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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1) Vaccine damage?
2) VAIDS?
Plus damage to immune system and multiple other aspects of physical health by both prolonged fear and restrictions
German TV presenter rolls eyes, becomes incoherent in mid-sentence and collapses on camera .
Anchor : “Let’s move on to the next item”
Stop taking the boosters guys. Not working…some expert docs calling effects of vaxx “immune erosion”..vaccine induced immune deficiency syndrome.you won’t even be able to mount a response for the common cold, and other mild illnesses. Please reconsider taking the boosters until all the trials are finished and all the safety data is in.
Demographics is destiny. Note the ageing population, and the quite startling excess of females from 25+. I’d go ahead and infer this is due to go-getting – and healthy – males emigrating, leaving behind… well, what gets left behind.
c.f. Scotchland, both demographically and genetically.
The female surplus is likely because of maids, cleaners etc from elsewhere in Asia.
Or it could be males turning into females
Gender fluidity makes this graph un-inclusive, I’m going to raise this in the High Court (Twitter).
Who can tell?
If it will get me a job, I’m prepared to identify as an iguana…
Hmm, fair point, thanks for pointing it out.
I’ll stick with “They old!” then. Given our own parlous fertility rates, that’s our not-too-distant future right there.
I wonder if the people in hospitals – soon to disappear? – might have an over-abundance of ‘freedom protesters’?
If you take away the hospitals, technically there’s no overflow. Problem solved.
That was what the NHS did during the last year or so. It’s good to think that the Chinese are still learning from us….
And I believe that the teachers are experimenting with this technique for solving the education crisis…
Yes, I suspect they are especially vulnerable to the new virus.
This, my friends, is the ‘benefit’ of the CCP!
It comes as the city reported 1,619 new cases on Tuesday, according to official data, plus around 5,400 preliminary positive infections. This is on top of 2,071 new cases on Monday – the highest daily count since the pandemic began.
Two thousand daily cases a day in a population of 8 million is small compared to rates in other countries, especially the UK.
Good job they are not in the midst of a Hong Kong flu pandemic.
Are we really going to believe anything being reported about HK?
The CCP need a compliant population there how they achieve it will not be publicised.
Indeed, this has a strong feel of those early images of Wuhanese dropping dead in the streets.
Does the style guide at the Telegraph specify punishment of death if the words “omicron variant” are not preceded by “highly contagious” in all copy?
His real name is Stephen Yaxley Lennon you know
and his address is …….
I didn’t get that at first, I must be getting old or still recovering from a good night out in the pub.
– Beowulf (real name Olaf Skullsplitter).
Yeah the point is that, just like the TR stuff, the phrasing around covid is centralized, it is imposed from outside newsrooms. There are NUJ edicts, but it’s likely these reflect “Trusted News Initiative” messaging. None of this is news, it’s brainwashing. MK Ultra.
No, just a fine from their World Health Sponsor ( we know who!)
No videos of people dropping dead in the street? I miss the glory days of February 2020. They’ve become very lazy with the propaganda.
Much easier to use drones
Answer. They both lie. The CCP and the Global Health team at the Telegraph.
Have the ‘Global Health Team’ taken over and fully occupied the Telegraph yet , or are there still pockets of resistance?
I wouldn’t know, as I have cancelled my subscription.
Telegraph is confused. They run comments and articles that have a place on this site. But their Gates funded team sticks to the script.
Use Bypass Paywalls with Firefox and you can get most publications around the world.
It used to be said “Never trust what you read in the newspapers”. Add to that anything which has a CCP source or linked to Gates, or both, and you’re in a land of fantasy or brainwashing; or perhaps both of those, too.
There is clearly a major outbreak of respiratory disease – it’s a virus called ‘masking’.
‘Masking’ will certainly worsen any respiratory disease a person might have!
I expect Pfizer will be working on a “Masker Respiratory Syndrome Vaccine ” to deal with it. ( 6 doses a year)
People with breathing difficulties, ie, serious COVID, are certainly not going to wear them. But patients rolled out to have some fresh air (the Hong Kong idea of fresh air at least — normal humidity there is like the situation immediatley before a thunderstorm in Europe) and sunshine well might.
If they are in hospital because they have breathing difficulties, why are they wearing face coverings, which will simply make it worse? Some of them have masks and face shields.
Helps reduce their oxygen intake and makes them worse…..then they can go on a ‘plan’ as soon as the Midazolam arrives!
Hong Kong is having a number done on it by China. SCMP is reporting this wave could last 5 months according to “medical experts”, so the HKers who can are trying to escape into Shenzhen. Presumably they’re not being told it’s just a cold- a brief Google suggests that confirmed cases are reported as being in hospital. HK remembers the original SARS very well and there is probably a high level of genuine concern, into which has been seeded a great deal of panic. If every positive case is being taken into hospital regardless of severity, that could indicate why the hospitals are struggling.
But also- I lived in China for a bit, and you went to the hospital for everything- if you needed antibiotics, if you needed vitamin C, if you were a bit tired… They don’t have GPs, and hospitals are not just for the seriously ill. They all look like the photos above. I never went to a hospital in HK but I wouldn’t be surprised if they look like those photos most of the time as well. British hospitals typically do, in a flu season.
