In recent months several notable credit union industry conference speakers have suggested that a credit union's board of directors should be as diverse in age, gender and ethnicity as the membership-delivering a backhanded criticism of currently seated boards of directors. Other conference speakers have used the bully pulpit to advocate recruiting Generation Y representatives into credit union board rooms by warning that older board members simply can't understand how to attract this under-30 demographic of online whizzes and social network buffs.

Both of these pronouncements are preposterous. Taken to the extreme, they advocate a credit union board diversity quota system.

While perhaps well-intended, these misguided admonitions fail to recognize that older directors are an asset to the credit union, not a liability. To believe otherwise misses the point. Credit union directors are fiduciary stewards for the overall institution and not merely advocates of only the consumer members who look just like them. The federal and state credit union laws never intended consumer-elected directors to represent specific ages, genders or ethnicities. That is not to suggest that having a diversely composed board of directors cannot be a good thing, but the converse-having an older but wiser board-is by no means a bad thing.