Santa Claus & the Easter Bunny sent this memo to "clarify" things...

To: English Department Faculty
From: Santa Claus & the Easter Bunny, English Department
Re: Our Resignation from the Hiring Committee

In her email to the department, General George Armstrong Custer announced our resignation from the Hiring Committee for the Position. We feel obliged to explain to the department our abrupt resignation after we had been intensely involved in the initial search and screening process.

We resigned from the hiring committee because a candidate who, in our estimation, is the weakest candidate of the final pool of seven received three first place votes, including a first place vote from a committee member who expressed strong preference for another candidate in a previous meeting. These three committee members have argued that the candidate rates highly because he is a minority (in fact the only minority who applied for the position) and has training in Specialty, even though the candidate is poorly qualified according to the job description.

We, as long time advocates for hiring minority candidates, are opposed to changing the job description to fit one candidate, because we believe it does not serve the best interest of the department or the minority students. We suggested that if hiring a minority candidate supersedes the immediate needs of the department, then the department should revise the job description to one in teaching non-classical Subject in order to attract a larger pool of minority candidates. The suggestion was rejected by the majority of the committee.

It appears that the majority of the committee is more interested in hiring this specific candidate than in hiring a minority candidate. We believe that the committee’s desire to select a minority candidate is actually a clever ruse to hire a candidate who might be an acquaintance or a relative of an acquaintance of a committee member.

We thereby submitted our resignation.