I looked for ADVANCE and any other such documents at my university, even the Wayback Machine, didn't find anything. However I do recall being on search committees a few years back and having to report to the Provost office about race.
For example, if 50 people applied for the opening, you would first exclude all the applicants who didn't meet the minimum qualifications, and then you'd have 40. From the 40, you'd create your "long-short" list of maybe 10, and these people would be Zoom-interviewed. Then you winnow it down to the 3 finalists who would be invited for campus visits.
At that point, you had to provide the Provost with documentation about why you excluded any non-whites who were among the 10 (whose race you now knew due to the Zoom meeting) from the finalist trio. It wasn't enough to make a good-faith assumption that the search committee had already evaluated everyone fairly; you had to offer extra "proof" that the excluded minority candidates were unequivocally less-qualified than the final three. The effect was sort of chilling—as in, you knew that the Provost really really wanted you to hire minorities, and you get this extra bad-faith scrutiny if you fail to do that.
One thing that always struck me about dealing with the Provost all these years is how bad-faith everything was, and ironically so. Basically everyone I work with wants to actively discriminate in favor of minorities—to create "visible diversity"—and yet the required trainings and their implications always assumed that we were all a bunch of thoughtless prejudiced white people who had to be trained and goaded to not reflexively prefer to hire people who look like us.
Out of curiosity, why not post the document? Or the name of the school? I know there is a need for some anonymity, but without the evidence made public it is kind of all hearsay.
Fair question. The reason is source protection, mainly. Naming the school narrows the pool of who could have leaked, sometimes to one person — and documents carry metadata and formatting tells that can finger sources even after redaction. SLAPP risk too: even meritless suits cost more to defend than a Substack can absorb. And the point isn't "school X did Y"; it's that the same patterns recur across very different institutions. This blog isn't gossip; it's a systemic argument.
I looked for ADVANCE and any other such documents at my university, even the Wayback Machine, didn't find anything. However I do recall being on search committees a few years back and having to report to the Provost office about race.
For example, if 50 people applied for the opening, you would first exclude all the applicants who didn't meet the minimum qualifications, and then you'd have 40. From the 40, you'd create your "long-short" list of maybe 10, and these people would be Zoom-interviewed. Then you winnow it down to the 3 finalists who would be invited for campus visits.
At that point, you had to provide the Provost with documentation about why you excluded any non-whites who were among the 10 (whose race you now knew due to the Zoom meeting) from the finalist trio. It wasn't enough to make a good-faith assumption that the search committee had already evaluated everyone fairly; you had to offer extra "proof" that the excluded minority candidates were unequivocally less-qualified than the final three. The effect was sort of chilling—as in, you knew that the Provost really really wanted you to hire minorities, and you get this extra bad-faith scrutiny if you fail to do that.
One thing that always struck me about dealing with the Provost all these years is how bad-faith everything was, and ironically so. Basically everyone I work with wants to actively discriminate in favor of minorities—to create "visible diversity"—and yet the required trainings and their implications always assumed that we were all a bunch of thoughtless prejudiced white people who had to be trained and goaded to not reflexively prefer to hire people who look like us.
Out of curiosity, why not post the document? Or the name of the school? I know there is a need for some anonymity, but without the evidence made public it is kind of all hearsay.
Fair question. The reason is source protection, mainly. Naming the school narrows the pool of who could have leaked, sometimes to one person — and documents carry metadata and formatting tells that can finger sources even after redaction. SLAPP risk too: even meritless suits cost more to defend than a Substack can absorb. And the point isn't "school X did Y"; it's that the same patterns recur across very different institutions. This blog isn't gossip; it's a systemic argument.