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 critique.
I share the disgust with Affirmative Action as it is practiced in the US, and have special contempt for the dishonesty and subterfuge used to implement it. Sometimes the results are absurd, such as the New Haven firefighters case, when the city of New Haven threw out their selection tests to promote lieutenants and captains because no blacks qualified, and only one Hispanic qualified. Sometimes the results are genuinely outrageous, such as the more recent case involving FAA hiring for Air Traffic Controllers (https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-faas-hiring).
I'd like to see all employers treat individuals fairly, regardless of their demographics. However, we should recognize the legal framework in which institutions work. I am not a lawyer, and I've never worked in HR functions, but I've been doing some reading on the history and practice of Affirmative Action. This is my understanding of the legal situation.
Executive Order 11246, originally issued in September 1965, required all US government contractors, which includes universities that do federally funded research, to have Affirmative Action Plans (41 CFR 60-2), and the Affirmative Action Plans are required to have "Placement Goals" (41 CFR 60-2.16) for the numbers of applicable demographic groups to be employed in each function and each organization. The wording of the regulations is vague as to exactly how binding the goals are - it is explicit that no employer is required to hire unqualified applicants, or applicants who are clearly less qualified than other applicants, but the employer would have the burden to demonstrate that minority candidates, if needed to meet the goals, were clearly unqualified or less qualified than the candidate(s) hired. President Trump rescinded the Executive Order in 2025, and there are proposed changes to these regulations currently being worked, but for now they remain requirements for all federal contractors. Even private universities with no federal contracts would be allowed to have Affirmative Action Plans.
Applied to hiring decisions for faculty, the university would be required to have a goal for some percentage of black and female faculty at a minimum, possibly also including Hispanic, Native American, or other groups. These goals would apply across the whole faculty, or perhaps subsets of the faculty, perhaps by department or school. Hiring committees generally don't hire to fill the entire faculty, but rather to fill one open position. If the department or school or university is currently short of some demographic group relative to their goal, they'd be required to make "good faith" efforts to hire someone from the group they're short.
I've never seen any employer publicly and explicitly acknowledge these considerations, but I believe they're real, and considered binding. And they've never been successfully challenged that I know of. In this environment, deans and provosts would fail their duty to the school if they didn't tilt the hiring process to recruit more of whatever demographic is needed to meet the targets. They try to hide their actions because faculty and the public at large would not react well if they were known, but they're nevertheless required. The combination of noxious requirements and blatant dishonesty to hide the actions corrodes public trust and confidence in the government and the institutions.
I'd be all in favor of scrapping all these legal requirements, and we may be on the way to doing so. However, I'm not sure that what comes after would be better. Before the current Affirmative Action regime, employers could be sued for not hiring enough blacks or women. We now have far more "protected classes", so there would be many other potential pitfalls. A common basis for the suit was "disparate impact," and the seminal "disparate impact" case was Griggs v. Duke Power, decided in 1971. Nearly any selection standards or employment practices could have "disparate impact" on one or another protected group. One of the purposes of the Affirmative Action system we have now was to make the legal landscape predictable for employers. If we sweep away all the Affirmative Action requirements and forbid such practices in areas where they're not currently required, we might end up with more arbitrary decision making, subject to endless and unpredictable challenges.
This article mentions the Students for Fair Admissions cases, but they're really not relevant to hiring. The cases dealt only with admissions, not hiring. As far as I can tell, there has never been a law or regulation requiring Affirmative Action in admissions, although there have been court decisions allowing discriminatory Affirmative Action practices. The SFFA decision said that the discriminatory practices used by Harvard and the University of North Carolina were impermissible. However, it also laid out some alternatives that might achieve the same goals in ways the majority would likely approve.
I'm reminded of the parable of Chesterton's Fence (https://www.chesterton.org/taking-a-fence-down/). I've seen different formulations of the story, but the essence is: don't demolish some great public fixture without first understanding it and its origins and purposes, and then having some clear alternative that addresses the worthwhile purposes of the existing fixture, hopefully without so many unintended effects.
"If we sweep away all the Affirmative Action requirements and forbid such practices in areas where they're not currently required, we might end up with more arbitrary decision making, subject to endless and unpredictable challenges."
Unpredictable challenges? Sounds like a kind of Brazil you may get: Disparate impact air traffic controllers (and CEOs, mayors, police chiefs, doctors, lawyers). Reparations to Somali fraudsters. An article in The Wall Street Journal explaining the need for, and reviewing, back-up generators (actually happened). Things stop working. Walls cordoning a shrinking Upper Caucasia from the vibrant favelas. Free stuff for the vast population of the "marginalized."
Eventually, the dollar collapses from sky-high debt and it is no longer a reserve currency. China has halved its US Treasury holdings in the last few years (happened). More to come.
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 critique.
