Category: DEI matters

The AAUP goes all in for DEI

October 9, 2024 • 12:00 pm

You know what DEI is, and in case you don’t know AAUP, it’s the American Association of University Professors, the most powerful association of faculty in the country. After dropping their longstanding opposition to academic boycotts, presumably so schools and people could boycott Israel at will, they’ve now pulled another woke-ish and academically harmful move: they’ve issued a statement called “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Criteria for Faculty Evaluation” (pdf here).  It’s more or less what you think: a statement that diversity, equity, and inclusion should be an important basis for hiring and promoting faculty. Some excerpts:

The Association’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure views the use of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) criteria in faculty recruitment, promotion, and retention within this broader vision of higher education for the public good. Since the 1990s, many universities and colleges have instituted policies that use DEI criteria in faculty evaluation for appointment, reappointment, tenure, and promotion, including the use of statements that invite or require faculty members to address their skills, competencies, and achievements regarding DEI in teaching, research, and service. Such criteria are one instrument among many that may contribute to evaluating the full range of faculty skills and achievements within a diverse community of students and scholars.

Some critics contend that such policies run afoul of the principles of academic freedom. Specifically, they have characterized DEI statements as “ideological screening tools” and “political litmus tests.” From this perspective, DEI statements are sometimes thought to constitute unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination and a threat to faculty members’ academic freedom because they allegedly require candidates to adopt or act upon a set of moral and political views. This committee rejects the notion that the use of DEI criteria for faculty evaluation is categorically incompatible with academic freedom. To the contrary, when implemented appropriately in accordance with sound standards of faculty governance, DEI criteria—including DEI statements—can be a valuable component in the efforts to recruit, hire, and retain a diverse faculty with a breadth of skills needed for excellence in teaching, research, and service.

But objections to DEI by myself and others aren’t based on whether it impinges on “academic freedom”—the freedom of faculty already hired to work on or teach pretty much what they want without interference. Or, as Wikipedia puts it:

Academic freedom is the right of a teacher to instruct and the right of a student to learn in an academic setting unhampered by outside interference. It may also include the right of academics to engage in social and political criticism.

DEI, in contrast, at least as the AAUP construes it, is a program to hire people with the aim of achieving equity (equal representation of all groups).  DEI programs in place aren’t much concerned with viewpoint equity, despite what the statement says, but rather with the AAUP’s undescribed elephant in the room: ethnicity (race) and sex.  When they speak of a “diverse faculty,” they mean racially diverse, not diverse in viewpoint. (One could argue that viewpoint diversity is the most important thing to emphasize, but I’ll leave that aside.) And DEI is certainly an “ideological litmus test”. What else do you think required or invited DEI statements are when used for hiring or promotion? If you don’t write something in line with the progressive view of DEI, you will sleep with the academic fishes.  We know this from seeing how those statements are actually used in academia.

Ergo, DEI initiatives are indeed a political litmus test, requiring fealty to the view that characteristics like ethnic background or sex can outweigh merit in hiring, promotion, or tenure.  Of course nobody wants bigotry in these processes, but it’s strongly disputed about whether one should preferentially hire people to increase the diversity of race or sex. Indeed, the Supreme Court has just outlawed race-based admissions to college, and if that is illegal, so will be race- (or sex-) based and promotion.

If DEI programs were just there to ensure that there was no bigotry that held people back in universities, that would be fine. But it’s not: it’s a program that puts background above merit, is based on dubious premises like “implicit bias,” and is divisive, setting up a hierarchy of people based on their immutable characteristics. And, by placing merit lower than background, it leads to the decline of academic standards (see here for more arguments). In general, DEI programs haven’t worked, and are being dismantled throughout America.

The AAUP keeps issuing these weaselly statements that give their imprimatur to things they won’t say explicitly: it’s okay to boycott Israel, and we should have hiring in which race and sex can outweigh merit.

As one sign of how DEI is ruled out in my school for hiring and promotion, we have the Shils Report, whose summary is this:

On 15 July 1970, the Committee on the Criteria of Academic Appointment was appointed by President Edward H. Levi. This Committee was charged with writing a report that would become the basis for evaluating faculty up for promotion. The Shils report dictates that faculty at the University of Chicago must display distinguished performance in each of the following criteria when being considered for promotion:
  • Research
  • Teaching and Training, including the supervision of graduate students
  • Contribution to intellectual community
  • Service
This Committee understood that unless such high standards existed and were used, the University would – indeed – become a pantheon for dead or dying gods incapable of attracting the best minds from around the world.

There is nothing in here about viewpoint diversity, much less equity and the use of sex and ethnicity as criteria for promotion (these same criteria apply to hiring).

The reason for the AAUP’s new statement may be seen in the its insistence that one of the reasons for issuing it is to counteract Republican legislation (they don’t say that explicitly, of course):

Debates about the appropriateness of DEI criteria cannot be understood in isolation from the current political context of higher education in the United States. Wholesale opposition to the use of DEI statements has often gone hand in hand with partisan legislative and other efforts to restrict or ban certain subjects of research and teaching—especially in fields and disciplines that expressly address histories of inequity.5 A recent AAUP joint report with the AFT analyzes more than ninety-nine bills representing direct political interference in higher education that have been introduced in more than thirty state legislatures. The report notes four trends: (1) limiting teaching about race, gender, and sexuality (so-called divisive concepts bills); (2) requiring intellectual and viewpoint diversity statements and surveys; (3) cutting funding for diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts; and (4) eliminating tenure for faculty members.6 Thus, attacks on DEI have played an integral part in the partisan political playbook to turn back the clock on advances that have been made toward the goal of diversity in the faculty, student body, and areas of study. Furthermore, it is crucial to consider how such attacks can easily reinforce and indeed fuel portrayals of entire fields and disciplines—including ethnic studies, critical race theory, and gender studies—as “political” and “ideological” projects and not serious subjects or research disciplines. When entire fields and subjects related to the study of race and gender, for example, are not considered “intellectual” pursuits, both academic freedom and DEI as social and institutional values are compromised, and the charge of orthodoxy gains purchase. This not only affects the fields and subjects traditionally tarred as ideological but also compromises the progress of knowledge by thwarting interdisciplinary exchange and endangering the very mission of higher education.

