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It’s Time to Mandate Merit
James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal ^ | January 2, 2026 | David Randall

Posted on 01/08/2026 3:47:50 AM PST by karpov

In an August City Journal piece, my former colleague John Sailer wonderfully quoted an anonymous professor: “Every day, the universities wake up and break the law.” Just about every faculty-hiring process in America’s colleges and universities discriminates—sometimes barely legally, when it’s just political discrimination to ensure that only radical professors get hired. The education-establishment discriminators do that by drafting job advertisements with specializations that ensure only radicals need apply: a preference for environmental history, human rights, and/or social movements when they’re subtle, a specialization in genderqueer Palestinian sociology with a concentration on community engagement in Dubuque when they’re not.

Political discrimination as often as not is camouflage for breaking civil-rights law and straightforwardly discriminating by race and sex. The search for X Studies is meant outright to select a member of X group to get the teaching job—and to make sure that white men (above all) don’t get hired. National Association of Scholars (NAS) researchers FOIAed the hiring-committee professors’ emails, and they said outright what they were doing. Colleges and universities systematically discriminate, systematically undermine the principles of individual merit and freedom of inquiry, and break anti-discrimination laws whenever they can get away with it.

Everybody knows what’s happening—but lawsuits mostly founder because the hiring process is a “black box” and plaintiffs can’t get conclusive proof of discrimination. The trick is to get information out there that makes it impossible for the education establishment to keep pretending to the public that they don’t discriminate. We need a Pinocchio Act. Or, close enough, NAS’s new model Faculty Merit Act.

The Faculty Merit Act requires state universities to publish every higher-education standardized test score (SAT, ACT, CRT, GRE, LSAT, MCAT, etc.) of every faculty member, as well as the standardized test score of every applicant for the faculty member’s position

(Excerpt) Read more at jamesgmartin.center ...


TOPICS: Education
KEYWORDS: academia; college
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Reducing sex and race discrimination in faculty hiring is important, but SAT scores of faculty applicants are not how I would evaluate merit. Teaching evaluations, publication records, and grants received are more relevant. Most important is to get rid of ideological "studies" departments.
1 posted on 01/08/2026 3:47:50 AM PST by karpov
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To: karpov

At the undergraduate level get rid of all of the “woke” studies and go back to the core liberal arts curriculum.


2 posted on 01/08/2026 4:24:10 AM PST by Petrosius
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To: Petrosius

Eliminate anything with “queer” in the title. That’s a start


3 posted on 01/08/2026 4:44:22 AM PST by MarlonRando
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To: karpov

Shouldn’t a mandated merit system have qualified judges of merit? I wouldn’t want to have some Indian recruiter guy named “Chuck” and his boss by the name of “Steve” to be judging the merits of my resume’.


4 posted on 01/08/2026 4:58:59 AM PST by equaviator (Nobody's perfect. That's why they put pencils on erasers!)
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To: karpov

The lefties in academia are cunning enough to evade most “big picture” laws and rules regarding hiring. The only real way to fix this is to have more conservatives on Boards of Trustees, etc., and that has to filter down through who is hired as deans, etc. Those are the people who can monitor and manage this stuff on a daily basis to stamp out leftism in hiring practices.


5 posted on 01/08/2026 6:05:51 AM PST by Bruce Campbells Chin
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To: karpov
a specialization in genderqueer Palestinian sociology with a concentration on community engagement in Dubuque

To whom those of us in the real world reply "No thanks - I don't want fries with that."

6 posted on 01/08/2026 11:49:41 AM PST by MikelTackNailer (No sense of humor indicates damaged or malformed personality.)
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