I share the disgust with Affirmative Action as it is practiced in the US, and have special contempt for the dishonesty and subterfuge used to implement it. Sometimes the results are absurd, such as the New Haven firefighters case, when the city of New Haven threw out their selection tests to promote lieutenants and captains because no blacks qualified, and only one Hispanic qualified. Sometimes the results are genuinely outrageous, such as the more recent case involving FAA hiring for Air Traffic Controllers (https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-faas-hiring).
I'd like to see all employers treat individuals fairly, regardless of their demographics. However, we should recognize the legal framework in which institutions work. I am not a lawyer, and I've never worked in HR functions, but I've been doing some reading on the history and practice of Affirmative Action. This is my understanding of the legal situation.
Executive Order 11246, originally issued in September 1965, required all US government contractors, which includes universities that do federally funded research, to have Affirmative Action Plans (41 CFR 60-2), and the Affirmative Action Plans are required to have "Placement Goals" (41 CFR 60-2.16) for the numbers of applicable demographic groups to be employed in each function and each organization. The wording of the regulations is vague as to exactly how binding the goals are - it is explicit that no employer is required to hire unqualified applicants, or applicants who are clearly less qualified than other applicants, but the employer would have the burden to demonstrate that minority candidates, if needed to meet the goals, were clearly unqualified or less qualified than the candidate(s) hired. President Trump rescinded the Executive Order in 2025, and there are proposed changes to these regulations currently being worked, but for now they remain requirements for all federal contractors. Even private universities with no federal contracts would be allowed to have Affirmative Action Plans.
Applied to hiring decisions for faculty, the university would be required to have a goal for some percentage of black and female faculty at a minimum, possibly also including Hispanic, Native American, or other groups. These goals would apply across the whole faculty, or perhaps subsets of the faculty, perhaps by department or school. Hiring committees generally don't hire to fill the entire faculty, but rather to fill one open position. If the department or school or university is currently short of some demographic group relative to their goal, they'd be required to make "good faith" efforts to hire someone from the group they're short.
I've never seen any employer publicly and explicitly acknowledge these considerations, but I believe they're real, and considered binding. And they've never been successfully challenged that I know of. In this environment, deans and provosts would fail their duty to the school if they didn't tilt the hiring process to recruit more of whatever demographic is needed to meet the targets. They try to hide their actions because faculty and the public at large would not react well if they were known, but they're nevertheless required. The combination of noxious requirements and blatant dishonesty to hide the actions corrodes public trust and confidence in the government and the institutions.
I'd be all in favor of scrapping all these legal requirements, and we may be on the way to doing so. However, I'm not sure that what comes after would be better. Before the current Affirmative Action regime, employers could be sued for not hiring enough blacks or women. We now have far more "protected classes", so there would be many other potential pitfalls. A common basis for the suit was "disparate impact," and the seminal "disparate impact" case was Griggs v. Duke Power, decided in 1971. Nearly any selection standards or employment practices could have "disparate impact" on one or another protected group. One of the purposes of the Affirmative Action system we have now was to make the legal landscape predictable for employers. If we sweep away all the Affirmative Action requirements and forbid such practices in areas where they're not currently required, we might end up with more arbitrary decision making, subject to endless and unpredictable challenges.
This article mentions the Students for Fair Admissions cases, but they're really not relevant to hiring. The cases dealt only with admissions, not hiring. As far as I can tell, there has never been a law or regulation requiring Affirmative Action in admissions, although there have been court decisions allowing discriminatory Affirmative Action practices. The SFFA decision said that the discriminatory practices used by Harvard and the University of North Carolina were impermissible. However, it also laid out some alternatives that might achieve the same goals in ways the majority would likely approve.
I'm reminded of the parable of Chesterton's Fence (https://www.chesterton.org/taking-a-fence-down/). I've seen different formulations of the story, but the essence is: don't demolish some great public fixture without first understanding it and its origins and purposes, and then having some clear alternative that addresses the worthwhile purposes of the existing fixture, hopefully without so many unintended effects.
"If we sweep away all the Affirmative Action requirements and forbid such practices in areas where they're not currently required, we might end up with more arbitrary decision making, subject to endless and unpredictable challenges."
Unpredictable challenges? Sounds like a kind of Brazil you may get: Disparate impact air traffic controllers (and CEOs, mayors, police chiefs, doctors, lawyers). Reparations to Somali fraudsters. An article in The Wall Street Journal explaining the need for, and reviewing, back-up generators (actually happened). Things stop working. Walls cordoning a shrinking Upper Caucasia from the vibrant favelas. Free stuff for the vast population of the "marginalized."
Eventually, the dollar collapses from sky-high debt and it is no longer a reserve currency. China has halved its US Treasury holdings in the last few years (happened). More to come.
The sheer amount of papershuffle make-work disguised as "activism" gives me pause.
Makes we want to beat the crap out of all male employees of the education industry. What wusses they are.