Harvard deep-sixes DEI statements

In light of the Supreme Court’s ruling against race-based college admissions (which involved Harvard), and the likely illegality of hiring faculty based on race, colleges are beginning to ratchet back on DEI-based admissions and hiring. (Although nobody’s yet taken a college to court for requiring DEI statements, I’m betting that such statements would be banned for constituting compelled speech.)

Now that MIT banned DEI statements for faculty job applications, the other great school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard, has just followed suit. According to the two articles below, Harvard has banned diversity statements.

Previously, these statements were required by many private and public universities (the University of California was a notorious offender), and they nearly all required three components:  a summary of what you did to advance diversity before you applied for the job, a statement of your philosophy of diversity (and it had to be more than simply “I believe all students should be treated equally”) and, finally, a statement of how you’d increase diversity at the institution were you hired.

It’s clear that all of these initiatives meant racial diversity: if you wrote about “viewpoint diversity” or “socioeconomic diversity,” your application would most likely be tossed in the circular file. (This was in fact guaranteed by rubrics in some schools that evaluated candidates for their diversity statements before looking at the rest of their applications, giving numerical marks to the three parts above. If you didn’t exceed a threshold value for your DEI statement, your application was tossed, regardless of your academic merits.)

This story from the NYT report the deep-sixing of diversity statements at Harvard, though I suspect the statements are just going to be disguised, just as race-based admissions will remain, too, but now adopting application questions like, “Describe the challenges you have overcome before applying here.” This gives you every opportunity to mention race.

But I digress. Read the NYT article by clicking on the first headline, and the Harvard Crimson article by clicking on the second.

Here’s the NYT’s reportage, which is indented; my comments are flush left:

Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the university’s largest division, said on Monday that it would no longer require job applicants to submit diversity statements, the latest shift at the university after months of turmoil over its values and the role of equity initiatives in higher education.

Instead, the division will require only finalists for teaching jobs to describe their “efforts to strengthen academic communities” and discuss how they would promote a “learning environment in which students are encouraged to ask questions and share their ideas,” Nina Zipser, the dean for faculty affairs and planning, said in an email to colleagues.

. . . In a statement that echoed Dr. Zipser’s email, Harvard said the “updated approach” would acknowledge “the many ways faculty contribute to strengthening their academic communities, including efforts to increase diversity, inclusion, and belonging.” The university added that the decision amounted to “realigning the hiring process with longstanding criteria for tenured and tenure-track faculty positions.”

To me, the second and third paragraphs imply that this is just a workaround to maintain hiring based largely on race, but using the code words are “strengthening academic communities” including “efforts to increase diversity, inclusion, and belonging.”

One problem with DEI statements is that they purport to equate ethnic diversity with viewpoint diversity, and while that is true to a very limited extent, it also assumes, patronizingly, that different ethnic groups have different viewpoints but that within a group viewpoints are relatively homogenous.  If that were indeed the case, which it isn’t, then maximum viewpoint diversity would require equal (not proportional) number of students or faculty from each ethnic group. If you really wanted viewpoint diversity, you’d use a different set of criteria for both student admission and hiring: criteria based on viewpoints themselves, including ideological stands.

Here’s some pushback from a Harvard professor who apparently holds the false equation of ethnic diversity with viewpoint diversity:

Yet backers of the diversity statements at Harvard and elsewhere have framed them as contemporary methods to promote a range of views, especially after the U.S. Supreme Court decision last year that ended race-conscious admissions.

“Furor over diversity statements in hiring is a red herring,” Edward J. Hall, a philosophy professor, wrote in The Harvard Crimson in April. He urged a redirection of anger toward “its proper target: not diversity statements themselves, but rather horribly distorted view that has taken hold about what they should contain.”

Well, I’m not sure what the “horribly distorted view” is, but the three components of a diversity statement mentioned above have been explicitly specified by several universities that use them.  And if you want to promote a range of views, are statements emphasizing racial diversity the best way? Why not ask people their views on various issues? Of course, if you’re looking for certain views, then you’re treading into the area of compelled speech. And, of course, most faculty, including those evaluating candidates, are liberals, which makes it hard for them to promote political or ideological diversity in the admissions process.

Finally, this statement disappointed me:

Last week, Harvard said that it would curb its statements about topics not “relevant to the core function of the university.” But it stopped short of fully embracing the notion of institutional neutrality, a principle promoted by the University of Chicago in which universities commit to staying out of political and social matters.

As I wrote recently, the Harvard statement on institutional neutrality, which is at this point only a proposal, is problematic in that its creators don’t seem to fully embrace neutrality but may be willing to make pronouncements about the “core function of a university” that really are statements more about politics or ideology. We really need to see Harvard’s final statement, which would have been much improved, I think, had Steve Pinker been put on the committee that wrote it.

Click to read the Crimson’s take:

The Crimson statement is pretty much the same as above, with Hall (now called “Ned” Hall), again defending the old-style statements:

Hall defended diversity statements as a way to understand how job candidates would educate classrooms of diverse students. But he criticized institutions’ expectations that candidates profess their dedication to “equity-based teaching” as a “horribly distorted view” of what such statements should contain.

Again, this distortion isn’t evident to me, and I’d like to know what Hall means when he says “classrooms of diverse students.”

Finally, Harvard waffles a bit again, leaving a little wiggle room for the traditional function of DEI statements:

Although language on DIB statements has been scrubbed from the appointment and promotion handbook, Zipser presented the changes as a way to balance facilitating diversity and inclusion with other priorities.

“This broader perspective acknowledges the many ways faculty contribute to strengthening their academic communities, including efforts to increase diversity, inclusion, and belonging,” she wrote.

(By the way, is there a difference between “inclusion” and “belonging”?)

The last bit of the second sentence is emphasized for a reason: this is the primary goal of the new statements, but Harvard can’t say it explicitly.  Now I may be being cynical here, and I hope so, but the admission of colleges that they’ll find workarounds for the Supreme Court;s decision makes me think that they’ll find related workarounds for faculty DEI statements.