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Mark Latham Column:
HOW UNIVERSITY EMPLOYMENT QUOTAS ARE HURTING OUR KIDS’ EDUCATION
Mark Latham’s Tuesday Column:
Last week we found out that Sydney University has introduced racial, gender and sexuality quotas for its debating teams. A student’s public speaking ability at Australia’s oldest university is no longer determined by what comes out of their mouth, but by their skin colour, genitalia and who they might be sleeping with.
The policy is designed to favour “women, people of colour and others who have been oppressed by white male supremacy.” This seems a tad strange given that 60 percent of university graduates each year are female, meaning the white male supremacists on campus must be doing a really bad job.
To walk around Sydney University is to witness League of Nations-style diversity. One-quarter of Asian Australians have university degrees, another sign of how ‘oppressed minorities’ are actually rocketing ahead in higher education. It seems silly to have diversity quotas at an institution that is already swimming in diversity.
Debating team quotas are yet another attack on the principle of meritocracy, or what we often call the great Australian ideal of a ‘fair go’. As a nation, we have always tried to treat each individual on their merits, rewarding their ability regardless of minor genetic factors such as race and gender. But now the ‘fair go’ is under siege.
Actually, in the university system, debating teams are the least of our worries. There is a far more insidious and damaging quota system being implemented.
Recently I was sent a copy of a memo notifying “Important changes to hiring of new staff” within the Faculty of Engineering, Architecture and Information Technology (FEAIT) at the University of Queensland. It was written by Professor Simon Biggs, Executive Dean of the Faculty, and dated 11 April 2017.
Biggs advised his staff of a new way of hiring academics, as per “a report from the Equity and Diversity working group of the faculty”. The net impact of the changes was to abandon merit selection, downgrading the prospects of white men and instead, placing “a special focus on women and minority groups”.
In the short-listing of academic staff, 50 percent were to be female, a task Biggs repeatedly acknowledged to be “a tough ask”. Even though women now dominate our university graduation lists, they have not necessarily chosen the engineering, architecture and IT disciplines in large numbers. Their bigger, majority preference has been for the law, medicine and teaching.
There’s no problem with that. In a free society, people should be able to choose what they like. Studies have shown that, compared to men, women prefer vocations focused on “working with people”. The law, medicine and teaching fit this requirement.
In their personal choices, men tend to pursue qualifications and careers centred on “working with things and objects”. Thus around 85 percent of engineering and IT graduates are male. In architecture the figure is 60 percent.
What does this mean for the University of Queensland? In hiring FEAIT academics, with a requirement for 50 percent female shortlisting, they are limiting the pool of qualified applicants. In engineering and IT, half the shortlist will be drawn from just 15 percent of the graduate population; in architecture, 40 percent.
This is a self-inflicted disaster for the quality of the university’s teaching and research program. No wonder Biggs admitted it will “be hard” to find “females with a strong and credible track record”. Imagine picking a representative sporting team or business leadership group where one-half of the squad has to be drawn from just 15 percent of the population. It’s a recipe for failure.
Yet this is what Queensland and other universities are doing to our children – knowingly giving them substandard teachers. It’s a crime against their students and indeed, the entire nation.
Australia relies heavily on higher education for the creation of a high wage/high growth economy. We all lose out when academic standards are compromised: non-whites as much as whites, women as much as men. The only effective way of running a national education system is to hire the best people to deliver the very best teaching and research.
Biggs had another trick up his sleeve. He abandoned the “normal practice after the interview session” of “ranking candidates immediately” and replaced it with a new system, “simply asking the question about whether they are appointable into the role”. This is a backdoor way of shoehorning ‘diversity candidates’ into jobs, regardless of merit.
“Prior to deciding whether to appoint, a more rounded discussion of the strategic needs of the school in terms of staff profile alongside teaching and/or research needs will be undertaken”, Biggs wrote, “That is, staff diversity will be one of the criteria that we consider.”
In Australian higher education the identity characteristics of race, gender and sexuality are now seen as more important that the ability of academics to give their students the highest standard of instruction and with it, the best start in life. This is the work of a nation in decline, mugged by political correctness. Meanwhile, the Turnbull Government stands idly by, never lifting a finger to correct these injustices.
So-called ‘diversity advocates’ often argue that employment quotas broaden the pool of talent available in selection processes. Yet in practice, the opposite it true. Clearly the Biggs memo has narrowed the faculty’s staff recruitment pool to a smaller proportion of qualified people in the fields of engineering, architecture and information technology. The needs of an ill-informed Left-wing political theory have been given priority ahead of the needs of students.
And for what purpose? There are now more female than male lawyers, GP doctors, vets, teachers, office managers and public servants in Australia. That’s what women are choosing to do – a great national achievement in gender equality. Only nutty social engineers think these women are so dumb they don’t know how to choose courses and careers that match up to their life’s aspirations.
Ultimately, people like Biggs are guided by a massive conceit: that they know more about the needs of individual women than the women themselves. In any society, the smallest minority group is actually the individual. That’s the beauty of merit selection: it treats people as individuals, not as crude identity groupings. It pays respectful attention to their abilities in life and rewards them accordingly.
The loss of meritocracy is the greatest tragedy of 21st century Australia.
Note: I asked Professor Biggs questions about his memo but he failed to respond.