Be Careful What You Ask For…

It’s been interesting to read the vitriol from some quarters since the election of Donald T. Much the same as was evident a few years back when Barack O was elected, although from different quarters. While I am tempted to provide a really deep and awesome critique of this entire U.S.A. election, I will yield not. Instead I will be a tad more restrained.

I believe this is the expected result of D.I.E. (or whatever that attitude of rearranging our world away from excellence is supposedly called). Simply put I have always been cautious about espousing any cause that could significantly boomerang on me or at least on my friends and family. When I first heard about diversity, I was in college but then it was simply that we should accept those students who were not coming from university-trained parents or households. We were to acknowledge that they had met the requirements of the university and therefore were as good as any of the rest of us who had always thought and planned towards a university education. Moreover, we were not to consider college as a higher form of education, but simply different. Apprenticeship, trades, technical, business and even following one’s parents into farming or fishing were all noble walks of life and should be respected.

Then things changed: while at the UofT a black woman complained that she was not selected for a bus trip to the south. Her reasoning, she was a black woman and should have had priority over white men. Perhaps, but the entry into the trip was by lottery. I didn’t get to go either, although I was a white guy. When I got to grad school in Minnesota there was more of this type of request, although I ducked the issue: people wanted more spots for Americans and I was Canadian. I was okay because there was an agreement for those in the field of education – reciprocity. Canada was accepting many non-Canadians for graduate studies, including from the USA so I could be granted admission (though I was labeled a registered alien).

Later, when running my consulting firm, I tended to hire more women than men, but I did so simply because they were more qualified than the men who were applying. Nevertheless there were some forces beginning to emerge that suggested there should be a more proactive approach. This started again in the academy where quotas and ratios began to appear as part of the acceptance of registrants. I was concerned about this and said so; more appropriate to me was the design and development of specialized programs that were targeted to specific groups (Aboriginals, ethnic minorities, and similar apparently disadvantaged folk). The idea was that there would be special entry programs which would help make up for previous deficiencies in their educational journeys; once these were completed, then they would be welcomed into the broader academic spectrum. Occasionally there would even be specializations established, particularly in education & health, for such people to further train to become professionals well versed in working within their specific community.

This all seemed to be going quite well – I even was invited to teach or at least guest lecture in a number of such programs. But then something happened, someone got the idea that equality of opportunity was insufficient. There was a need to reduce the number of qualified entrants in order to permit a wider swath of participants in the academy. We were to diversify according to population demographics. We were to include people of limited means and even abilities to reflect the make-up of our world. And equality was to be replaced by equity (and I never fully grasped what that was).

And so it came to pass that D.I.E. became the new standard. Forget wanting the best. Forget requiring acceptance of personal responsibility for learning. Forget recognition of the reality of failure. No one was to be denied. In fact, if anyone suggested that perhaps this might lead us down a path of unintended consequences, that person was castigated to the degree even leaders of the Inquisition would have acknowledged far exceeded their intentions.

And now we have the first real wave of results. The denominator that some of us feared would emerge, has… In a tsunami of equity, inclusion & diversity we have as President, Donald T. Just as several academic institutions appointed presidents that barely met the standard of entry into their hallowed halls, so have the American people appointed a president. And just as there are myriads of woke profs who are biased and condescending in their approach to teaching (and thus preventing real learning), so has the new president assigned biased and condescending people to his cabinet. I could go on and on, but hopefully you get my point.

I am not highly enamoured with our current Prime Minister (but you know that). I am also not a huge fan of the man who likely will become our Prime Minister. But if you sit in judgment of his fitness for the role, thank those who allowed the current unqualified individual who set a bar so low, even I might be qualified. When you ask for D.I.E. you encourage the unqualified to think they are qualified. Moreover, you ask everyone else to accept them as qualified. And you know what, a good many of them actually will believe you and respond accordingly. Remember what you asked for? Well, you are getting it, full circle...

Reflectively
g.w.