My point is that the opinion of the home department doesn’t matter. It’s the opinion of the hiring department that matters, and who is the most qualified or least qualified can be different from department to department.
The Cornell add was not for “a generic URM professor.” Here is what the actual ad said:
…so there was heightened interest in considering applications from minorities in the fields - OR people who work on topics related to those issues - in an effort to raise the diversity of Cornell’s professoriate and/or the research that they do. That statement isn’t really much different from the boilerplate that many academic ads have (“We are especially interested in applications from women and minorities/diverse candidates/underrepresented minorities/candidates who can teach and mentor a diverse group of students/etc.”) In fact, many non-academic jobs use that language. It doesn’t mean they would absolutely hire one.
The reason why the Cornell faculty (and by extension, others) were upset about the ad wasn’t that line; it was because the Cornell administration mounted a generic search for some generic faculty member in the social sciences or humanities without consulting the faculties of those respective departments right before the holidays. So the faculty members were concerned about whether they would have to review hiring documents during their holidays. They were also upset because Cornell never asked them what they needed or wanted in new faculty - so many feared they would get a tenure line taken away for an 18th century Americanist or a philosopher of gender when what they really needed was someone who specialized in medieval Germanic history or philosophy of science.