But forget about politics. The authors of this statement, probably comprising social scientists and people in the humanities, don’t seem to realize that yes, entire fields of study (the “studies” areas) have indeed been compromised and made into vehicles to push progressive propaganda on students. If you think that a department of race, diaspora, and indigeneity won’t be teaching students what ideological views are acceptable, I have some land in Florida to sell you.

The AAUP statement is “progressive,” but it’s too late. DEI is already crumbling, both in academia and the corporate world.

Severe DEI cuts at the University of North Carolina

September 13, 2024 • 11:30 am

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) is on a roll to clean up its act and promulgate freedom of speech and divisive DEI actions. I’ve written before about how UNC-CH adopted institutional neutrality, making it one of seven schools that have done so. Now, according to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE), the entire UNC system is dismantling its DEI apparatus. Remember, the CHE isn’t a right-wing site, but the most respected source of reportage about developments in higher education.  Click headline to read:

The reporter, Jasper Smith, seems to concentrate on issues of colleges and race.

An excerpt:

In a report released on Wednesday, campuses in the University of North Carolina system outlined how they’ve complied with a directive to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts — such as eliminating staff positions, altering or ending programs, and cutting spending.

Across the system, institutions eliminated 59 jobs and restructured 132 positions. The DEI-related cuts added up to more than $17 million, a majority of which was redirected to “student success” initiatives, according to university officials.

At a time when colleges across the country have been dismantling diversity programs in response to political pressure, the UNC report offers a particularly comprehensive look at how a wide-ranging group of institutions approached the purging of DEI.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the state’s flagship, accounted for the biggest changes: It axed 20 staff positions, reassigned 27 positions, and redirected more than $5 million away from DEI efforts.

The Chapel Hill campus eliminated seven positions in central administration, including the vice provost for equity and inclusion and chief diversity officer. Reassignments include the senior associate dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion, who in a new role will focus on “professional and leadership development” for students and faculty.

First, why is this something to celebrate?  While the origin of DEI (“Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion”) may be well intentioned—to give a hand to underperforming minority students—the way it’s worked out has been counterproductive. And not just that—it’s divisive as well. Here are some of its problems (h/t Luana):

a.) DEI initiatives are universally associated with a particular ideology, one derived largely from postmodernism. It sees society as a clash between competing worldviews (in this case, among different ethnic groups or among the sexes), with the most powerful people getting to promulgate their worldview. In that sense it’s divisive, as it sets up a hierarchy of privilege that has led to things like increased anti-semitism in particular and the chilling of speech in general.

b.) DEI instills those lower on the “power” hierarchy with a sense of victimhood, which in some (but not all) cases leads to a sense of futility among those deemed “minoritized”. Why strive to improve if society is holding you down you from the outset?

c.) It has largely replaced merit as a criterion for success with ethnicity, race, or gender. This has largely reduced the quality of education in various fields. It’s because of this that most of the elite schools that initially got rid of standardized testing have now reinstated it.

d.) The initiatives almost uniformly state that their goal is “equity” (equal representation) rather than “equality of opportunity.” These are not the same thing, and leads to the notion that inequities are not the result of anything besides systemic racism and ubiquitous bigotry. This in turn buttresses the view that society is totally and inseparably wedded to racism. I know that, at least in academia, this is not true; but DEI pushes its false narrative that it is.

At any rate, What’s important for the UNC system is that positions aren’t just being “restructured” (a euphemism under which the system continues but with jobs given different names). but eliminated.  Maybe there should be a small group of “DEI” people in charge of investigating claims about bias, but, as you know, the whole system has become bloated. (The University of Michigan, for example, has over 240 DEI jobs that costs the system over $30 million a year.)

This is, of course, blamed on the Republicans, and, indeed, it’s mostly the GOP that has pushed these changes, but I can’t say it’s all to the bad:

The changes in the UNC system come as Republican lawmakers, conservative activists, and others continue to push a national anti-DEI movement. Since 2023, 86 anti-DEI bills have been introduced, and 14 have been signed into law, according to The Chronicle’s DEI Legislation Tracker.

The Chronicle has also tallied more than 200 campuses in 30 states that have eliminated or altered diversity offices or programs.

Last year, North Carolina’s Republican-controlled legislature banned the use of diversity statements and mandatory DEI training, overriding a veto from the state’s Democratic governor, Roy Cooper. The legislation went into effect in December of 2023.

In May of this year, the UNC system’s Board of Governors voted to replace a policy that had mandated certain diversity-related activities on each campus. The system’s new policy emphasized a commitment to nondiscrimination and “institutional neutrality.”

Of course one likely result is that minority representation will fall, especially since the Supreme Court banned race-based admissions. Now I don’t think there’s equality of opportunity of any means, and that is one reason for inequities. But to me the solution is not to substantially lower the admissions bar to create equity for minorities, but to increase equality of opportunity, which must be done by starting with kids at a very young age. We all know how hard that will be, requiring a substantial investment of effort and money (throwing money at schools doesn’t seem to work).  And I still believe in a form of affirmative action, one that nevertheless may be illegal under the Supreme Court ruling. In muy view, if two students are pretty much equally qualified, go for the minority student.  But that may be “race-based” admissions, and may be prohibited by the Court’s decision.

Regardless, we simply don’t need the DEI bloat that is causing more problems on campus than it solves.

Simon Fraser University (sort of) adopts a policy of institutional neutrality, making five North American colleges to do so

September 10, 2024 • 10:00 am

As I’ve said many times, while over 100 American colleges and Universities have adopted a version of the University of Chicago’s policy of free speech, only a handful have adopted our complementary policy of institutional neutrality (“The Kalven Report”). That policy mandates that our University, its departments, and other “official” units, are forbidden from making statements espousing a specific ideology or taking moral or political stand—except when making such a statement directly supports the university’s mission of teaching, learning, and research. Institutional neutrality—which in our school also involves investment decisions—is designed to buttress freedom of expression: nobody feels that they would be punished if they went against some “official” political statement.

