Tuesday, October 20, 2009

'Equal' in Office of Equal Opportunity

I'm sitting on a search committee. The administrative assistant to the Dean of our School sent the following to the Chair of the Search Committee who then wrote to us asking, "Any ideas?"
OEO [Office of Equal Opportunity] has challenged us to include non-white members of the search committees for two other searches. I anticipate that they will do the same for the Technical Editor search. Do you have someone else that you would like to add to the search committee who would help meet this criteria?
I wrote back to the committee and sent a copy to the Dean:
Dear Colleagues:

I'm offended that the Office of Equal Opportunity feels that due to the color of my skin or ethnicity (it's not clear which) I'm unable to render a decision of the same value as someone who does not share my background.

2 comments:

Crucis said...

Good on ya!

You just can't get away from these racists.

Joanna said...

At j-school, they used to pass around cards in ever class where everyone filled out their vital stats. Included was "race". Every class, every time, I checked "other" and wrote in "callipygian." I noticed that a year after I started doing that, they took the race category off the cards. I'm not saying it was my doing ... I'm not saying it wasn't, either. :-)