Amy Gutmann’s master plan. (http://media.stanfordhospital.com)

I doubt the DP’s “staff editorial” would ever list itself in the end of semester “Cheers & Jeers” compendium as a member of the latter category, but it certainly deserves it when it publishes a farce like yesterday’s editorial bemoaning that the five faculty chosen thus far for the University’s Penn Integrates Knowledge initiative have all been men.

Le sigh. Where to begin?

let’s start with assertion that 5 PIK professors + 5 Y chromosomes = patriarchal male oppression. This just doesn’t fly. Even as someone who struggled to eke out a B- in STAT-111, I can say with confidence that 5 is usually not considered a statistically significant number with which to make any sort of guesses. The DP staff editorial is jumping to conclusions with insufficient evidence. It is the statistical equivalent of Nigerian yellowcake (I wonder, if I say “DP lied, thousands died!” does the DP then sue itself for libel?)

No, what it means is that Penn is using their scarce resources to get the maximum benefit in innovative research and teaching, regardless of their gender. If anyone wants to tell Penn’s donors that the school should hire less qualified people because satisfying already well-satisfied feelings of gender equality, I’d love to watch you try, and then laugh at you for being stupid. “Satisfies feminist non-issues” is not a category measured in the US News Rankings. Quality of faculty, on the other hand, is.

Perhaps when Penn has money coming out of its ears (like Princeton), we can afford to buy $2400 designer chairs hire faculty that spend more time making rap CDs than doing research but make us feel good for being diverse (like Princeton).

This is all much ado about nothing. Even the editorial admits in its opening line “it’s safe to say that Penn actively supports gender equity in academia.” So why do they then spend the rest of the article seeming to argue to the contrary? I can think of dozens of University shortcomings more worthy of the staff’s attention than this.

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