt kind of bad for some of the minority pilots; they had to prove to their peers, who could be very judgmental, that they were there on merit and not to fill a square. Well, actually, everyone had to prove themselves. No place to hide.

I wonder why the few in Academia who object are not more pro-active; especially since tenure seems to protect the mavericks.