The Hypocrisy of Mandatory Diversity Statements
Demanding that everyone embrace the same values will inevitably narrow the pool of applicants who work and get hired in higher education. John D. Haltigan sued the University of California at Santa Cruz in May. He wants to work there as a professor of psychology. But he alleges that its hiring practices violate the First Amendment by imposing an ideological litmus test on prospective hires: To be considered, an applicant must submit a statement detailing their contributions to diversity, equity, and inclusion. According to the lawsuit, Haltigan believes in colorblind inclusivity, viewpoint diversity, and merit-based evaluationall ideas that could lead to a low-scoring statement based on the starting rubric UC Santa Cruz publishes online to help guide prospective applicants. To receive a high score under the terms set by the rubric, the complaint alleges, an applicant must express agreement with specific socio-political ideas, including the view that treating individuals differently based on their race or sex is desirable. Thus, the lawsuit argues, Haltigan must express ideas with which he disagrees to have a chance of getting hired. The lawsuit compares the DEI-statement requirement to Red Scareera loyalty oaths that asked people to affirm that they were not members of the Communist Party. It calls the statements a thinly veiled attempt to ensure dogmatic conformity throughout the university system. Conor Friedersdorf: The DEI industry needs to check its privilege UC Santa Cruzs requirement is part of a larger trend: Almost half of large colleges now include DEI criteria in tenure standards, while the American Enterprise Institute found that 19 percent of academic job postings required DEI statements, which were required more frequently at elite institutions. Still, there is significant opposition to the practice. A 2022 survey of nearly 1,500 U.S. faculty members found that 50 percent of respondents considered the statements an ideological litmus test that violates academic freedom. And the Academic Freedom Alliance, a group composed of faculty members with a wide range of political perspectives, argues that diversity statements erase the distinction between academic expertise and ideological conformity and create scenarios inimical to fundamental values that should govern academic life. The Haltigan lawsuit filed by the Pacific Legal Foundation, a right-leaning nonprofitis the first major free-speech challenge to a public institution that requires these statements. If Haltigan prevails, state institutions may be unable to mandate diversity statements in the future, or may find themselves constrained in how they solicit or assess such statements. Taking a principled stand against the use of the DEI rubric in the Academy is crucial for the continued survival of our institutions of higher learning, he declared in a Substack post earlier this year. Alternatively, a victory for UC Santa Cruz may entrench the trend of compelling academics to submit DEI statements in institutions that are under the control of the leftand serve as a blueprint for the populist right to impose its own analogous requirements in state college systems it controls. For example, Christopher Rufo of the Manhattan Institute, who was appointed by Governor Ron DeSantis to help overhaul higher education in Florida, advocates replacing diversity, equity, and inclusion with equality, merit, and colorblindness . If California can lawfully force professors to detail their contributions to DEI, Florida can presumably force all of its professors to detail their contributions to EMC. And innovative state legislatures could create any number of new favored-concept triads to impose on professors in their states. That outcome would balkanize state university systems into factions with competing litmus tests. Higher education as a whole would be better off if a Haltigan victory puts an end to this coercive trend. T he University of California is a fitting place for a test case on diversity statements. It imposed loyalty oaths on faculty members during the Red Scare, birthed a free-speech movement in 1964, was a litigant in the 1977 Supreme Court case that gave rise to the diversity rationale for affirmative action, and in 1996 helped inspire California voters to pass Proposition 209. That voter initiative amended the Golden States Constitution to ban discrimination or preferential treatment on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin. In 2020, at the height of the racial reckoning that followed George Floyds murder, voters in deep-blue California reaffirmed race neutrality by an even wider margin. This continued to block the UC systems preferred approach, which was to increase diversity in hiring by considering, not disregarding, applicants race. Indeed, the insistence on nondiscrimination by California voters has long been regarded with hostility by many UC system administrators. Rewarding contributions to diversity, equity, and inclusion is partly their attempt to increase racial diversity among professors in a way that does not violate the law. Read: The problem with how higher education treats diversity The regime these administrators created is a case study in concept creep. Around 2005, the UC system began to change how it evaluated professors. As ever, they would be judged based on teaching, research, and service. But the system-wide personnel manual was updated with a novel provision: Job candidates who showed that they promoted diversity and equal opportunity in teaching, research, or service could get credit for doing so. Imagine a job candidate who, for example, did volunteer work mentoring high schoolers in a disadvantaged neighborhood to help prepare them for college. That would presumably benefit the state of California, the UC system by improving its applicant pool, and the teaching skills of the volunteer, whod gain experience in what helps such students to succeed. Giving positive credit for such activities seemed sensible. But how much credit? A 2014 letter from the chair of the Assembly of the UC Academic Senate addressed that question, stating that faculty efforts to promote equal opportunity and diversity should be evaluated on the same basis as other contributions. They should not, however, be considered a fourth leg of evaluation, in addition to teaching, research, and service. If matters stood there, the UC approach to diversity and equal opportunity might not face legal challenges. But administrators successfully pushed for a more radical approach. What began as an option to highlight work that advanced diversity and