“Culture Fit” as “Anti-Diversity”: Avoiding Human Resources Decisions that Disadvantage the Brightest

have just had a chat with a good friend who recently completed her on-campus interview in a small liberal arts college library. With a brilliant education from one of the top-ranked ALAaccredited schools, a knowledge of multiple languages, international work experience, and a solid publication record, she felt that she had a fair shot at this position. The hiring decision, however, was negative; a formal response claimed the usual—someone else was a better “fit.” When she queried the library website a while later, she discovered that the person hired was a younger man with a fraction of her education and experience who, unlike her, did not belong to a visible or religious minority and was from the geographic area in question. We will never know for sure what this lack of fit exactly meant in this case. It did not seem like a bona fide lack of fit with the actual position requirements or the library’s declared values. Much more likely, it was the proverbial “culture fit” that is so difficult to detect and define but that often serves as a crutch for justifying biased (non)hiring decisions, irrespective of whether bias is overt or implicit/unconscious. In this case, fit could have implicitly referred to so-called surface-level diversity characteristics (e.g., ethnicity, religion, gender, country of origin) or deep-level diversity characteristics (e.g., a worldview and opinions that do not align with the expected and the mainstream; personality traits; a life experience different from that in a well-to-do East Coast state; in professional terms, a different—much more acute—appreciation for the issues of censorship, intellectual freedom, freedom of expression, access, and collegiality in a small interdependent library team). In this case, the culture fit argument has cost this library the great potential, energy, and revitalization usually associated with multiple layers of diversity in a newly hired librarian. The diversity cost was tied into both surfaceand deep-level diversity characteristics. The latter is frequently referred to as values-based diversity.