“Meritocracy” for dorks who peaked in grade 11

I would like to tell you that this is a mean parody of anti-“DEI” rube-running, but it’s the National Review, Katie:

The diversity mania that has swept over American education for the last 50 years or so has had a malign effect on the quality of professors. Many of those hired to fill quotas for certain groups are, to be blunt, not especially qualified. Moreover, such hiring violates the law against discrimination.

What should we do?

In today’s Martin Center article, David Randall of the National Association of Scholars suggests that we should adopt the Faculty Merit Act.

[…]

Disappointed faculty candidates can sue, but their lawsuits are often stymied by the “black box” of faculty hiring — there is no objective data on the capability of the pool of applicants. The Faculty Merit Act would solve that problem by requiring schools to get the SAT scores of all applicants.

Randall explains why that would matter:

An SAT score isn’t the same thing as being able to write an interesting book or discover something interesting in a lab. But a standardized test score isn’t a bad proxy for student merit in undergraduate admissions, and it isn’t a bad proxy for faculty merit in the hiring process. If the public and policymakers can see that a faculty search had 300 applicants, that the standardized test scores dropped during each round of the selection process, and that the person who got the job had a lower SAT score than 290 other applicants, then they can see that something is wrong

Ranking candidates for faculty searches by fucking SAT scores? Are you shitting me? “Sure, you have three peer-reviewed articles, great fellowships, and great letters from top people in the field, but your scores on a single test you took in high school are 10 points lower, sorry.” (The fact that the guy who thinks this is a serious idea took his SATs during the Johnson administration makes this even funnier.)

While we’re here, it’s worth noting that anyone who has participated in an academic search from either end at some point this century knows that the idea that any material number of “unqualified” applicants are being hired to tenure-track jobs is an absurd fantasy. The typical faculty position gets dozens of fully-qualified applicants, with credentials far surpassing the typical member of the generation of faculty complaining that contemporary faculty hires lack merit. Of course, the not-at-all-veiled subtext here is that anybody but a white man hired for a faculty position is presumptively unqualified.