The screengrab below is from a job advertisement for a senior academic role at a mid-ranking U.K. university (to which I have no connection), paying a maximum salary of around £63,000 a year. (For context, the median full-time salary in the UK is approximately £33,000.)
British universities frequently advertise a commitment to the Athena SWAN Charter, which is a set of ten principles designed to promote and support equality between genders in institutions of higher education, and which allocates bronze, silver and gold awards on application by such institutions. That universities should remove barriers that unfairly prevent employees from achieving their full potential is a project that almost anybody can get behind – even if we recognise that there is a certain amount of rent-seeking going on whenever a body sets itself up to give out industry awards of this kind.
But explicitly adopting an “inclusive recruitment process” for the furtherance of equality between men and women in higher education is a new one on me – especially when it is so transparently and obviously wrongheaded (although I suppose nothing should surprise me in this regard anymore). The ‘logic’, if I can use that word, would appear to be that if all shortlisted candidates know in advance what they will be asked at interview, and also know that there will be no unexpected questions or digressions (and can even bring pre-prepared notes on their answers), there will be a level playing field between them and – presumably – no danger of any particular candidate benefiting from the conversation straying into irrelevant areas (“Oh, I didn’t know you were a West Ham supporter too! The job’s yours!”).
Michel Foucault once said that something doesn’t have to be bad to be dangerous. That’s true. But it is definitely possible for something to be both bad and dangerous, and this is a paradigm case.
Badness first. I don’t know if you have ever interviewed a candidate for a job – I must have been involved in something approaching 100 such events – but one thing you will never hear anybody who has performed many interviews say is that they wished the candidates would be more homogenous in their answers. Everyone gives cookie-cutter answers to interview questions – except for the 1% who are misguidedly honest and the 1% who don’t give a toss because they’ve already got a better offer and are just attending the interview for a free meal and a night’s stay at a hotel.
This means that the decision about who to hire has to come down to other factors – the candidate’s CV and cover letter, and also their demeanour (their calmness and collectedness when answering unexpected questions) and how they come across personally when speaking off the cuff during the interviewing process – whether, in other words, they strike you as somebody who would be a good colleague. If you ‘level the playing field’ by essentially eliminating the last two factors, all you’re left with is the CV and cover letter – or, let’s face it, the fifth variable of “Yeah, I know Simon/Sajid/Stephanie and they went to the same university as I did/know my PhD supervisor/are really nice”.
How this would promote equality is anyone’s guess. Instead, what I suspect it will do is promote the hiring of people who have great CVs because they went to the best schools and universities and, in turn, were given the best opportunities to succeed in the world of higher education. And I also suspect it will promote the hiring of staff on the basis not of what they are like at interview, but extraneous factors such as who they know.
So, by its own lights, the idea is bad and will not work. In fact it will most likely be counterproductive and make things less equal in terms of socioeconomic background than they are already. But let’s turn to its dangerousness.
First, the idea that women cannot perform well at traditional interviews and need supportive measures in those circumstances is itself insulting and disempowering. One would have thought this would go without saying; apparently it doesn’t, and it is important therefore to say it. This will undermine women in the workplace and smear them with the slur that they cannot be as good as male colleagues without a leg-up. (Or, worse, it will cement grievance and deepen the mutual antagonism between the sexes, with women becoming increasingly convinced that men can’t be trusted to conduct interviews fairly, and men becoming increasingly convinced that modern feminism means rigging the system against them. That road will not lead to harmonious workplaces or indeed a harmonious society.)
Second, though, and much more importantly, the existence of this scheme shows a contemptuous attitude for the very idea that merit (much less the nowadays exotic concept of excellence) matters.
What does it mean to be an academic teaching law in a law school? Particularly in a senior position such as a Reader (equivalent to an Associate Professor and a step below being a full Chair). Such a person should at the very least be competent, shouldn’t they? They should know their subject well. They should be a good public speaker and be able to display confidence (even if they don’t feel it). They should be researching at the cutting edge of their discipline and be able to speak about it fluently. They should be able to put students at ease, but also exert rigour where required. They should, in other words, be good at what they do.