As I wrote in an earlier post announcing that Columbia University also has professed this policy (I’ll believe it when I see it there):

The only universities that have adopted Kalven-esque principles, besides us, number two: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Vanderbilt University. (Vanderbilt’s Chancellor, Daniel Diermeier, is a free-speech advocate who was Provost here before he moved south.)  Some professors at Northwestern University have urged adoption of institutional neutrality, but so far little seems to have happened.

(See Diermeier’s WSJ critique of Harvard’s lame attempt at institutional neutrality.)

So, including Chicago, we had four schools adopting a policy that should be universal.  But if you count Simon Fraser University near Vancouver, B.C. as “American” (well, it’s North American), now we have five.  Read the announcement from Simon Fraser’s President by clicking on the screenshot below.

A transcript (I’ve bolded the important stuff except for the title and subtitle, but some of the bolded stuff is troubling, at least to me):

Message from the President: the Role of Universities in Troubled Times

September 09, 2024

As president of SFU, I am often asked by students, faculty and staff to take a stance on partisan political matters and current events. These requests have increased greatly in the past year, during which this topic has been at the forefront of discussion on university campuses around the world. I want to share some thoughts on why I have come to the view that it is important for university administration not to take public positions on such matters.

Universities are comprised of thousands of students, faculty and staff who all hold unique opinions and views, informed by their scholarly work and lived experiences. I believe that universities need to be a place where people can freely engage in academic inquiry, share ideas, learn from each other, disagree constructively and peacefully protest. And I believe that my role as university president is to help facilitate an environment where people can have robust conversations, including on controversial topics.

In the past, I have made statements related to world events in an attempt to be responsive to issues our community is concerned with. However, I have come to understand that taking a public position on behalf of the university can have a chilling effect on the vigorous discussion and debate of students, faculty and staff. While these statements were intended to provide comfort to and express solidarity with members of the university community, their potential impact on open discussion runs contrary to the university’s purpose. I also recognize that there are many local, global and personal issues affecting community members at any given time, and issuing statements on some topics but not others can further contribute to feelings of exclusion.

If SFU is truly to be a place where people feel comfortable sharing their ideas and participating in meaningful dialogue, the university must be non-sectarian and non-political in principle. In order to facilitate this, I believe that the institution—and senior leadership as representatives of the institution—must refrain from taking public positions on topics unrelated to the business of the university, including partisan matters and world events.

Living by Our Values

Academic freedom, as enshrined in our collective agreements and underscored in What’s Next: The SFU Strategy, creates the conditions for scholars to freely examine, question, teach and learn within their area of study, provided that these actions are based on an honest search for knowledge. To truly live by our core values of academic freedom and critical thinking, we need to hold space for difficult and controversial conversations to take place responsibly and respectfully, as well as defending and protecting the human right to express views within the bounds of the law.

As outlined in What’s Next, we are also committed to embedding the values of equity and belonging in every decision and action. We have a collective responsibility to create a culture of inclusive excellence where all feel welcome, safe, accepted and appreciated. Taken together, academic freedom and inclusive excellence support each other and work together to create a vibrant academic community where everyone feels a sense of belonging.

One of the foundational practices of university life is to be exposed to different points of view, broaden our perspectives and have our beliefs and ideas challenged. This may be uncomfortable, but it is also an important part of being an engaged citizen. As we take on this work, it is important to remember that students, staff and faculty are accountable to SFU’s policies and codes of conduct. If violations of established codes of conduct, university policies or laws occur, we will follow the appropriate processes and procedures to address them.

In a time of increased polarization, we must preserve the vibrancy of our academic community while ensuring that difficult conversations are grounded in care and respect for each other. This is a challenging task, but I believe it is one we can accomplish, together. I want to assure you that senior leaders are committed to doing our part by promoting—not shutting down—healthy dialogue at SFU.

Joy Johnson
Pronouns: she, her, hers
President & Vice-Chancellor
Simon Fraser University

Now the “pronoun statement at the bottom undermines this statement just a tad, but on the whole Dr. Johnson (a researcher in “gender and health”) seems to understand the issues at play. But there is one bit of her message that seriously undermines her statement:

As outlined in What’s Next, we are also committed to embedding the values of equity and belonging in every decision and action. We have a collective responsibility to create a culture of inclusive excellence where all feel welcome, safe, accepted and appreciated.

This statement is indeed a debatable political assertion, because “equity” is not equal opportunity for everyone, which is not only the law but morally correct. Rather, “equity” is a policy of equal outcomes, and is premised on the debatable claim that a lack of equal outcomes must perforce reflect bias against an underrepresented group (e.g., “structural racism” or “structural sexism”). The University of Chicago would never adopt a policy calling for equity, but of course we do have a policy of equality of opportunity.  Our University would never assert that it tries to ensure “equity” because that is a debatable statement about ideology.

Further, ensuring that everyone feels “welcome, safe, accepted, and appreciated” may not be possible if there is true freedom of speech.  For that kind of speech almost invariably assures that, at least at some times, some students claim that they feel “unsafe” and “unwelcome”.  That, for example, was one reason that an art history professor at the private Hamline University in Minnesota was fired for showing images of old Islamic pictures in which Muhammed’s face was unveiled.  Showing those pictures (which some Muslims feel is disrespectful or even blasphemous) made some students feel “unsafe,” and that  “they didn’t belong.”  (The professor sued Hamline and, I think, got an other job.)

Finally, “inclusive excellence,” though it links to an explanation of its meaning, is really a slippery concept.  In many cases where students and groups differ in achievement, the words “inclusive” and “excellence” may not be compatible.

So this statement is a sort-of acceptance of Kalven, but shows some unsettling signs of wokeness. For the time being we’ll see what happens at Simon Fraser. It is a public university, but there’s no First Amendment in Canada.

The link was sent to my reader Mike, who is associated with Simon Fraser. Mike said this in an email:

I wanted to share some good news. My university president today publicly embraced institutional neutrality for the university and its senior leadership.  (See below).

