Recruiting for EDI roles

Here's an idea.  I suggest that anyone interviewing someone for an EDI role should ask these questions:

What is a cause, issue or injustice that you feel particularly strongly about?

Tell us about it and why you feel so strongly...

Now, I'd like you to put yourself in the shoes of someone who takes the opposite position; someone intelligent and well-intentioned.  What would he or she say?

And anyone who is unable to answer that last question, in a way that would satisfy someone who did indeed take the opposite stance, would be a poor appointment. 

My thinking here is that people who lead on Diversity and Inclusion, should be able to understand and empathise with diverse views, and include people who differ from them in a respectful way. Otherwise, it is not diversity and inclusion, at all; merely the imposition of the current preferred views and beliefs. 

I have blogged previously about some of my reservations about the EDI agenda, so I won't repeat myself here. But I think the principle (and indeed the practice) that I suggest above would be very valuable for organisations wishing to avoid putting ideologues into influential roles.

And as I write this, it occurs to me that this could also apply to teaching roles, whether in Schools or Universities: activist teachers are all well and good (perhaps) but not if their activism means that they can only see - and teach - a simplistic view of complex issues.

I am reminded of the time when a friend and I signed up, at Fresher's Fair, to go out with the Hunt Saboteurs. We successfully disrupted a local hunt, and one of the huntsmen took the time, despite his understandable annoyance, to come and speak to us in an intelligent way. Most of the Sabs weren't prepared to listen to him, but my friend was wise enough to do so. I stayed with him and listened, too.

As we were going home afterwards, I expected him to be dismissive of the huntsman's arguments. But he was not. He was smart enough to realise that he hadn't done his homework. He had assumed he knew what the issues were and where he stood, but in fact had never engaged with the counter-arguments. 

That was a real lesson to me: if one wants to take a stand, one has, I think, an intellectual and a moral obligation to engage sincerely with those who disagree, to understand their arguments and perspectives. Then by all means, take a stand; but to do so without that preliminary step strikes me as rash, to put it mildly.

It is, of course, much easier to assume that those who disagree with me are either mad or bad, and probably both (and that may, of course, be the case...) but the rapid leap to that assumption is one of the things that fuels so much of the division and toxicity that seems to be on the increase - and not least in our Universities.

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With thanks to  Tim Gouw for sharing his photos on Unsplash