Diversity statements in academia: the veiled barrier to ideological diversity
January 16, 2024
DEI – diversity, equity, and inclusion – in American universities is not just worse than you think; it’s worse than you will believe. It isn’t just that the students won’t allow the college to do anything that might annoy them. Universities will not hire those who don’t follow the current fashion and political views.
This is not just wrong – what is a university for if it’s not to explore a diversity of views – it’s also entirely illegal under American law. And yet they’re going it.
One example:
“A self-survey conducted by the University of California, Berkeley, found that, during a search for faculty in the life sciences department, 76 percent of applicants were eliminated solely on the basis of their diversity statements. Another departmental search found that the number was 78 percent.”
So, let’s run through this.
To get a job teaching in an American college, you must provide a diversity statement. This tells how you’ve worked toward that diversity and how your teaching would contribute to forwarding diversity. But they do not mean diversity of views. It’s evident that conservatives and centrists do not provide the right kind of diversity statements. When diversity is being talked about here, it’s the worst excesses of Critical Race Theory and DEI that is meant.
Talking about ideological diversity is a failure. Talking about social or economic diversity is a failure. Only those prayers to the church of DEI are heard.
This is, obviously, an ideological test for anyone trying to get on the tenure track at a college. It is the other people within the department who get to decide on these diversity statements, too. So, once the ideology is firmly established in a department, no one who does not follow it will ever get hired.
The entire system, therefore, becomes a factory for teaching nothing but the ideology, of course. This is not good for our children, it’s not good for colleges themselves, and it’s not good for the country. It’s also grossly illegal – the Supreme Court has made it clear that there cannot be such ideological tests.
But this is the life sciences – biology and so on. Imagine how much worse it is in areas like gender or critical race studies.
As the Rabbi who resigned in disgust at Harvard said, “Battling that combination of ideologies is the work of more than a committee or a single university. It is not going to be changed by hiring or firing a single person, or posting on X, or yelling at people who don’t post as you wish when you wish, as though posting is the summation of one’s moral character. This is the task of educating a generation, and also a vast unlearning.”
The entire American college system has been captured by people who do not have our or our children’s best interests at heart. They’re peddling an extreme ideology based on DEI and CRT. The task is what we do about it – can we change them, or will we have to rebuild the system entirely?