We don’t have a real policy yet, we don’t know how far down the administrative structure this neutrality will extend, and I don’t know whether this or a different message was sent to our students at the same time. But I hope clarifying those things will be a next step. It’s a huge improvement over the past 5 years in which the president created a new vice-president-level DEI infrastructure and pursued other initiatives that have chilled free expression by choosing sides on controversial topics including Hamas terrorism. So although there is work to do this is good news and a good day for my university.
The people most responsible for this positive development are the faculty leaders of our Heterodox Academy Campus Community at SFU. Our group has politely, publicly, and insistently urged our colleagues and administrators to back off from adopting public positions on policy or cultural issues on behalf of everyone at the university, and we have extolled the virtues of academic freedom of expression. We think that public campaign has borne its first fruit. I hope its effects will continue to be felt (a real policy, extended to students, and extended down to the level of department chairs).

Mike’s statement about the President setting up a DEI infrastructure is further unsettling. I hope this is good news for Simon Fraser, but, as a cynic, I found the President’s statement worrisome. The first sign that Dr. Johnson means what she says it that she has to dismantle or cut way back on the DEI business. For DEI itself, or at least the ideology behind its most common implementations, is itself ideologically debatable. Remember, the “E” stands for “equity.”

Shorter version of the ideological capture of science funding by DEI

July 26, 2024 • 10:00 am

The other day I wrote about the paper below that has now appeared in Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics (click headline to read; download pdf here).

It detailed how, over time, federal grand funding by agencies like the NIH and NSF has gradually required statements from the applicants about how they will implement DEI in their grants or, for group or educational grants, will select candidates to maximize diversity and create “equity” (i.e., the representation of minoritized groups in research in proportion to their occurrence in the general population).

If reading the big paper is too onerous for you, one of the authors (Anna Krylov), along with Robert George (“a professor of jurisprudence and director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University”) have published a short précis in The Chronicles of Higher Education, a site that usually doesn’t publish heterodox papers like this. You can read the shorter version simply by clicking on the screenshots below:

I won’t go through the whole argument, but will simply give an example of how each agency requires DEI input to create equity, and then show why the authors think this is bad for science and for society.

DEI statements have been made mandatory for both the granting agency and aspiring grantees, via two federal acts and the federal Office of Management and Budget:

. . .  a close look at what is actually implemented under the DEI umbrella reveals a program of discrimination, justified on more or less nakedly ideological grounds, that impedes rather than advances science. And that program has spread much more deeply into core scientific disciplines than most people, including many scientists, realize. This has happened, in large part, by federal mandate, in particular by two Executive Orders, EO 13985 and EO 14091, issued by the Biden White House.

. . . . As the molecular biologist Julia Schaletzky writes, “by design, many science-funding agencies are independent from the government and cannot be directed to do their work in a certain way.” So how do Biden’s executive orders have teeth? The answer: They are implemented through the budget process, a runaround meant, as Schaletzky says, to tether “next year’s budget allocation to implementation of ideologically driven DEI plans at all levels.”

One example of capture of each organization, but the paper gives more details:

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA):

For its part, NASA requires applicants to dedicate a portion of their research efforts and budget to DEI activities, to hire DEI experts as consultants — and to “pay them well.” How much do such services cost? A Chicago-based DEI firm offers training sessions for $500 to $10,000, e-learning modules for $200 to $5,000, and keynotes for $1,000 to $30,000. Consulting monthly retainers cost $2,000 to $20,000, and single “consulting deliverables” cost $8,000 to $50,000. Hence, taxpayer money that could be used to solve scientific and technological challenges is diverted to DEI consultants. Given that applicants’ DEI plans are evaluated by panels comprising 50 percent scientists and 50 percent DEI experts, the self-interest of the DEI industry is evident.

Department of Energy (DOE):

In a truly Orwellian manner, the DOE has pledged to “update [its] Merit Review Program to improve equitable outcomes for DOE awards.” Proposals seeking DOE funding must include a PIER (Promoting Inclusive and Equitable Research) plan, which is “encouraged” to discuss the demographic composition of the project team and to include “inclusive and equitable plans for recognition on publications and presentations.”

National Institutes of Health (NIH):

The National Institutes of Health’s BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) initiative requires applicants to submit a “Plan for Enhancing Diverse Perspectives (PEDP).” By “diverse perspectives,” the NIH explains that it means diverse demographics. In the agency’s own words, “PEDP is a summary of strategies to advance the scientific and technical merit of the proposed project through inclusivity. Broadly, diverse perspectives refer to the people who do the research, the places where research is done, as well as the people who participate in the research as part of the study population [emphasis ours].”

The NIH’s efforts toward advancing racial equity also offer an invitation to “Take the Pledge,” which includes committing to the idea that “equity, diversity, and inclusion drives success,” “setting up a consultation with an EDI [DEI] liaison,” and “ordering the ‘EDI Pledge Poster’ (or … creat[ing] your own) for your space.

Three years ago the NIH tried to incorporate DEI into its most widely-awarded grant, the “R01,” by asking investigators to give their race and then saying they’d fund some grants that didn’t make the merit cut but were proposed by minority investigators. But I guess they decided that awarding grants based on race, and discriminating against white investigators whose proposala had higher merit scores, was likely to be illegal. They quickly scrapped this program, but DEI, like the Lernaean Hydra, always grows a new head.  As you see, DEI back again in a more disguised form.

National Science Foundation (NSF):

Scientists applying to the National Science Foundation for what are known as Centers for Chemical Innovation grants must now provide a two-page Diversity and Inclusion Plan “to ensure a diverse and inclusive center environment, including researchers at all levels, leadership groups, and advisory groups.” They must also file an eight-page “broader impact” plan, which includes increasing participation by underrepresented groups. For comparison, the length of the scientific part of the proposal is 18 pages.

Those are the four largest grant-giving agencies in the federal government, and their largesse to science amounts to $90 billion per year.

Why is this DEI practice harmful? The authors give a handful of reasons:

These requirements to incorporate DEI into each research proposal are alarming. They constitute compelled speech; they undermine the academic freedom of researchers; they dilute merit-based criteria for funding; they incentivize unethical — and, indeed, sometimes illegal — discriminatory hiring practices; they erode public trust in science; and they contribute to administrative overload and bloat.

While well-intended, as are nearly all efforts to lend a hand to those disadvantaged by their backgrounds, most of these practices are probably illegal because they practice discrimination based on race or other immutable traits. The only reason DEI stipulations remain, I think, is because nobody has challenged them. To bring the agencies to court, one needs to demonstrate “standing”—that is, the investigator has to demonstrate that they have been hurt by the practices.  And, as you can imagine, finding someone like that would be hard, as they’d be forever tarred as racist.