Wouldn’t escaping from HK to Shenzhen be as difficult as escaping from East Germany to West Germany during the Cold War?
HK’s border with mainland China is sealed shut: in fact one of the main justifications HK has for pursuing a zero-covid policy in the first place is to persuade mainland China that it’s safe to reopen that border!
Global Health Security have a consistent message in their propaganda section of the DT.
Which is “Its not over, panic, get another vaccine shot or we’re all going to die”
Its pretty tedious
The DT is now a disgrace to free and honest investigative journalism – a sad loss, ruined by Globalist ownership and interference and cowardly Editors.
Neither the government of HK nor that of China would ever lie or distort the truth
Do we know which ‘vaccine’ has been given to its population? Is it mRNA? (I’m assuming it is – and this may explain why we’re not seeing the same thing play out in China).
This seem impossible to establish for certain.
It is from:
And definitely not from an injected experimental gene therapeutic that induces spike proteins to attach to ACE-2 receptors causing inflammation and cellular destruction.
It’s winter. It’s a seasonal virus. This doesn’t appear to have registered with world ‘leaders’.
Here are the figures from S Korea. Repressive masking mandates. Unvaxxed not allowed in bars or restaurants. Mandatory quarantine for everyone entering the country. Massive Vax uptake. Guess what? None of it works!
https://en.yna.co.kr/view/AEN20220215002653320
At this time of the years, it’s decidedly T-shirt season in southern China. It may have been a bit like late March in the UK a month ago.
Hong Kong is actually tropical by the astronomical definition (it’s at 22.3 degrees North) even if its climate is a bit shy of tropical because of the strength of the Siberian High Pressure in winter.
My thoughts? Rearrange this anagram into a well known dismissive word. SLOBLOCK.
Hong Kong Hospitals? The New Prisons?
Are the force vaccinating the people ?
What is really going on?
Organ harvesting. You wake up dead.
I think you’ve made an error on Hong Kong’s Covid policy: the quarantine facilities are for contacts of the infected rather than the infected themselves.
Anyone who actually tests positive (regardless of symptoms) is automatically hospitalized, which may explain why they’re overflowing.
Another factor is that Hong Kong’s vaccination rate among the elderly (ie the very people most likely to die from Covid) is pitifully low: perhaps due to a combination of lack of desire to travel and trust in the government’s Zero Covid strategy?
Simple answer to this question: Just as everytime so far, the overflowing hospitals have been wished into existence by COVID propagandists attaching exaggerated claims to a normal situation and context-less photos people who aren’t familiar with the situation in Hong Kong can interpret properly.
As someone who has actually lived in Kwun Tong in the past (within walking distance of Ngau Tau Kok subway station), the first thing I note when seeing these photos is that they have an air of being unusually spacey and relaxed for local conditions. During day time, one will have serious problems finding locations with that few people in them there.
My first thought was that the hospitals must be overflowing with freedom loving folk who’ve had their heads bashed by Hong Kong cops.
Sometimes I’ve wondered if the West ought to do a population exchange with China: the West gets the pro-democracy Hong Kongers, while Hong Kong (which I guess due to its British colonial past would be more able than mainland China to absorb immigrants who don’t speak Chinese) gets Western zero-coviders in exchange.
I’m generally unhappy about the idea of more mad mask lovers coming here and expecting us to integrate into their culture but exporting zero-coviders to Hong Kong for some time could be a good idea. They’d be in for a nasty culture shock upon discovering that Chinese people are not geneticallly lactose-intolerant.
More staged photos ‘leaked’ to ‘the West’ to keep the fear going. An incentive for everyone to take the 4th jab.
Another possibility is that many of them could in fact just get up and go home. How many of these people are panicking on account of having a cold – maybe a nasty cold, but a cold – and think they’re dying? I’ve met a lot of such people here – where it’s known as ‘man flu’. Psychosoma. Some are serious, some are saps.
My son lives in HK and is going about his daily life as usual. There are many people out and about and 98% are wearing masks. Even the babies are westing masks although my son has refused a mask for his child.
No Hong Kongers are allowed to leave the island but this has been the case for many months. It seems to me there is propaganda at work again. My cousin in India was telling me last hear that UK was totally locked down as so many people were dying?????
Lies, lies and damn lies.
Isn’t it a shame Hong Kong will not use ivermectin and other repurposed drugs as early treatment?
Gates funded Global Health Security team? Nothing dodgy there then.
Isn’t it the case that anyone testing positive in HK is required to spend 21 days isolating in hospital, asymptomatic or not?
If so – and I believe it is so – then given that HK hospitals are always 90%+ occupied, it’s hardly surprising that the hospitals are overflowing.It didn’t matter much when “cases”were in the hundreds but it does now as the number has shot up.
The Telegraph’s global health security articles are not to be trusted in any shape or form. They’re basically a branch of the Gates Propaganda Department.
Is it also possible to compare within the vaccines? The Astrazeneca product is of a completely different type to Pfizer so it doesn’t seem quite right to lump them together in the statistics.