Put in a more blunt way, if I’m going to be paying somebody £63,000 per year to be a Reader in Law (or, put more accurately, if I’m going to appoint somebody who the students at my institution are going to be paying £63,000 per year to be a Reader in Law; or, more accurately still, if I’m going to appoint somebody whom the taxpayer is going to be paying £63,000 per year to be a Reader in Law and hoping that the rate of student loan repayment goes up somewhat), that person had better be able to answer unexpected interview questions, think on his/her feet, and speak confidently to a roomful of strangers without pre-prepared notes. If they can’t do those things, then I would have serious doubts about their ability to perform in their role competently. I certainly could not in good conscience appoint them, given that I would owe implicit obligations to students at my institution to appoint suitable staff, to my colleagues to appoint suitable team members, and to the taxpayers to use their money effectively.
Yet the idea that interview candidates should display merit seems to have gone out of the window. Instead, what this scheme indicates is that universities see it as their primary function to be inclusive.
I have no problem with inclusivity when it comes to learning – everybody with sufficient natural intelligence and dedication should have access to education (though I would still say that the primary function of the university should be to produce excellence). But when it comes to staff – particularly when it comes to staff who will be being paid almost twice the median salary in the country – inclusivity should come very far down the list. I don’t think we want to live in a world in which somebody can be paid £63,000 a year of largely public money (only a small proportion of which will ultimately come from student loan repayments) without having gone through a rigorous interviewing process that puts their competence to the test. And this, I’m afraid, ought to mean that it is jolly difficult, and should be conducted as a proper interview and not a rehearsed presentation in response to questions made available in advance.
More broadly, we should view it as highly concerning that U.K. universities don’t seem to understand that inclusivity and merit (or excellence) are basically incommensurate. If you pursue inclusivity to its extreme then you are including everyone irrespective of merit. And if you are pursuing merit to its extreme then you have to exclude people who do not have enough of it. This should be obvious to anyone with an ounce of commonsense who thinks about matters for a minute or two. This is not to suggest for a moment that there are not unfair or unjust barriers that exclude those who would otherwise have merit. (That is indeed the entire basis of the liberal understanding of non-discrimination – it is wrong to exclude anybody from anything on the basis of a metric other than merit.) But merit and inclusivity at some point become mutually antagonistic goals.
Yet universities appear to wish to have their cake and distribute it equally to everybody. Look at the strategic statement of almost any institution of higher education in the land and you will see much braggadocio about excellence or words to that effect. (See, for example, Warwick’s Excellence with Purpose, Durham’s ongoing commitment to being a globally outstanding centre of teaching and research excellence, or Sussex – a university which describes itself as “challenging convention” – and its striving for, er, “excellence in everything we do“.) How does this sit alongside ‘inclusive recruitment’ processes which don’t even require candidates to respond to unseen questions? I’ll spoil the quiz for you: it doesn’t, and it can’t.
Perhaps most concerningly still, what kind of message does all this send to young people, and particularly prospective university students? Don’t bother trying to be excellent – or even competent – because those things don’t matter all that much in the grand scheme of things anyway. Coming after the Covid lockdowns, the implicit message of which for young people was “education is optional and it doesn’t really matter if you attend school or not”, we need to consider carefully how much we unconsciously reinforce that kind of message across the board.
Dr. David McGrogan is Associate Professor of Law at Northumbria Law School. This article first appeared on his Substack page. Subscribe here.
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Surprise, surprise; one of the members of the General Medical Council is deputy chairman of the JCVI (a clear conflict of interest in regard to Dr Malhotra’s case):
‘Professor Anthony Harnden,Registrant member, England, GMC ref. no. 2807869, is currently the Deputy Chairman of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) which advises the UK government on vaccine policy. He is currently advising government on the optimal Covid-19 vaccination strategy.’
https://www.gmc-uk.org/about/who-we-are/our-council
He is a paediatrician.