Nevertheless, nobody wants to exclude minorities from science. But the paucity of black and Latino scientists is due not to “structural racism” in science (encoded rules that impede minorities), but to a lack of opportunity for disadvantaged groups starting at birth, which leads to lower qualifications. The way to solve this problem is to create equal opportunity for all, a solution that will solve the problem for good but is at present impossible to implement. Until then, all the granting system should do is cast a wider net, for the more people who apply for money, the greater the chance of finding more diverse people who pass the merit bar. And merit must remain the criterion for funding if we want to keep up the standard of American science. While I continue to believe in a form of affirmative action for college admissions, to me that’s where the buck stops. After that, all academic achievements should be judged without considering minority status.

And that seems to be happening, for in almost every venue, DEI efforts are waning.

More ideology in science: DEI infects the process for handing out scientific grants

July 22, 2024 • 9:40 am

I held the same National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant for about 30 years, renewing it under a competitive process every three years. It was onerous (I took six months to write each renewal application), but at least you could be sure that the proposals were judged on merit. Sure, you had to check a box with your “race” (the NIH considers that a social construct), but that was for record-keeping purposes only  and, during the times I sat in on evaluation committees, ethnicity and identity were never even discussed when ranking proposals.

That has now changed, not only with the National Institutes of Health, but with all the major funding agencies: the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Department of Energy (DOE), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).  All of these agencies, though legally forbidden to take into account the ethnicity of those who apply for grants, or to boost those of minority status, have found ways around that restriction, adhering to today’s DEI Zeitgeist.  This of course devalues scientific merit in proposals—a dangerous strategy if the aim of science funding is to promote the understanding of nature (with health benefits to humans in the case of the NIH). Giving grants based on minority status rather than merit also reduces the public’s trust in science.  The situation has become so fraught that I am positively elated that I no longer have to write grants, as I’m not sure how to write a diversity statement, and am opposed to them in general.

A new paper in SSRN (“Social Science Research Network”) calls attention to the pervasive attempts to circumvent race-based funding in the federal government, and outlines the problems that such attempts produce. You can go to the paper’s website by clicking on the screenshot below, or you can download the pdf here (go to “download without registration” at the upper right).

You’ll probably recognize a couple of names among the authors:

If you want a short take, you see below a summary and preview by Krylov and Tanzman from Heterodox STEM (click headline to read).  But I’ll be citing excerpts from the long paper itself.  It has not escaped my notice that the government’s attempt to circumvent restrictions on race-based funding parallel those now used by universities after the Supreme Court ruled out race-based admissions.

I’ll summarize the paper’s main points, indenting quotes and putting the main points under headers of my devising. All bolding is mine.

What is DEI?

While no reasonable person can oppose the morality of trying to to give every American equal opportunity to become a scientist (and that starts with birth), the mandates that condition federal funding call not for equal opportunity, but for equity—“equal outcomes” so that minoritized groups—not just races, but LGBTQ+, the disabled, women, and anybody said to be disadvantaged because of oppression—are represented in proportion to their occurrence in the general population. Here’s the authors’ construal of DEI as it is actually implemented by the government:

Actual DEI policies do not promote viewpoint diversity, equitable treatment of individuals based on their accomplishments, or equal opportunity for individuals regardless of their identity (e.g., race, sex, ethnicity). It can scarcely be questioned (Krylov and Tanzman, 2024) that DEI programs today are driven by an ideology, an offshoot of Critical Social Justice1 (CSJ) (Pluckrose, 2021; Deichmann 2023). DEI programs elevate the collective above the individual. They group people into categories defined by immutable characteristics (race, sex, etc.) and classify each group as either “privileged” or “victimized,” as “oppressor” or “oppressed.” The goals of DEI programs are to have each group participate in proportion to their fraction of thepopulation in every endeavor of society and to obtain proportionate outcomes from those endeavors. Disproportionate outcomes (with respect to science, such outcomes as publications, funding, citations, salaries, and awards), or disparities, are axiomatically ascribed to systemic factors, such as systemic racism and sexism, without consideration of alternative explanations (Sowell, 2019, 2023). Claims, such as “The presence of disparities is proof of systemic racism” and “Meritocracy is a myth” are propagated widely despite the vagueness of the claims and their lack of support by concrete data. Similarly, tenets that are central to DEI ideology—such as diversity is excellence, diverse teams outperform homogenous teams, and the advancement of women is impeded by biases—lack a robust evidence base, particularly when applied to science (Abbot et al., 2023; Krylov and Tanzman, 2023; Ceci et al., 2021, 2023).

Note that several important claims, including the assertion that underrepresentation of minoritized groups is due to ongoing systemic racism (which would be illegal) and that diverse scientific teams consistently outperform more homogeneous ones. Neither claim is supported by evidence.

My own opinion (and that of the authors; see below) is to give as many people as possible the opportunity to do science, and choose for advancement those who do the best work.  That might not result in equity, but it does allow equal opportunity. I recognize, of course, that we’re a long way from giving different groups equal opportunity, which must begin at or even before birth. But equal opportunity is the only permanent way to solve the problem of disproportional representation in science (or any endeavor). Effecting that will be hard, and requires immense effort, money, and empirical tests of educational systems, but once it’s in place, unequal representation would reflect other things, like behavioral differences or differential preferences among groups.

How do funding agencies employ DEI? This takes place through the use of required statements and plans to enhance diversity that must accompany grant proposals. Here are two examples; the first is from an HIH program:

Recruitment Plan to Enhance Diversity (NOT-OD-20-031):

The applicant must provide a recruitment plan to enhance diversity. Include outreach strategies and activities designed to recruit prospective participants from diverse backgrounds, e.g., those from groups described in the Notice of NIH’s Interest in Diversity. Describe the specific efforts to be undertaken by the program and how the proposed plan reflects past experiences in recruiting individuals from underrepresented groups.

New applications must include a description of plans to enhance recruitment, including the strategies that will be used to enhance the recruitment of trainees from nationally underrepresented backgrounds and may wish to include data in support of past accomplishments.