equal opportunity morphed over time into mandatory statements on contributions to diversity, equity, and inclusion. The shift circa 2018 from the possibility of credit for something to a forced accounting of it was important. So was the shift from the widely shared value of equal opportunity to equity (a contested and controversial concept with no widely agreed-upon meaning) and inclusion. The bundled triad of DEI is typically justified by positing that hiring a racially and ethnically diverse faculty or admitting a diverse student body is not enoughfor the institution and everyone in it to thrive, the best approach (in this telling) is to treat some groups differently than others to account for structural disadvantages they suffer and to make sure everyone feels welcome, hence inclusion. That theory of how diversity works is worth taking seriously. Still, it is just a theory. I am a proponent of a diverse University of California system, but I believe that its students would better thrive across identity groups in a culture of charity, forbearance, and individualism. A Marxist might regard solidarity as vital. A conservative might emphasize the importance of personal virtue, an appreciation of every institutions imperfectability , and the assimilation of all students to a culture of rigorous truth-seeking. Many Californians of all identities believe in treating everyone equally regardless of their race or their gender. UC Santa Cruz has not yet responded to Haltigans lawsuit. But its chancellor, Cynthia K. Larive , states on the UC Santa Cruz website that the institution asks for a contributions-to-DEI statement because it is a Hispanic-Serving and Asian American Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institution that has a high proportion of first generation students, and that it therefore seeks to hire professors who will contribute to promoting a diverse, equitable, and inclusive environment. In her telling, the statements help to assess a candidates skills, experience, and ability to contribute to the work they would be doing in supporting our students, staff, and faculty. Perhaps the most extreme developments in the UC systems use of DEI statements are taking place on the Davis, Santa Cruz, Berkeley, and Riverside campuses, where pilot programs treat mandatory diversity statements not as one factor among many in an overall evaluation of candidates, but as a threshold test. In other words, if a group of academics applied for jobs, their DEI statements would be read and scored, and only applicants with the highest DEI statement scores would make it to the next round. The others would never be evaluated on their research, teaching, or service. This is a revolutionary change in how to evaluate professors. This approachone that is under direct challenge in the Haltigan lawsuitwas scrutinized in detail by Daniel M. Ortner of the Pacific Legal Foundation in an article for the Catholic University Law Review . When UC Berkeley hired for life-sciences jobs through its pilot program, Ortner reports, 679 qualified applicants were eliminated based on their DEI statements alone. Seventy-six percent of qualified applicants were rejected without even considering their teaching skills, their publication history, their potential for academic excellence, or their ability to contribute to their field, he wrote. As far as the university knew, these applicants could have well been the next Albert Einstein or Jonas Salk, or they might have been outstanding and innovative educators who would make a significant difference in students lives. At UC Davis, 50 percent of applicants in some searches were disqualified based on their DEI statements alone. Abigail Thompson, then the chair of the mathematics department at UC Davis, dissented from its approach in a 2019 column for the American Mathematics Society newsletter. Classical liberals aspire to treat every person as a unique individual, she wrote. Requiring candidates to believe that people should be treated differently according to their identity is indeed a political test. More striking than her argument was the polarized response from other academics, captured by the letters to the editor . Some wrote in agreement and some in substantive disagreement, as is appropriate. But a group letter signed by scores of mathematicians from institutions all over the United States asserted, without evidence, that the American Mathematics Society harmed the mathematics community, particularly mathematicians from marginalized backgrounds, merely by airing Thompsons critique of diversity statements. We are disappointed by the editorial decision to publish the piece, they wrote. Mathematicians hold a diversity of views about mandatory DEI statements. But just one faction asserts that others do harm merely by expressing their viewpoint among colleagues . Just one faction openly wanted to deny such dissent a platform. Are members of that progressive faction fair when they score DEI statements that are in tension with their own political beliefs? It is not unreasonable for liberal, conservative, and centrist faculty members to be skeptical. And many are. A rival group letter decried the attempt to intimidate the AMS into publishing only articles that hew to a very specific point of view, adding, If we allow ourselves to be intimidated into avoiding discussion of how best to achieve diversity, we undermine our attempts to achieve it. T he most formidable defender of mandatory diversity statements may be Brian Soucek, a law professor at UC Davis. Hes participated in debates organized by FIRE and the Federalist Society (organizations that tend to be more skeptical of DEI) and recently won a UC Davis Chancellors Achievement Award for Diversity and Community. In an April 2022 article for the UC Davis Law Review , he acknowledged that certain types or uses of diversity statements would be indefensible from a constitutional or academic freedom standpoint but argued that, should a university want to require diversity statements, it can do so in ways that violate neither academic freedom nor the Constitution. He has worked to make UC Daviss approach to DEI statements more defensible. Someone evaluating a diversity-statement regime, he suggests, should focus on the following attributes: Soucek argues that the ability to help diverse students to thrive is directly relevant to a law professors core duties, not something irrelevant to legitimate educational or academic objectives. As for concerns that mandatory diversity statements might entrench orthodoxies of thought in academia, or create the perception that political forces or fear of job