In my opinion, employers shouldn't be blind to private beliefs or race or gender or any of the other protected classifications. If you are looking for an EE professor in a U.S. university department with 17 white men and you have 4 candidates of approximately equal desirability, I would highly recommend hiring the one which is black or a woman, or even better, both. This purely reflects my desire to market the department to potential students, I would expect a broader pool of interested qualified students.
Protecting most categories is at best an inelegant solution to pervasive discrimination. As the pervasiveness of discrimination goes away, it would be nice to see these laws go away as well.
As far as the idiot who wrote that email, if I were the Dean or the Department Head I would charge him $125,000 for insubordination or stupidity, whichever he chooses to attribute his decision to write that stuff in email. Of course I wouldn't do it directly and wouldn't write down that it was coming down that way. But I would get my pound of flesh, and the next time he committed something to email or paper which risked costing the university money, I would fire him, or if he was tenured, put him in charge of the toilet cleaning committee and assign him to teach freshman computing for non-majors.
In my opinion, employers shouldn't be blind to private beliefs or race or gender or any of the other protected classifications.
Disagree.
They ideally should be blind, however I don't think rigid qutas or equating inequality of outcome with inequality of opportunity is helping anyone.
In my estimation the best solution currently available to us is to keep government completely blind on ethnicity or even give preference to some groups while letting the private sector complete freedom to choose in this regard and let the market handle it.
http://www.boingboing.net/2011/01/24/should-employers-be.html