Renewal applications must include a detailed account of experiences in recruiting individuals from underrepresented groups during the previous funding period, including successful and unsuccessful recruitment strategies. Information should be included on how the proposed plan reflects the program’s past experiences in recruiting individuals from underrepresented groups.

For those individuals who participated in the research education program, the report should include information about the duration of education and aggregate information on the number of individuals who finished the program in good standing. Additional information on the required Recruitment Plan to Enhance Diversity is available at Frequently Asked Questions: Recruitment Plan to Enhance Diversity (Diversity FAQs).

Applications lacking a diversity recruitment plan will not be reviewed. [Emphasis ours.]

And one from NASA:

The assessment of the Inclusion Plan will be based on […] the extent to which the Inclusion Plan demonstrated awareness of systemic barriers to creating inclusive working environments that are specific to the proposal team. [Emphasis ours.]

But to those of us in science, there are no systemic (codified) barriers to advancement, although of course there is still some racism. But those who make the claim of systemic barriers have to ignore the ways universities are falling all over each other to recruit qualified women and members of minority groups.

Why are these requirements bad for science?  Besides taking up an enormous amount of time confecting such statements, which are surely often deliberately misleading, they are palpably illegal, violating civil rights laws:

These requirements to incorporate DEI into each research proposal are alarming. They constitute compelled speech, they undermine the academic freedom of researchers, they dilute merit-based criteria for funding, they incentivize illegal discriminatory hiring practices, they erode public trust in science, and they contribute to administrative overload. “Diversity,” which is sometimes described as “diverse backgrounds” or “diverse views,” actually refers to select underrepresented identity groups (Honeycutt, 2020; Brint and Frey, 2023; Brint, 2023).

. . .The demand to provide an inclusion plan without evidence that there is a need for one is compelled speech and an intrusion of ideology into the conduct of science. Forcing scientists to “acknowledge” and “show awareness of” systemic racism and “barriers to participation” in their institutions and teams (Nahm and Watkins, 2023), even if none can be documented, misrepresents reality, is an offense to scientists who have worked hard to establish fair and transparent hiring practices in their institutions, and is inconsistent with scientific professional ethics and, indeed, the very vocation of the scientist.

The paragraphs below identify what’s illegal. I’m fairly convinced that these DEI requirements do indeed violate civil-rights laws, and that the only reason they persist—just as DEI requirements for job applications in academia persist—is that nobody has challenged them in the courts. To do so, you need “standing”, that is, you must demonstrate that you have been injured by these requirements. And anybody doing that would be forever demonized in academia, not to mention tied up in legal battles that would last years.

The interaction of DEI with the legal system is troubling. First, the demands that PIs “acknowledge” systemic racism and “barriers to participation” in their institutions (Nahm and Watkins, 2023), and insert land acknowledgements in their scientific publications (NSF, n.d.(b)) raise grave legal concerns. The First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States strictly forbids compelling people to say things they do not believe are true. The circumstances under which government may condition grants or benefits on attesting that one holds a certain belief (e.g., “acknowledges” the truth to be this or that with respect to a contested matter), though somewhat obscure, are certainly limited (Supreme Court, 2013). At a minimum, government’s engaging in such conditioning on contested questions raises significant civil liberties concerns and is in tension with core First Amendment values.

Second, there are strict laws against discrimination on the basis of race and gender, both at federal and state levels. Thus, invoking DEI explicitly attempts to circumvent existing laws. Any actual “barriers” or “systemic discrimination” can be prosecuted under existing anti-discrimination statutes, following due process.

Third, even more worrying is that successful applications require principal investigators and their home institutions to engage in practices that are likely illegal.  For example, DEI “equity”-based plans for equal gender or racial participation can, in practice, only be implemented by gender- and race-preferential hiring. This is strictly illegal under civil rights employment law (Title VI; Title IX; EEOC, n.d.).

How do funding agencies get around the illegality of this process?

Funding agencies attempt to circumvent the laws prohibiting them from basing funding decisions on race or ethnicity by cloaking DEI requirements in nebulous language (NIH, 2019; Renoe, 2023) and by disguising racial preferences and even quotas as “diversity of backgrounds” and unequal treatment as “broadening participation of underrepresented groups.” The determination of which groups to treat as underrepresented and worthy of special treatment is highly subjective, as Americans hold many identities and can be split up in a multitude of ways. In practice, implementing equity-focused DEI programs means preferring members of some groups over others (Kendi, 2019). To paraphrase Orwell, all groups are equal, but some groups are more equal than others (Orwell, 1945).

The evaluations of submitted DEI plans are not open to public scrutiny. Agencies run diversity-focused programs but refuse to give guidance on how to determine eligibility for them; they are careful to state that compliance with all applicable employment laws is the responsibility of the host institution. However, DEI metrics, which must be reported annually to the funding agency, are criteria for renewal (NIH, 2023b). It remains unclear how a principal investigator is supposed to be nondiscriminatory in hiring and at the same time fulfill de facto DEI quotas for renewal. In this way, programs are developed that are de jure “open to everyone,” but de facto allocated according to identity metrics, reminiscent of the pre-civil rights era in the U.S.

Why is this happening?  The proximate reason for DEI requirements is government regulations (see below), but the ultimate reason is the “racial reckoning” taking place in America, a reckoning speeded up by the death of George Floyd and extending now to many minority groups save those who have done well, like Jews and Asians.  The paper doesn’t mention ultimate causes, but does show several federal requirements that gave rise to DEI mandates:

In fact, the mandate that funding agencies implement DEI comes directly from the White House. Executive Order 13985, titled “Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government,” directed all federal agencies to allocate resources to DEI and to incorporate “equity” into their decision making as a principle (EO 13985).

. . .If “consistent and systematic fair, just, and impartial treatment of all individuals” means equality of opportunity and equitable treatment of people’s accomplishments based on their merit, we’re all for it. However, the Order goes on to make clear that the goal is not to achieve equal opportunity and equitable treatment, but to achieve equal outcomes for identity groups. The Order conflates racism in the past with disparities in the present and equitable treatment with equal outcomes. It attributes unequal participation in the present to alleged discrimination in the present. It charges the Domestic Policy Council with the task “[of] remov[ing] systemic barriers,” thus implicitly asserting the existence of such barriers in the present. It calls for “redress[ing] inequities,” “affirmatively advancing equity,” and “allocating Federal resources in a manner that increases investment in underserved communities, as well as individuals from those communities.” Whatever is to be said about such goals in relation to, say, social welfare programs, we question their value and appropriateness for science funding.

