Central Arkansas Library System formalized a four-month timeline two weeks ago to find its next executive director. During that meeting, Miguel Lopez, a banker and former chairman of the Arkansas Ethics Commission who is among the community members serving on the hiring committee, stepped up with the sad but predictable racialized script.
He’d like an emphasis on programming, he said. So far, so good. But then came the kicker: He wants a director who “either has a diverse background or diverse perspectives, and that can make anyone feel included.”
You know this autotuned siren song by now. DEI isn’t dead; it’s just rebranded, as if the United States Supreme Court, the Arkansas Legislature and governor, and basic common sense hadn’t already weighed in against it.
Note Lopez’s ask: diverse background or diverse perspectives. Of course, the former is the pigment and plumbing mandate that I’ve discussed here many times.
What exactly is “diverse perspectives,” though? Is it someone who believes (i.e., knows) that affirmative action is unconstitutional? Someone who understands that biological sex is real? Someone who voted for Donald Trump?
Somehow, those perspectives never seem to count. That’s because the phrase isn’t a commitment to viewpoint diversity at all. It’s a coded assurance that the successful candidate will embrace the “right” (i.e., left) views–an unwavering adherence to the narrow ideological catechism of race-conscious policy preferences, biological-sex denial, and the full DEI lexicon of systemic grievance–even if the candidate, mon Dieu, doesn’t check the preferred demographic boxes himself. And the moment a candidate expresses support for merit-based hiring, he is no longer “diverse.” He is disqualified. Diversity, it turns out, is remarkably homogenous.
But at least Lopez comes to his outlook organically, having once served as the “Hispanic resource officer” at First Community Bank. Who came up with that title–Archie Bunker?
Lopez says he wants to make everyone feel included. Here’s a radical idea that actually works: include them by hiring the best person for the job without regard to race, sex, or other identity checkboxes. And treat patrons as individuals who come to the library for books, knowledge, programming, and quiet refuge–not as avatars of demographic grievance.
That’s not only good policy, it’s the law. Arkansas prohibits any governmental entity from “discriminat[ing] against, or grant[ing] preferential treatment to, an individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin . . . .”
Sadly, the left has spent decades using schools, media, politics, and captured institutions to indoctrinate the public into believing that “diversity” means something nobler than old-fashioned affirmative discrimination. It doesn’t. It functions as a linguistic loyalty oath. To be considered a candidate of a “diverse background” or possessing “inclusive values,” an individual must subscribe wholesale to a specific framework of systemic grievance and identity politics–where dissent is not viewed as a valid counterpoint, but an existential threat to the collective.
Forgive my return to this topic in this column after having had a brief respite, but Lopez’s comments demonstrate that euphemized discrimination resists eradication like a fungus, and efforts to conceal its nature are one of the great hypocrisies of modern times. Take, for example, those academics who insist that their replacement of the pre-Bakke admissions quotas with “holistic review” was anything beyond a transparent shell game.
Holistic review’s score sheet includes such, uh, measurable qualifications as “grit,” which rides along with “lived experience” as wonderfully pliable tools allowing admissions officers to engineer the same racial outcomes as quotas while pretending to evaluate character. The subjectivity isn’t a bug. It’s the feature that makes demographic tailoring possible. No surprise, then, that the outcomes of this alleged comprehensive evaluation method remarkably track the old quota system.
Consider, similarly, the inverted logic of those bemoaning the “implicit bias” of standardized exams painstakingly designed to be neutral. DEI ideologues deride that objectivity, because they won’t abide testing that doesn’t necessarily produce equal results across cohorts. So their solution is always the same: discard the test, massage the scores to create the à priori demanded outcomes, or declare objectivity itself suspect.
Even worse is the central paradox of the modern diversity apparatus: DEI directives champion a kaleidoscope of appearance, but the orthodoxy of thought is non-negotiable. DEI turns neutral public institutions into Red Guard re-education camps (forgive my mixing of communist thuggery for illustrative purposes).
The library should be about literacy, access to ideas, and community enrichment–not an outpost for the latest equity workshop. Patrons don’t check the director’s demographic scorecard before checking out a book. They care whether the shelves are stocked, the programs are substantive, the budget is managed responsibly, and the doors open on time.
Merit doesn’t have a skin color or gender quota. The country has moved past this failed experiment. Corporations have abandoned it. Courts have struck it down. And states are legislating against it, as Arkansas already has. If public institutions like CALS don’t lead by example, they should at least stop lagging behind.
This is your right to know.
Robert Steinbuch, the Arkansas Bar Foundation Professor at the Bowen Law School, is a Fulbright Scholar and author of the treatise “The Arkansas Freedom of Information Act.” His views do not necessarily reflect those of his employer.