None of the members of the council are cardiologists
No wonder, then, that the GMC statement said of renowned cardiologist Dr Malhotra:
‘….there is a question around the accuracy of his statements.’
Dr Malhotra’s stance threatens the reputation of one of the GMC’s councillors and none of them have a clue about cardiology.
If you have a state run health service and that state is a ‘democratic’ socialist fascist state, this is the kind of overmighty behaviour that the state’s various panjandrums, in this case within the nationalised state health establishment, get up to:
Arrogant bigotry
Vote this government out, annihilate it at the polls, and then do the same for the next government.
Only by rocking the worlds of these dreadful people on a regular basis is there any chance of them getting the message.
Good analysis. Similar to the MHRA. The Light has analysis of the MHRA board. It is a clown show like the GMC or JCVI. The MHRA holds a lot of power -but how many know anything about them?
On the 15 member MHRA, 7 are purported to be Doctors all linked to Pharma, one tested for quacksine ‘quality’. 5 or so are from Pharma, either paid currently as employees or ex- including the Chair who ran GE Pharma. None are virologists. One is a paid Gates Institute employee. One is an IT guy with zero med credentials. One is an ex Parliamentary accountant, zero med knowldge. There are others who are not doctors as well. Yet these idiots are the ones assessing if the quackines are safe for children and pregnant moms. What clown world do we live in?
The sainted June Raine decided that the role of the MHRA was to expedite the approval of the toxic jabs, not regulate the pharmaceutical industry.
Because 86% of her salary and pension come from pharma
Is there any public body in the UK that is free of conflicts of interest, venality and hypocrisy?
I agree with annihilating the current ruling party at the next general election but the lot who would take over are no better. They will annihilate the country and in a further 5 years leave a note saying “tee hee, we’ve spent all the money”. A plague on all their houses
Hello….is anyone in Westminster/Whitehall listening?
‘Japan’s health ministry has approved lump-sum payments for the deaths of five people after they received coronavirus vaccinations. The ministry determined that a causal link between the vaccinations and the deaths of the recipients cannot be ruled out.
The ministry made the decision on Thursday based on the country’s immunization law. Such payments have already been approved for the deaths of 15 people in their 20s to 90s.
The latest decision follows the deaths of five people aged 36 to 96. They died of acute heart failure, hemorrhagic shock and other causes after their immunizations.
Four of them reportedly had underlying conditions such as high blood pressure. The ministry says it could not deny a causal link between their deaths and the vaccinations, given the contents of their death certificates and clinical records.’
https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20230113_01/
I suspect they do not fancy arguing the case for vaccines in open court.
Call me old fashioned, but what really grates in this article and therefore diminishes it, is the constant reference to Dr Malhotra as the untitled ‘Malhotra’. I find it dreadfully discourteous to a medical professional who has earned and therefore, should be shown respect. It’s akin to scribblers who deride Baroness Thatcher, referring to her disparagingly as ‘Thatcher’, when in terms of personal qualities, they’re not in the same universe.
Quality is the sum of our character! Please don’t use Thatcher and Maholtra in the same sentence! There are vast differences.
To some people Thatcher is a hate figure, necessary at the time,but not a hero, Maholtra is a hero!
Regarding unsolicited advice. I’d be grateful if you’d stop proffering it to me.
Margaret Thatcher did not get everything right but at her finest she would have run rings round the garbage politicians we have had inflicted on us since she left office.
A hero would have spoken out against the jabs when they started.
If I knew the virus posed a trivial threat to the vast majority and that the gunks couldn’t possibly have been properly tested, so did Malhotra.
Margaret Thatcher is only a hate figure to those who believe that unelected trades union leaders should run the country into the ground rather than the elected government try to improve matters. For a current example see Mr Lynch.
A damn fine point but by the same token the likes of Whitty, Valance, Fraudci and that television doctor and the rest have trashed their professions and so are equally not entitled to their prefixes.