The authors note that in this executive order “merit,” “excellence” and “achievement” are not mentioned at all.

There is one more federal order:

The goal of promoting “equity” in science is reinforced in Executive Order 14091 (EO 14091). Titled “Further Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government,” it explains how equity is to be implemented in various domains, and specifically calls for the “promot[ion] [of] equity in science.” It lays out specific DEI requirements for federal agencies, including NASA and NSF, such as the following:

The Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Director of the National Science Foundation […] (agency heads) shall, within 30 days of the date of this order, ensure that they have in place an Agency Equity Team within their respective agencies to coordinate the implementation of equity initiatives and ensure that their respective agencies are delivering equitable outcomes for the American people.

Both of these are orders are enforced by the government’s Office of Management and Budget, which monitors agencies to ensure that they meet DEI concerns.

What is to be done? The purpose of scientific research is not to be a lever for creating social justice. That’s the job of the government, but the government cannot violate the law to effect the change we need. In lieu of creating new law, they have to effect desired change within existing legal boundaries.  My own view, which is echoed by the authors, is to hold scientific merit as the overweening criterion for funding research.

At the same time, it would be churlish to ignore the palpable inequality in American society, an inequality that deprives some groups of simple access to doing science, often because their backgrounds and the existence of past racism or bigotry. This leads to the need for equal opportunity, something that Americans apparently lack the stomach for. Equity has become  a quick fix, a way to tell us that we’re good people, but it’s neither a permanent fix nor, in science, a way to best advance the field.  So ditch the DEI requirements mandating equity and do this:

Systemic disparities in opportunity, especially those related to socio-economic status, are real and well documented. Solid family structure, access to healthcare, good nutrition, an environment free from violence and drugs, high-quality preschool and K–12 education are necessary to nurture the next generation of scientists, but they are not equally available to all Americans. Rather than attempt to institute “equity” by mandating proportional participation through the manipulation of grant funding, we believe that increased efforts should be made to promote equality of opportunity as early in people’s lives as possible so that young people who aspire to standing in any field, including scientific fields, can succeed on merit (Abbot et al., 2023; Abbot et al., 2024; Loury, 2024).

It is sad that to write something like that, or the paper itself, is an act of courage in today’s political climate. But if you’re committed to advancing science, with equality of opportunity as a moral ancillary, then one must judge science on merit alone while working politically to eliminate differences in opportunity.

In the end, DEI statements should be no more than this: “This project will not discriminate against anybody on the grounds of race, religion, disability status, gender, or sexual identity or orientation.” End of story.

WSJ report: the National Institutes of Health, in complicity with universities, appears to be breaking the law by using ethnicity as a criterion for hiring.

July 7, 2024 • 11:15 am

I guess I have to give the usual disclaimers here: yes, John Sailer is a conservative, and yes, it’s an op-ed from the Wall Street Journal, whose op-eds are reliably on the Right. But of course where else will you learn things that the MSM won’t tell you? In this case, we learn that the National Institutes of Health, the largest government dispenser of research funds in America, is apparently funding hiring initiatives involving racial preferences. But how can they do that given that such hiring is illegal under Title VII? (And accepting students on the basis of race was recently deep-sixed by the Supreme Court.)

The way around this, according to Sailer’s article, is simply to fund “cluster hires,” which gives an institution a pot of money to hire several faculty at once, in hopes that doing so will bring in underrepresented minorities. Well, that’s fine (it casts a wider net), so long as people aren’t hired on the basis of their ethnicity itself.  But in the case of the National Institutes of Health, cluster-hire funding also requires that candidates proffer diversity statements, which of course allow universities to pick and choose using race, which is easily determined from diversity statements. (The University of Chicago prohibits this explicitly based on the Shils Report: our hires and promotions are to be based solely on research, teaching, contribution to the intellectual community, and university or department service).

Further, beyond the NIH’s end-run around race-based hiring, universities are making their own goals much more explicit, as Sailer found out by using the Freedom of Information Act to see what universities are doing vis-à-vis hiring.

If Sailer is wrong in his quotes and claims, he could be sued, and because he bases them on public records, I seriously doubt that his article is misguided.

Click the headline to read, or find the WSJ piece archived here. 

Here are some excerpts, showing how universities manage to hire based on ethnicity. One of them, to my horror, was Vanderbilt, which, headed by Chicago’s former Provost, has been a model of rationality, honesty, free speech, and adherence to academic and legal standards.

Sailer:

 . . . . there is evidence that many universities have engaged in outright racial preferences under the aegis of DEI. Hundreds of documents that I acquired through public-records requests provide a rare paper trail of universities closely scrutinizing the race of faculty job applicants. The practice not only appears widespread; it is encouraged and funded by the federal government.

At Vanderbilt University Medical Center, a large hiring initiative targets specific racial groups—promising to hire 18 to 20 scientists “who are Black, Latinx, American Indian, and Pacific Islander.” Discussing a related University of New Mexico program, one professor quipped in an email, “I don’t want to hire white men for sure.”

Both initiatives are supported by the National Institutes of Health through its Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation program, or First. The program gives grants for DEI-focused “cluster hiring” at universities and medical schools, promising eventually to spend about a quarter-billion dollars.

A key requirement is that recipient institutions heavily value diversity statements while selecting faculty. The creators of the program reasoned that by heavily weighing commitment to DEI, they could prompt schools to hire more minorities but without direct racial preferences. That’s the rationale behind DEI-focused “cluster hiring,” an increasingly common practice in academia. The documents—which include emails, grant proposals, progress reports and hiring records—suggest that many NIH First grant recipients restrict hiring on the basis of race or “underrepresented” status, violating NIH’s stated policies and possibly civil-rights law.

