Why Hire ANY Harvard Grads?

[Bill] Ackman, the CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management, tweeted he has been approached by “a number of CEOs” asking for the names of the student organizations to ensure “none of us inadvertently hire any of their members,” arguing students “should not be able to hide behind a corporate shield when issuing statements supporting the actions of terrorists.” -- Forbes, Oct 11, 2023

Watching cancel culture coming after some of its most enthusiastic practitioners is fun, I admit. The question I have is why it takes something this expressly egregious to make American employers realize that elite schools produce fewer and fewer grads worth hiring.

The quality has dropped. Admission standards and grading policies mean that a degree from Harvard or Stanford no longer carries what was once a virtual guarantee of intelligence, general knowledge, and well-honed reasoning, writing, and problem-solving skills.

Worse, the graduate has been trained to discover and promote grievances. Fellow employees who are not au courant on the politics of pronouns, permissible speech, sartorial cultural appropriation, etc., will likely “trigger” the new hire, which will compel tiresome HR interventions and even create litigation or PR risks.

Worse still, not just fellow workers but customers and clients from the off-campus world of actual diversity are likely full or contemptible beliefs and habits. One has to wonder whether the new elite-school hire can constrain the contempt that he/she/they/xyz/it has/have been trained to display.

American employers are going to have to develop new ways to identify quality. A college degree, even from an elite school, is no longer of much use as a screening tool except perhaps as a red flag.

As an aside, my compulsively productive, refuses-to-retire, hard-working Filipina sister-in-law took a job at a specialty foods store and characteristically became indispensable. She was the subject of a complaint by a new co-worker for referring to that person as “her” rather than the preferred “they.” The manager tried to explain the pronoun issue but not being even remotely woke she kept asking who the other person was in the “they.” (How I wish the conversation had been recorded!) Finally, the manager told the complainant to try to live with the indignity because if he had to choose, he was keeping the one who was 350% more productive than the other. That man is a Solomon-like model for employers everywhere.