Should Sundar Pichai Resign?

Google has a problem. It should have seen that diversity programs had damaged many of America’s universities. It should have known better than to introduce them into the company. It should have, but it didn’t.

This morning David Brooks points out that the situation has been seriously mishandled at the highest corporate levels. The company’s diversity officer, Danielle Brown, denounced the memo for advancing “incorrect assumptions about gender.”

One does not quite see how Brown is qualified to pass judgment on biological research, but clearly she does not care about biology or fact. Brooks points out that her remarks were an instance of “ideology obliterating reason.”

The man most responsible for managing the crisis was CEO Sundar Pichai. And yet, Brooks notes, instead of managing it, Pichai fueled the fire by surrendering to the forces of political correctness. He followed the appalling example of far too many college presidents and administrators.

Brooks calls for Pichai to resign his position. He was facing a difficult management challenge and he failed:

He could have wrestled with the tension between population-level research and individual experience. He could have stood up for the free flow of information. Instead he joined the mob. He fired Damore and wrote, “To suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not O.K.”

That is a blatantly dishonest characterization of the memo. Damore wrote nothing like that about his Google colleagues. Either Pichai is unprepared to understand the research (unlikely), is not capable of handling complex data flows (a bad trait in a C.E.O.) or was simply too afraid to stand up to a mob.

Regardless which weakness applies, this episode suggests he should seek a nonleadership position. We are at a moment when mobs on the left and the right ignore evidence and destroy scapegoats. That’s when we need good leaders most.

Of course, Damore said nothing about biological unsuitability. One suspects, with Brooks, that Pichai was simply too weak to stand up to a mob. It’s a bad sign for one of America’s greatest companies.