That's not how DEI looked to me. In the places I've worked, DEI consisted of policies meant to force organizations to hire underqualified applicants so long as they were members of certain demographics, i.e. a variant of affirmative action.
For most professions (not talking about professions with rigorous licensing and training like pilots and doctors), I would argue that the idea of a “qualified” candidate has been taken too far and is used as a construct of social hierarchy.
A DEI program done right will recognize this. For example, someone who isn’t fluent in upper middle class corporate speaking and etiquette may not be considered “qualified” even though they are more than capable of doing the job. This disproportionately affects minority and lower income groups. A good DEI program can train hiring committees to look past issues like that and focus on skills and traits that lead to success in the role.
As a side note, I think it’s clear that affirmative action wasn’t performed fairly at many college institutions, especially competitive ones, but corporate DEI has almost no relation to those programs and how they operate. Corporations have no real functional equivalent to the college application process. Universities are dealing with volumes on a completely different scale with completely different end goals.
The DEI policies I’ve seen were careful to emphasize that diversity should be a factor only when several candidates are otherwise competitive, and the focus should be on reducing interviewer bias towards hiring people like themselves so the company can benefit from a wider range of experience among employees.
For example, HR hands this decree down from on high to hiring managers: "At least X% of your hires need to be women"
If you don't get many women candidates applying (as is the case with certain types of STEM roles), you end up hiring candidates you might otherwise consider unqualified in order to try to make the quota.
From observing the public behavior of the current regime and it's war against DEI, it itself seems to be lazer-focused on hiring unqualified morons whose most important quality is loyalty to the supreme leader. Methinks merit was never the goal, and DEI was just a figleaf to get angry culture warriors to turn out and vote for them.
I used to work for a manager who would blatantly say "I will not hire a white person for this position". Of course, it wasn't an official policy to exclude people based on race. I'm pretty sure that would be illegal? But in practice, some hiring managers would sometimes reject or not even consider candidates of certain races. I've also seen people on hiring panels lower standards explicitly because of "diversity" (but to be fair, only when the candidate was on the fence of hire/no-hire).
Look, the reality is we live in a country where being white makes every aspect of your life a little easier. If you just "let" people hire whoever, they're gonna hire more white people than they should, because they are white. They've done studies on this - even just having a non-white sounding name on your resume slashes your odds of getting hired in half!
The idea that we somehow, at sometime, had an "equal" system is just not true. 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s whenever - these were times by, and for, the white man. No DEI, but actually yes we had extreme DEI, in the opposite direction. Hence why DEI was then created.
And before I hear anything, I'm white. I just have eyeballs and the ability to look around me.
As part of the staff I was included in various hiring processes. And I can assure you I haven't seen even the slightest sliver of someone being hired based purely on DEI without having the qualifications to back it up. In fact most of the times we had to throw out those candidates, because they lacked in one way or another against non-DEI candidates.
Turns out even the most left-leaning people prefer working with competent colleagues, who would have thunk..
I file the whole DEI thing as right wing myths without basis in reality. All we hear is vague stories. You know my dogs aunt knows a guy who said on facebook..
After that, we didn't have a white person to interview for quite awhile. The racial makeup of interviews had changed- quite radically- and the quality of interviewees had gone down quite a bit as well. I'm certain one submitted a fake resume, and possibly a second.
Bear in mind, our team was not entirely white, and we had people working with us from around the world as far away as Pakistan.
Eventually, our manager got her taken out of the loop, and we took back control of hiring, including several (albeit not exclusively) non-white people.
> I work in a european liberal art school
There have been several prominent academia scandals in the US around the DEI space. Some of the studies that triggered a lot of the companies to hop on the bandwagon (and either Air Force or the DoD, I forget which) ended up being full of basic statistical fudging to fit conclusions.