While I'm sympathetic to the authors' inclination to attack these problems from the bottom-up, behavioral side, we need to recognize that the government has put its thumb on the scale in a way that can't be easily circumvented.
As I understand it, current civil-rights law often puts the burden on the employer to prove that it 𝘩𝘢𝘴𝘯'𝘵 …
While I'm sympathetic to the authors' inclination to attack these problems from the bottom-up, behavioral side, we need to recognize that the government has put its thumb on the scale in a way that can't be easily circumvented.
As I understand it, current civil-rights law often puts the burden on the employer to prove that it 𝘩𝘢𝘴𝘯'𝘵 created an unsafe or discriminatory work environment for members of a protected class. That's a big deal and can scare the Dickens out of upper management. Thus, when the employees of the 'Times complain that their black colleagues have been made "unsafe" by the decision to publish Senator Cotton, it's a complaint with teeth to it.
Beyond that, while it's easy to imagine the advantages of a workforce that's diverse in its attitudes, knowledge and cultures, the advantages to diversity along protected-class axes are, as far as I know, speculative. Yet it's the latter that is practically mandated by law, in that a lack of that kind of diversity can be taken as prima-facie evidence of illegal discrimination.
To be clear: I share the authors' opposition to Mr. Ramaswamy’s top-down enforcement of viewpoint diversity, but whatever course we take to deal with this problem should recognize the structural problem created by the civil-rights legal regime.
While I'm sympathetic to the authors' inclination to attack these problems from the bottom-up, behavioral side, we need to recognize that the government has put its thumb on the scale in a way that can't be easily circumvented.
As I understand it, current civil-rights law often puts the burden on the employer to prove that it 𝘩𝘢𝘴𝘯'𝘵 created an unsafe or discriminatory work environment for members of a protected class. That's a big deal and can scare the Dickens out of upper management. Thus, when the employees of the 'Times complain that their black colleagues have been made "unsafe" by the decision to publish Senator Cotton, it's a complaint with teeth to it.
Beyond that, while it's easy to imagine the advantages of a workforce that's diverse in its attitudes, knowledge and cultures, the advantages to diversity along protected-class axes are, as far as I know, speculative. Yet it's the latter that is practically mandated by law, in that a lack of that kind of diversity can be taken as prima-facie evidence of illegal discrimination.
To be clear: I share the authors' opposition to Mr. Ramaswamy’s top-down enforcement of viewpoint diversity, but whatever course we take to deal with this problem should recognize the structural problem created by the civil-rights legal regime.