White guy DEI
Affirmative action, Trumper style.
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Republicans have spent decades howling about how affirmative action led to unqualified minorities taking jobs away from well-qualified straight white men. Thanks to the Supreme Court ending affirmative action in college admissions in 2023, conservatives had the chance to, as one of Trump’s executive orders put it, “restore merit-based opportunity.”
Implicit in that statement is the notion that people of color, women, and LGBTQ individuals are unqualified, but got jobs because they check a box. They must be removed, the thinking goes, so that the most proficient and skilled people are chosen solely on merit. Except that’s not really what conservatives want.
Yes, they’re sincere about their desire to eradicate actual diversity in the workplace, but they aren’t interested in a world where skills carry the day. Rather, they want what can only be described as affirmative action for unqualified true believers. Put another way, adherence to a particularly hardline conservative worldview is the sole qualification that matters.
Just look at Oklahoma Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt. In 2023, Stitt banned the use of any tax dollars for diversity initiatives. But that didn’t lead to him nominating the most qualified people.
Stitt just named Travis Jett to the state supreme court. Jett has never been a judge, but somehow beat out two other sitting lower court judges, one of whom has been on the bench since 2009, the other since 2014. But what Jett lacks in judicial experience he makes up for in ideology, with connections to a conservative think tank that hates the state’s judicial nomination commission.
Conservatives also want to reshape education by requiring their views be coddled and their people be employed. Look at Trump’s demands of Harvard. The administration threatened to withhold billions from the school unless it agreed to hire a “critical mass” of new professors with “viewpoint diversity” for any department found lacking.
This is precisely the sort of affirmative action that conservatives theoretically decry. These demands aren’t based on any assertion that existing Harvard faculty are not skilled enough, but that not enough have rightwing beliefs. That’s not merit-based opportunity. Indeed, it’s literally a quota, but only for conservatives.
It gets worse. For each “teaching unit” with insufficient viewpoint diversity, Harvard would be required to admit enough additional students — based on their views! — until viewpoint diversity was achieved. No one knows what a “teaching unit” is. A single class? A department? How does one determine the viewpoint diversity of students?
So, trying to achieve a diversity of students based on race, gender, or sexual orientation is illegal and results in less qualified students getting admitted, but mandating a diversity based on political viewpoints is totally cool, qualifications be damned. Actually, that’s not entirely fair. There is a qualification, but it has nothing to do with the experience of professors or the background of students.
Not the best and the brightest
If you look at high-profile conservatives who have recently succeeded in burrowing into academia, you can see that the qualification that matters is not experience or education. Instead, it’s just a willingness to espouse — and impose — rightwing views.
Take Christopher Rufo, who Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis installed as one of the trustees for Florida’s New School as part of his efforts to destroy the small progressive university. Rufo is very experienced at ginning up racist moral panics, but not so much so when it comes to relevant educational qualifications. Though he brags about his master’s in liberal arts from Harvard, it’s actually from the extension school there.
That might seem like a distinction without a difference — Rufo certainly tries to hand-wave it away — but the extension school is basically open-enrollment. High school grades don’t matter, and there are no standardized test requirements for admission. Instead, people are eligible after getting a B grade or better in two extension courses before officially enrolling in a degree program. In contrast, getting in as an undergrad at the actual Harvard is not easy, with over 60,000 applications for fewer than 2,000 spots. Oh, and Harvard Extension School credits don’t transfer to Harvard proper.
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Nor does Rufo have any specific background in education policy or research, unless you count a stint at the Discovery Institute, which is best known for denying evolution. Ostensibly, Rufo was a research fellow and director of the Center on Wealth & Poverty, but his publications are mostly just fact-free rants about the evils of diversity.
DeSantis made sure that Rufo wasn’t alone in being an unqualified white guy DEI hire. He also tapped former Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse to run the University of Florida, which has over 50,000 students. Sure, Sasse had previously run a school, except it was a tiny private college in Nebraska. But Sasse wasn’t hired for his ability to run a school. He was hired because of his rightwing views.
Sasse’s brief 17-month tenure at UF was not exactly a success. The school fell in the US News and World Report rankings, where it had previously been one of the top five public universities in the country. He tripled presidential office spending and shoveled money to GOP cronies, many of whom got six-figure jobs with the school despite living hundreds of miles away. He spent $300,000 of the school’s money on private jets and $169,000 on a single holiday party.
Sasse spent $7.2 million on consulting, over 40 times more than his predecessor, Kent Fuchs, spent in eight years. Of course, Fuchs had relevant experience, having previously been provost at Cornell and in leadership and faculty roles at Purdue and the University of Illinois.
