Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. Normally, America does not care when a superintendent of public instruction or a school district is fired. Even in a big city like Des Moines, Iowa. But now we do. And why? For a variety of reasons.
Ian Roberts, who is an African American resident alien—we’ll get to that in a minute—from Guyana, was recently fired. And he was fired because of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention order. And they came and arrested him. He fled. This is the superintendent of schools, remember. He fled ICE agents. And they chased him, and he was apprehended, arrested.
It was found out, A, that he is here illegally. He is an illegal alien. He never obtained either citizenship nor legal residence. And he had an existing deportation order out on him, which ICE was trying to finalize when they arrested him. He had a prior weapons charge. And it was also discovered in the investigation to deport him that he is not a doctor of education, as his resume and as the school board thought when they hired him. And more importantly, they can’t figure out exactly how many units in which particular degrees he actually obtained because he’s mentioned five or six different universities of various statuses.
So, it’s kind of a mess.
When he was arrested, he was found with $3,000 in cash. I don’t know when a superintendent of schools carries $3,000 in his wallet. And he also had a loaded Glock gun.
Put all that together, and it’s mystifying that he became a cause celebre. So that when he was detained, and therefore, immediately put on suspension, and he resigned before he was fired, there was a mass protest to retain him.
And the chairman of the school board, Jackie Norris, who’s now a candidate in the Democratic upcoming primaries to replace incumbent Republican Sen. Joni Ernst, tried to use this as a political ploy when she said, you know, this is a—basically, her subtext was: This is a typical ICE overreach. And we, people of Iowa, and especially liberal Des Moines, will not stand for it. So, we need radical—that was a weird word—radical empathy for Dr. Ian Roberts.
Of course, he wasn’t a doctor.
And then, all of what I just told you started to trickle in, and she backed off. And now the school board says: Well, we were deceived. We were deceived. We didn’t know.
They hired a headhunting firm to find him. And apparently, he’d taught at four or five other places, most of which are mum about his record there. But there was plenty of evidence, had anybody wanted to look for, that he never had a doctorate, that he lied about his citizen status, he lied about a prior arrest for a gun violation, and he was, as I said, here illegally.
So, the question then is, why would a sophisticated city and a sophisticated school district hire someone without specifying his citizen status or his degrees? And the answer was: He was a diversity, equity, and inclusion candidate.
He was a charismatic, apparently, they thought, black American. This was mostly a white city. It had a large minority population. They felt it would be a goodwill gesture to hire the first African American—although he was not an African American, he was a citizen of a foreign country. And he was here illegally. But nevertheless, they thought that would be reflecting on their goodwill, their sensitivity, their liberality.
But they didn’t seem to be worried about whether he was qualified because all you have to do—and I’m speaking as someone who has been in academia for 50 years and probably, I don’t know, run 20 searches when an applicant applies for a teaching job or administrative job. And I think I’ve been on three or four administrative searches.
The suspicion is always there. When you see these resumes, you always ask yourself: I have to check the resume. I’ve gotta call the institution and make sure they have a degree. I’ve gotta call the recommender to make sure that he really exists.
They apparently didn’t do many of that at all. And why? We’re getting back to a theme we’ve talked about a lot of times. And that is the dangers of DEI. And what are the dangers? They’re a danger of omission and commission.
Commission means that you do not use meritocratic standards for particular people of a particular gender or sexual persuasion or racial background or religious background. You exempt them in a way that you would not for other people. And therefore, when you exempt them and they know that you’re exempting them, they take advantage of that, as Mr. Roberts did. I can’t say “Dr. Roberts,” he’s not a doctor.
And then there is the sin, always, of DEI of omission. When you hired Dr. Roberts—“Dr.”—you passed over a lot of qualified people who probably did have doctorates, who probably did get legitimate degrees from good universities, who probably did have school districts and universities that would be willing to contact you and vouch for the resident. But you weren’t interested in that.
So, you basically disqualified dozens of people because they didn’t have the right race or they didn’t have the right ethnic background. And they didn’t, therefore, fit your definition of what the school board president, Ms. Norris, who was a former staffer to then-first lady Michelle Obama, called “radical empathy.”
She doesn’t have radical empathy now, once she learned the story and got embarrassed, and sees that it’s going to damage her senatorial prospects. But until the full story came out, this was a Luigi Mangione and Kilmar Abrego Garcia—not in the same magnitude, but it was the same sort of profile.
We suspend all normal meritocratic evaluations because of someone’s ideology, or someone’s superficial appearance, or ethnic or racial background. It’s a very dangerous thing to suspend meritocracy for those reasons.
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