In grant proposals, several recipients openly state their intention to restrict whom they hire by demographic category. Vanderbilt’s NIH First grant proposal states that it will “focus on the cluster hiring of faculty from minoritized racial and ethnic groups, specifically Black, Latinx, American Indian, and Pacific Islander scientists.” The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and the University of Texas at Dallas jointly proposed hiring 10 scholars “from underrepresented groups,” noting that the NIH First program specifically identifies racial minorities and women as underrepresented.

But if you can’t use race as a criterion for hiring, why are DEI statements required? This still confuses me, for it’s not even a moderately disguised way to engage in the practice. If you go to the NIH First Awards page, you see a list of seven schools given FIRST awards for cluster hiring, and then this statement:

These awardee institutions will build self-reinforcing communities of scientists, through recruitment of cohorts of early-career faculty who are competitive for assistant professor positions and have a demonstrated commitment to inclusive excellence. The institutions are also building efforts to positively impact faculty development, retention, progression, and eventual promotion, as well as develop inclusive environments that are sustainable. Overall, the FIRST cohort awardees, together with the CEC  will work to determine if a systematic approach that integrates multiple evidence-based strategies including the hiring of faculty cohorts with demonstrated commitments to inclusion and diversity will accelerate inclusive excellence, as measured by clearly defined metrics of institutional culture change, diversity, and inclusion.

Unless you fell off the turnip truck, you’ll know that “inclusive” and “diversity” are simply code words for “racial diversity.”  But the code isn’t hard to break. This means that the government is, without explicitly admitting it, in the business of producing equity, which of course is against government regulations. In fact, the NIH affirms this ban (bolding is mine):

At its inception, NIH First was widely understood not to involve racial preferences. In 2020, shortly after the program was announced, Science magazine published an explanation: “Not all of the 120 new hires would need to belong to groups now underrepresented in academic medicine, which include women, black people, Hispanics, Native Americans, and those with disabilities, says Hannah Valantine, NIH’s chief diversity officer. In fact, she told the Council of Councils at its 24 January meeting, any such restriction would be illegal and also run counter to the program’s goal of attracting world-class talent.”

ILLEGAL is the relevant word here. Sailer goes on (again, bolding is mine):

Yet multiple programs have stated their intention to limit hires to those with “underrepresented” status. One job advertisement, for a First role at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine, notes: “Successful candidates will be early stage investigators who are Black, Latinx, or from a disadvantaged background (as defined by NIH).”

And some universities make explicit the fact that they’re hiring based on race. Drexel, one of the seven schools that got a FIRST Award, makes it mandatory to be an underrespresented minority to be hired:

Some grantees even admit such preferences in documents sent to and reviewed by the NIH. A joint proposal from the University of Maryland School of Medicine and the university’s Baltimore County campus states that all scientists hired through the program will meet the NIH’s definition of “underrepresented populations in science.” Drexel University’s program, which focuses on nursing and public health, provides its evaluation rubric in a progress report. Among its four criteria: “Candidate is a member of a group that is underrepresented in health research.”

This raises questions about compliance with Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits race discrimination in employment. The First program’s website highlights regulations requiring that federal agencies ensure grant recipients comply with nondiscrimination law. The most basic implication is that universities can’t refuse to hire someone, or prefer one candidate over another, because of race or sex. But emails show that this has been happening.

This also occurs at the University of New Mexico (UNM), which appears to have been slapped on the tuches. Bolding is mine:

At the University of New Mexico, the First leadership team heavily scrutinized the race and sex of applicants. “Just to be sure: what was the ethnicity of Speech and Hearing’s first-choice candidate?” a UNM team member asked in an email.

“She identified as URM in her application, right? I am confused, maybe I am misremembering,” a team member wrote of a different candidate. Another responded, “It looks like she said she was a ‘native New Mexican.’ We checked, and she said she’s white.”

. . . UNM appears to have violated NIH First policy, which states that programs “may not discriminate against any group in the hiring process.” The UNM spokeswoman said in a statement that “the email correspondence among members of the UNM FIRST Leadership Team do [sic] not represent the University of New Mexico’s values nor does it comport with the expectations we have of our faculty” and that “as a result of this unfortunate circumstance,” the university is instituting a required “faculty search training/workshop for all . . . faculty search committee members.”

Hiring of underrepresented minorities is, of course, a form of discrimination—against people considered “white” or “white adjacent” (e.g., Asians).

And this goes on even for non-NIH-funded hires. One place is, as I said, Vanderbilt University, run by our former Provost, Daniel Diermeier. Does he know about this?

At Vanderbilt University Medical Center, a large hiring initiative targets specific racial groups—promising to hire 18 to 20 scientists “who are Black, Latinx, American Indian, and Pacific Islander.” Discussing a related University of New Mexico program, one professor quipped in an email, “I don’t want to hire white men for sure.”

For sure!

I’m pretty sure that Vanderbilt does know about this, because they refused to comment when asked. They do have a FIRST grant proposal in for a cluster hire, and it’s explicitly aimed at hiring those of “minoritized” groups, not including, of course, Asians or Jews (bolding is mine):

In grant proposals, several recipients openly state their intention to restrict whom they hire by demographic category. Vanderbilt’s NIH First grant proposal states that it will “focus on the cluster hiring of faculty from minoritized racial and ethnic groups, specifically Black, Latinx, American Indian, and Pacific Islander scientists.”

. . . Taken as a whole, these documents shed new light on the practice of cluster hiring. They explain why some in academia seem to treat the practice as a form of legal racial quotas. In addition to the responses already noted, representatives of the University of Maryland, UT Dallas and UT Southwestern said that their institutions comply with civil-rights laws and don’t discriminate on the basis of race. Drexel, Northwestern, Mount Sinai and Vanderbilt didn’t reply to inquiries.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m in favor of increasing all kinds of diversity—socioeconomic, ethnic, and viewpoint diversity. The more varied people you have, assuming that they meet quality standards, the more chance you can get an oddball idea that will move science forward. But in science, and particularly in the NIH—whose money goes entirely for health-related research—an increase in diversity is important only insofar as it is associated with an increase in the quality of research produced. You can get both only by widening the net, trying to attract more applicants. And in the end you must, according to law, hire people irregardless of their race, and, as the Shils Report specifies for Chicago, using only criteria associated with merit.

 

Harvard deep-sixes DEI statements

June 4, 2024 • 10:00 am

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.