What does the resignation of Claudine Gay say about the state of liberal affairs?

When you go too far, the pendulum can swing back hard...

The $64,000 question is what does this sort of pendulum swing look like? To most liberals, they will demand that any pushback to DEI is just an acceptance of racism or even an invitation for racism. But in the more logical form, the fundamental change will be to go back towards meritocracy. Obviously, these two things are not one in the same and the pendulum swing will come from those who recognize as such.

I go back to a portion of my employment where the company I was working for had a large swing in how they evaluated people. This was back when layoffs were in vogue and we saw something (small or large) almost every quarter. We were introduced one year to job evaluations that was based pretty much entirely on "peer reviews" and there was little effort made by anyone to find any objective manner to evaluate people. The thought process was that by getting a whole slew of personal feedback from those who you worked with, they would be able to get a good feel for how people were performing. After all, everyone wants to work with good employees and nobody wants to work with bad employees, right?

The problem was obvious to many of us. What happened was that those departments where everyone got along, were basically friends, and even hung out together after work, the peer reviews were pretty much spectacular. Everyone was doing a great job, regardless of how much work was being done. But in departments where there was some internal strife, where you had some instigators and troublemakers, these peer reviews became a chance for people to go after those they did not like. In those departments, it seems as though nobody was getting good peer reviews, regardless of the quality of work. What happened was that slackers stuck around due to their buddy buddy relations with other slackers, while certain long term high performers ended up on the "list" for layoffs due to bad peer reviews by people who targeted the more successful out of jealousy or spite.

Not too surprisingly, the very next year we were introduced to what was called a "competency culture" where every little thing you did was now measured, and the concept of "peer reviews" went completely away. The reviews from the next year were little more than spreadsheets, charts, and graphs, showing us in the most objective manner how we were performing our jobs. While this seemed better than relying 100% on peer reviews, things slowly moved back to a system where both objective measures and peer reviews were considered. But it took a little time for the pendulum to settle back down into the middle.

Eventually I suspect that many places in this country will move away from the concept of DEI and similar to my story, will adopt a more merit based system of hiring and employee evaluations. By making it cold, objective, clearly laid out, and processed by the books, they can eliminate suggestions that they are being unfair. By stressing the meritocracy of things, they can avoid the concept that they are judging anyone by anything other than performance. This will not go over well with everyone, people will run to court, but if people start moving back towards a meritocracy, the courts will back the system. Once it has been established that meritocracy is perfectly legal and perfectly acceptable, we will be in a position to slowly move back towards a system that comes back to something that allows for both merit and other factors to play a part without it being rammed down the collective throats of society.

At the end of the day, DEI is a feel good concept. In and of itself, there is nothing there that makes it appear as if it can last long term. Claudine Gay is a typical example of a completely underqualified person given an highly important and extremely high profile job because of her race. She was not just an abysmal failure, but a complete embarrassment to the University. She was largely that way The damage she did to Harvard will take years to undo. This could have been avoided if Harvard had hired a qualified candidate for President, rather than hire someone of color at the bidding of Barack Obama. Eventually this catches up and people will have to learn (and learn from) these lessons.