Outside of fields like "music, theater and writing", the ones MIT is <i>really</i> serious about, it's only fair to hire the very best.  In those fields, at MIT you don't get tenure unless you are #1 or 2 in your sub-field (sometimes <i>maybe</i> but very rarely #3).<p>"<i>Furthermore, it is clear that the value placed on gaining a diverse faculty is not high.</i>"<p>Damned straight: "the very best in their fields" has nothing to do with a "diverse faculty" as defined in this study.<p>Anyway, we're talking about pretty small numbers here.  MIT has  1,003 faculty members, I don't think any departments are significantly/disproportionately larger than say the "average" (MIT has a strong policy of not letting the facility and graduate program of a department get too large because fields tend to go bust, witness aero/astro in the early '70s, nuclear engineering a little later, and EECS at the beginning of this decade; in the sciences physics has seriously declined and chemistry is smaller than it used to be).<p>So you have to be very careful about drawing conclusions.  See the comment by Jack Olson: for many departments the pool of black scholars <i>is nonexistent</i>.<p>Bottom line of the report, as summarized in this article: MIT <i>may</i> be imperfect in its pursuit of its ideal of meritocracy, and discussion of meritocracy along the axis of "diversity" is discouraged at best.<p>My comment: Too bad, if you want to play the academic game by different rules, the majority of universities and colleges in the US will be <i>delighted</i> to accommodate you.  MIT will <i>never</i> do so.<p>Or as commentator "mb" put it, "There is no such thing as 'black thermodynamics,' 'women's calculus,' [or] 'hispanic quantum mechanics'".