You're right of course that credentialism is what's moving between the two pieces, and it's right to say that just wanting people with common sense, good judgment and generalist knowledge is very close to the way that old-boy networks understood themselves to operate--"our kind of man", "a good fit", and all that.
The problem with credentialism and its accompanying formalisms is in a sense the same problem with any attempt to use formal regulatory power to change (or outright ban) culture rather than, well, changing culture via getting people to think differently, not because they've been ordered to but because they've been convinced somehow to think differently. Nobody's heart or mind was ever changed by a two-hour DEI self-guided training course that is primarily aimed at protecting an institution from legal liability, and when formalisms and credentialism lead to bypassing a plainly excellent person in favor of someone who has the degree but not the capacity, it undercuts the entire transformative project. The ideological insistence by some DEI advocates that this by definition *never happens* is just wrong.
Moreover, this shift is yet another of the many changes that no one ever bothers to imagine in terms of trade-offs. Even if credentialism and formalization prevent insidious kinds of favoritism, they also impose high costs on job-seekers that knock many potentially excellent people who can't afford the pursuit of the credential, they lead to administrative bloat (because now suddenly you've defined jobs so that no one is carrying three or four different portfolios or responsibilities in a generalist way), they impede the institution's responsiveness to changing circumstances, and they intensify hierarchy.
Looking for jack-of-all-trades generalists who can adapt to changing conditions and matching them to the kinds of jobs that require that sort of mindset doesn't *have* to be old-boyism; old-boyism is a subset of the larger set of that approach. I'm really convinced there are ways to welcome people with implicit or unexplored talents and perspectives into institutional work and train them into the jobs rather than privilege people with intensely specialized degrees which do not intensify older kinds of elitism but are in fact better at recruiting diversity and accomplishing inclusion.
You're right of course that credentialism is what's moving between the two pieces, and it's right to say that just wanting people with common sense, good judgment and generalist knowledge is very close to the way that old-boy networks understood themselves to operate--"our kind of man", "a good fit", and all that.
The problem with credentialism and its accompanying formalisms is in a sense the same problem with any attempt to use formal regulatory power to change (or outright ban) culture rather than, well, changing culture via getting people to think differently, not because they've been ordered to but because they've been convinced somehow to think differently. Nobody's heart or mind was ever changed by a two-hour DEI self-guided training course that is primarily aimed at protecting an institution from legal liability, and when formalisms and credentialism lead to bypassing a plainly excellent person in favor of someone who has the degree but not the capacity, it undercuts the entire transformative project. The ideological insistence by some DEI advocates that this by definition *never happens* is just wrong.
Moreover, this shift is yet another of the many changes that no one ever bothers to imagine in terms of trade-offs. Even if credentialism and formalization prevent insidious kinds of favoritism, they also impose high costs on job-seekers that knock many potentially excellent people who can't afford the pursuit of the credential, they lead to administrative bloat (because now suddenly you've defined jobs so that no one is carrying three or four different portfolios or responsibilities in a generalist way), they impede the institution's responsiveness to changing circumstances, and they intensify hierarchy.
Looking for jack-of-all-trades generalists who can adapt to changing conditions and matching them to the kinds of jobs that require that sort of mindset doesn't *have* to be old-boyism; old-boyism is a subset of the larger set of that approach. I'm really convinced there are ways to welcome people with implicit or unexplored talents and perspectives into institutional work and train them into the jobs rather than privilege people with intensely specialized degrees which do not intensify older kinds of elitism but are in fact better at recruiting diversity and accomplishing inclusion.