Quotas Suck

I've been active in the City Club of Portland (CCOP) for a few years and just got recommended as a possible member of the Board of Governors. This is the text of my reply to a friend, regarding whether the Club should use quotas as part of any "diversity" effort for either Club membership or Board membership:

I'm actually in favor of both outreach and metrics. I'm sour on quotas in part because they've often been accompanies by lowering criteria (far more minority law students fail law school when admitted under "affirmative action" criteria that include lowering admissions standards), as well as other ways of gaming numerical systems.

I think the way to get (say) more black members is to go find groups of black people and invite their members to join, and do it in a way that makes clear how the CCOP addresses the things they already care about.

Jaime Escalante managed to get a record high number of poor and minority students to pass AP Calculus by starting with elementary school teachers to build a pipeline of students who would be ready for harder math by the time they hit high school. It was an eight year process. (The movie "Stand and Deliver" completely ignores this part of the story.)

There was no lowering of the bar, no "affirmative action" of the quota type. This was real engagement addressing real root causes - my kind of change.

I cringe at the idea of CCOP setting a numeric quota, then looking superficially at the "usual suspects" for dark skin (or whatever attribute we're looking for) and stopping as soon as the number is reached - no true outreach, no true attempt to make CCOP relevant to groups who may currently be detached or alienated from us, no long term attempt to bridge any gaps we find.

Quotas suck.

Having said all that, it may be that CCOP is naturally going to be attractive to (say) rich intellectuals with time on their hands and pretensions of good citizenship. And that group may demographically (around here) be disproportionately white liberals. And if that's the case, we should continue the outreach while accepting something other than numerically precise demographic balance.

I'm very clear on the fact that I'm being proposed for the Board because I'm a wacky libertarian, and there's a quota for wacky libertarians. If there were great riches associated with Board membership, I'd be suitably chastened. Quotas still suck.