After Sasse bolted, he got to keep his $1 million salary for staying on as a professor and adviser to the board of trustees. Meanwhile, Fuchs is now back as interim president, cleaning up the mess left by Sasse.
And then there are the people chosen directly by Trump.
By the incapable, for the incapable
Several of Trump’s first-term judicial picks were emblematic of his elevation of the incapable, with 10 of his nominees being rated as “not qualified” by the American Bar Association. Conservatives try to excuse this by saying the ABA’s ratings are driven by liberal bias, but from 1989 to 2017, spanning two GOP administrations and two Democratic ones, only 12 nominees in total received that rating.
Trump offered up people like Brett Talley. Even if you set aside concerns about Talley’s views, such as his apparent defense of the KKK, his lack of experience was staggering. At the time of his nomination, he had never tried a case or even argued a motion in federal court.
Talley’s nomination was ultimately withdrawn, but other objectively unqualified Trump appointees are now on the federal bench. Justin Walker also had no meaningful experience, having also never tried a case. What Walker did have, though, was a longtime family friendship with Sen. Mitch McConnell, who absurdly described Walker as “unquestionably the most outstanding nomination that I’ve ever recommended to presidents to serve on the bench in Kentucky.” Come on, man. However, Walker didn’t stay on the federal district court bench for long. After less than a year at that job, Trump tapped him for the DC Circuit Court of Appeals.
Charles Goodwin was a federal magistrate for several years before his nomination, but he had a bad habit of not showing up to the courthouse until mid-afternoon, leaving the ABA concerned about his work ethic and ability to meet the demands of a federal judgeship. Today, Goodwin is one of the slowest federal judges in Oklahoma, with motions languishing for over two years.
Perhaps no one is more emblematic of the conservative commitment to elevating unqualified ideologues than Pete Hegseth. Put simply, there’s no world where Hegseth should be in any position of power, much less running the Department of Defense. Even setting aside his history of sexual assault allegations and alcohol abuse, he’s objectively wildly unqualified.
Just compare Hegseth to Trump’s first-term choices for defense secretary. His first pick, Patrick Shanahan, had no military background but spent over three decades at Boeing, including helming defense projects like missile defense and military transports. Shanahan later withdrew when a history of domestic violence incidents in his family surfaced, including Shanahan defending his son after he beat his mother with a baseball bat. Isn’t it quaint that such a thing used to derail a nomination?
An exception to the rule was Mark Esper, Trump’s longest-serving defense secretary, who had 21 years of active and reserve army service, was chief of staff at the Heritage Foundation, held high-level policy positions with multiple GOP senators, was a deputy assistant secretary of defense under George W. Bush, and was high up at Raytheon. By contrast, Hegseth ran — poorly — a few small nonprofits and was a talking head on Fox News. That’s pretty much it.
Hegseth is exactly the kind of affirmative action pick conservatives theoretically decry. He got the job because he’s a Trump-loving culture warrior with reactionary rightwing beliefs, not because he has any relevant experience that would make him qualified to oversee millions of people and hundreds of billions of dollars. He’s not even qualified to run a group chat without breaking the law.
Pretending that Hegseth got nominated on merit is ridiculous, but it’s a fiction conservatives have all agreed to adopt. To admit he’s not qualified would mean acknowledging that straight white maleness does not automatically confer expertise. It would mean acknowledging that Hegseth was picked for a trait — his regressive views — rather than for his ability to do the job.
Conservatives were never going to be content with eliminating diversity initiatives. They won’t be satisfied even if they manage to shove everyone except white men out of public life. That’s because they can’t actually compete on merit. They’ll only be satisfied when their unpopular worldviews are elevated and their unqualified picks are given jobs they don’t deserve. Talk about diversity hires.
That’s it for today
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Thanks for reading.
This is so depressing. It feels like all of the momentous, hard-won gains of the past 50 years are being swept away, and I don't know what's going to stop this. On a personal note, when I was in college in 1970, I considered medical school. However only 5% of the graduating class at the time were women. Then, thanks to the Women's Movement which insisted that women have equal rights to study Medicine, the class of 1978 to which I belong, had 25% women. Now the male/female ratio is close to 50% at most medical schools. A ten-fold increase because of the conservatives' despised DEI. The same story can be told of Black people finally being allowed to enter the halls of influence and power. These self-centered people want to wash it all away.
That Trump has decimated so many factions of leadership in such a short time is frightening- if something isn’t done to stop him, remove him- I don’t know what the options could be- I can’t imagine what would happen if we were attacked by another country, and given the way he has turned most of the world against us, we wouldn’t have much support. And the damage being done to our education systems, be it K-12 or higher Ed, these changes will take a long time to overcome.