Colleges and universities are often looking for applicants in various demographic groups in the quest for “diversity.”

However, those who have serve in the American military are not really seeing benefits in this diversity approach.  The College Fix has the details of one veteran’s experience with campus hiring practices.

It’s amazing that a man’s 22 years serving in the U.S. military can actually be deemed a black mark as he seeks a new job, but that’s exactly what’s taking place right now at the University of Missouri.

Retired Army Colonel Larry James is hoping to land a job as division director in the school’s College of Education, and he’s one of two finalists. But the outlook looks bleak as anti-war and Muslim student groups on campus have hosted a series of protests to make sure he does not get hired.

At issue is “the 16 months he spent during two stints overseeing interrogations at the U.S. military detention center at Guantanamo Bay,” reports the Dayton Daily News.

James, a retired military psychologist, defended his service at a recent community forum, the paper reports:

As he has in the past, including in the 2008 memoir ‘Fixing Hell,’ James told the crowd he went to Guantanamo, as well as the Abu Ghraib detention center in Iraq in 2004, to clean up what James referred to not as abuse but “some diabolical things” at both prisons. In the sexual humiliation incident, James said he disrupted the interrogation after a 5-minute coffee break.

“I was sent to Guantanamo not to aid these CIA operatives, but to teach these young men and women, how do you sit down and interview someone without any abusive practices whatsoever,” he said. “That’s what my mission was.”

Other audience members, including members of the university’s Muslim Student Organization, asked James about his characterization in his book of the International Committee of the Red Cross as “a bunch of radical left do-gooders” who consider military detainees “completely innocent, and only needed to be hugged more.”

The University of Missouri’s student newspaper has also covered the controversy, noting “James currently serves as the Dean of the School of Professional Psychology at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, a position he’s held for five years. He was awarded a Bronze Star and the Defense Superior Service Medal during his 22-year service in the military. So far, James has not been sanctioned for any professional or ethical misconduct by any state or court of appeals court, or any licensing board.”

Yet, one could see where Col. James might not fully fit in with the school’s vision, as it offers such weighty classes as “Sibling Incest in Theory and Literature”.