To the editor: Whereas I don’t dispute Duncan Hosie’s rivalry that requiring range statements within the College of California school hiring course of can devolve into “ideological litmus exams — bureaucratic hurdles cloaked within the rhetoric of inclusion” and that failure “to repeat the fitting orthodoxies” would possibly imply that “your candidacy was useless on arrival” in some departments, I disagree together with his conclusion that universities are higher off not utilizing them as part of the hiring course of (“Why liberals should celebrate the end of diversity statements at UC,” March 26).
All three segments of public greater schooling on this state — the UC, the California State College and the neighborhood schools — serve a various array of scholars who deliver with them a wide range of life circumstances and experiences. We serve returning college students, dad and mom, veterans, worldwide and first-generation college students, lots of whom work part- or full-time, in addition to economically deprived college students and those that have confronted challenges and difficulties of many varieties.
As I’ve served on quite a few school and administrative searches on the CSU system, campus, school and division ranges, I’ve discovered range statements to be helpful instruments for screening candidates for interviews.
It’s my expertise that administrative and school candidates whose statements are largely performative and which lack perception into the differing wants of the various pupil populations we serve rightly don’t transfer ahead within the course of.
Like every device, range statements in hiring processes can be utilized inappropriately and even abused, however as with all device, we should always deal with utilizing them successfully to additional worthwhile objectives quite than eliminating them totally as a result of they’re misused by some.
John Tarjan, Bakersfield
