LF: I wonder how much the decreased trust in institutions is due to a DEI related lack of competence?
Gemini: Based on the article “The Lost Generation” by Jacob Savage from Compact Magazine, the text provides significant anecdotal evidence supporting your hypothesis, specifically within the industries of media and elite academia.
While the article focuses primarily on the displacement of white millennial men rather than a broad analysis of public trust, it explicitly argues that institutions deprioritized competence in favor of identity metrics.
Here is how the article supports the connection between DEI and a perceived lack of competence or meritocracy:
1. Explicit Deprioritization of “The Best Person”
The strongest piece of evidence in the article is a quote from a senior hiring editor at a major media outlet. Reflecting on hiring practices post-2020, the editor states:
“It was a given that we weren’t gonna hire the best person… It was jarring how we would talk about excluding white guys.”
The author argues that in many cases, diversity was not just a tie-breaker but the primary driver, leading to situations where qualified candidates were passed over solely due to their demographic profile.
2. Shift in Institutional Focus
The article describes a shift in newsrooms and universities where the focus moved from “holding power to account” or “meritocratic achievement” to obsessive internal monitoring of diversity metrics.
In Media: The author describes a reporter (“Andrew”) who saw his newsroom shift from valuing “scoops” and “credibility” to requiring reporters to catalog the identity characteristics of their sources.
In Academia: The article cites instances where research topics were judged by their adherence to identity politics rather than academic rigor. One graduate student interested in Roman military history was viewed as “hopeless” because the topic was considered “white and European and male and dead.”
3. “Optics” Over Reality
The author contends that institutions prioritized “optics” over actual data. For example, the article notes that by 2019, many newsrooms had already reached gender parity, and women were already well-represented in humanities tenure tracks. However, the “reckoning” of 2020 ignored this baseline to push for even more aggressive exclusionary hiring, suggesting these moves were performative rather than competency-based.
The article suggests that for the specific institutions mentioned (elite media and Ivy League universities), the decline in trust is twofold:
Internal Trust: The “lost generation” of white millennial men lost trust in the institutions because the “meritocracy” they were promised was replaced by what they view as a rigged system.
Institutional Competence: By explicitly admitting that “the best person” was often not hired, the article supports the idea that the quality of output (competence) may have suffered as a direct result of these mandates.