loss drives academic conclusions, he argues that those concerns, while real, are not unique to diversity statementsthey also apply to the research and teaching statements that most job candidates must provide. Academic freedom, and the system of peer review that it is built upon, is a fragile business, always susceptible not just to outside interference, but also to corruption from within, he wrote in his law-review article. But diversity statements strike me as more vulnerable to corruption from within than research statements. Although a hiring committee of chemists might or might not do a fair job evaluating the research of applicants, at least committee members credibly possess the expertise to render better judgments than anyone elsethey know better than state legislators or DEI administrators or history professors or the public how to assess chemistry research. Read: What is faculty diversity worth to a university? On what basis can chemistry professors claim equivalent expertise in how best to advance diversity in higher education generally, or even in chemistry specifically? It wouldnt be shocking if historians or economists or sociologists were better-positioned to understand why a demographic group was underrepresented in chemistry or how best to change that. Most hiring-committee members possess no special expertise in diversity, or equity, or inclusion. Absent empirically grounded expertise, academics are more likely to defer to whats popular for political or careerist reasons, and even insofar as they are earnest in their judgments about which job candidates would best advance diversity, equity, or inclusion, there is no reason to afford their nonexpert opinions on the matter any more deference than the opinions of anyone else. Ultimately, Souceks idealized regime of mandatory diversity statementstailored to particular disciplines and judged by faculty members without outside political interferencestrikes me as a theoretical improvement on the status quo but, in practice, unrealistic in what it presumes of hiring committees. Meanwhile, most real-world regimes of diversity statements, including those at campuses in the University of California system, lack the sort of safeguards Soucek recommends, and may not assess anything more than the ability to submit an essay that resonates with hiring committees. Whether an applicants high-scoring DEI statement actually correlates with better research or teaching outcomes is unclear and largely unstudied. T he costs of mandatory DEI statements are far too high to justify, especially absent evidence that they do significant good. Alas, proponents seem unaware of those costs. Yes, they know that they are imposing a requirement that many colleagues find uncomfortable. But they may be less aware of the message that higher-education institutions send to the public by demanding these statements. Mandatory DEI statements send the message that professors should be evaluated not only on research and teaching, but on their contributions to improving society. Academics may regret validating that premise in the future, if college administrators or legislators or voters want to judge them based on how they advance a different understanding of social progress, one that departs more from their ownfor example, how theyve contributed to a war effort widely regarded as righteous. Mandatory DEI statements send the message that its okay for academics to chill the speech of colleagues. If half of faculty members believe that diversity statements are ideological litmus tests, fear of failing the test will chill free expression within a large cohort, even if they are wrong. Shouldnt that alone make the half of academics who support these statements rethink their stance? Mandatory DEI statements send a message that is anti-pluralistic. I believe that diversity and inclusion are good. I do not think that universities should reward advancing those particular values more than all others . Some aspiring professors are well suited to advancing diversity. Great! The time of others is better spent mitigating climate change, or serving as expert witnesses in trials, or pioneering new treatments for cancer. Insofar as all academics must check a compulsory advancing DEI box, many will waste time on work that provides little or no benefit instead of doing kinds of work where they enjoy a comparative advantage in improving the world. And mandatory DEI statements send the message that viewpoint diversity and dissent are neither valuable nor necessarythat if youve identified the right values, a monoculture in support of them is preferable. The scoring rubric for evaluating candidates statements that UC Santa Cruz published declares that a superlative statement discusses diversity, equity, and inclusion as core values of the University that every faculty member should actively contribute to advancing. Do academics really want to assert that any value should be held by every faculty member? Academics who value DEI work should want smart critics of the approach commenting from inside academic institutions to point out flaws and shortcomings that boosters miss. Demanding that everyone get on board and embrace the same values and social-justice priorities will inevitably narrow the sort of people who apply to work and get hired in higher education. In that sense, mandatory DEI statements are profoundly anti-diversity. And that strikes me as an especially perilous hypocrisy for academics to indulge at a time of falling popular support for higher education. A society can afford its college professors radical freedom to dissent from social orthodoxies or it can demand conformity, but not both. Academic-freedom advocates can credibly argue that scholars must be free to criticize or even to denigrate God, the nuclear family, America, motherhood, capitalism, Christianity, John Wayne movies, Thanksgiving Day, the military, the police, beer, penetrative sex, and the internal combustion enginebut not if academics are effectively prohibited from criticizing progressivisms sacred values. The UC system could advance diversity in research and teaching in lots of uncontroversial ways. Instead, in the name of diversity, the hiring process is being loaded in favor of professors who subscribe to the particular ideology of DEI partisans as if every good hire would see things as they do. I do not want California voters to strip the UC system of more of its ability to self-govern, but if this hypocrisy inspires a reformist ballot initiative, administrators will deserve it, regardless of what the judiciary decides about whether they are violating the First Amendment.