I would never dream of referring to Whitty and the like as Doctor, or Professor or whatever.
A good generic term for them would be arseholes
The GMC are of course not unaware of the masses of scientific data and real world evidence to support it ( e.g the increase in cardiac-related admissions ) and they know that if they suspended Malhotra or took away his license they wouldn’t have a leg to stand on in court because he’s very careful to always back up anything he says by citing the study to support his statement. You can’t cry ”conspiracy theorist” or ”anti-vaxxer” when somebody is actually demonstrating an evidence-based approach and quoting scientific data. The GMC would not be able to justify investigating Malhotra on that basis. They also won’t be blind to what happened with Andrew Bridgen. The mafia government attempted to silence him by removing him and look what happened. Complete own goal!
Yes, it’s an astute move by the GMC.
Ivor Cummins is using the same approach in his podcasts. He only references official documents so he can’t be censured by the YouTube cancellers.
You make your bed, lie in it!
It’s called a rock and a hard place!
Be careful, because history will tell!
“The GMC’s decision not to act against Malhotra is a victory for science, ethics and common sense”
Not sure about that. It’s a victory for our side in that they obviously didn’t feel they could push this one without big risk to themselves. It’s a tactical retreat. A victory for science, ethics and common sense would be the utter destruction of the leadership tier of the entire medical establishment – doctors, public health, government, civil servants, regulators, big pharma, unions, medical journalists.
In some ways a better result for us would have been for them to pursue the Dr flagrantly and expose themselves more fully as the evil bunch that we know they are.
Anyway, why doesn’t the bbc stick to what it’s good at, transgender box ticking, blm, climate change etc? What on earth is it doing trying to report the news?
Spot on
The BBC doesn’t try to report the news. The BBC tries to spin the news.
According to their statement (see below) they are scared witless (sic) and are terrified of what evidence a hearing, ie the disinfectant of sunlight, might expose.
Ba boom:
“a forum for further scepticism to be heard.”
Actually Dr Malhorta would be right to challenge that statement implying as it does that his scientifically supported views are not entirely accurate.
The tone of these statements by these official bodies is quite chilling.
They have an air of the menace of a gangster that will not tolerate being challenged.
On this occasion they’re indicating Malhotra is a worthless little fly not even worth reprimanding.
What a world this has become.
Right about the unwanted publicity. People like the GMC and their patsies are in too deep now and a full reverse ferret would be catastrophic. But as long as William Gates keeps filling their pockets, they’ll be perfectly happy to keep lying – no matter how many people it kills.
The GMC (and whoever is controlling them) has obviously decided it is safer to, effectively, ignore Malhotra’s apostasy rather than challenge it.
In other words, they’re running scared.
This is the link to the outcome of Dr Sam’s court case, which has been sent to the oubliette…. Why??
iamdrsamwhite
But of course, it’s not just Twitter. This is the link to my win one year ago on the national judiciary website: (check the link)
https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/White-v-GMC-judgment-031221.pdf
Get the torpedoes in the water and let them run. All of these organisations are past their sell-by date, they’re not there for any reason other than to perpetuate their power.
I went to the rally in London yesterday, highlighting the plight of the vaccine injured, Lack of acknowledgment and lack of help. There was also emphasis on the need to stop mRNA vaccines.
We started at the BBC headquarters with speeches. Matt Letissier’s was very powerful as was Andrew Bridgen’s, who went for a walk-about after his speech.
This was followed by a ‘silent’ March to Downing Street.
A reasonable turnout, but far fewer people than for the lockdown protests.
Interestingly there was more positive interaction with people watching the protest. Thumbs up, asking questions.
Maybe people are waking up to the reality of these ‘vaccines’. In a previous life this vaccine campaign would have been halted 2 years ago.
From your own correspondent ;).
All that the GMC is concerned about is that Malhotra didn’t impede the ‘vaccine’ rollout! They’ve let him off the hook because he woke up late.