#diversity statements

By: FIRE

Published: Aug 17, 2023

• The California Community Colleges’ regulations force professors to espouse controversial views about “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”  • FIRE filed a lawsuit after the chancellor’s office ignored our warning that the regulations violated professors’ First Amendment rights. • The regulations dictate how professors teach the approximately 1.8 million students enrolled in California community colleges.

FRESNO, Aug. 17, 2023 — Today, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression filed a lawsuit on behalf of six California community college professors to halt new, systemwide regulations forcing professors to espouse and teach politicized conceptions of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

Each of the professors teach at one of three Fresno-area community colleges within the State Center Community College District. Under the new regulations, all of the more-than-54,000 professors who teach in the California Community Colleges system must incorporate “anti-racist” viewpoints into classroom teaching. 

The regulations explicitly require professors to pledge allegiance to contested ideological viewpoints. Professors must “acknowledge” that “cultural and social identities are diverse, fluid, and intersectional,” and they must develop “knowledge of the intersectionality of social identities and the multiple axes of oppression that people from different racial, ethnic, and other minoritized groups face.” Faculty performance and tenure will be evaluated based on professors’ commitment to and promotion of the government’s viewpoints.

“I’m a professor of chemistry. How am I supposed to incorporate DEI into my classroom instruction?” asked Reedley College professor Bill Blanken. “What’s the ‘anti-racist’ perspective on the atomic mass of boron?”

“These regulations are a totalitarian triple-whammy,” said FIRE attorney Daniel Ortner. “The government is forcing professors to teach and preach a politicized viewpoint they do not share, imposing incomprehensible guidelines, and threatening to punish professors when they cross an arbitrary, indiscernible line.”

DEI requirements are controversial within academia. FIRE’s research indicates that half of professors believe mandatory diversity statements violate academic freedom. The sole mention of academic freedom in California’s model framework frames it an inconvenience, warning professors not to “‘weaponize’ academic freedom” to “inflict curricular trauma on our students.”

“Hearing uncomfortable ideas is not ‘curricular trauma,’ and teaching all sides of an issue is not ‘weaponizing’ academic freedom,” said Loren Palsgaard, a professor of English at Madera Community College and a plaintiff in the suit. “That’s just called ‘education.’”

An official glossary of terms released by the state makes plain that the “anti-racist” views it mandates are highly ideological. Indeed, the definition for “anti-racism” states that “persons that say they are ‘not a racist’ are in denial.” California declares that “color-blindness,” or the belief that “the best way to end prejudice and discrimination is by treating individuals as equally as possible, without regard to race, culture, or ethnicity,” is itself a problem because it “perpetuates existing racial inequities and denies systematic racism.”

Even a professor saying something as benign as “I grade my class based on merit” is suspect under the regulations. “Merit is embedded in the ideology of Whiteness and upholds race-based structural inequality,” the glossary claims. “Merit protects White privilege under the guise of standards … and as highlighted by anti-affirmative action forces.”

FIRE first expressed concerns with the California regulations when they were proposed in 2022, warning in a public comment that the new rules would “unconstitutionally require faculty to profess allegiance to and to promote a contested set of ideological views.” The response from the chancellor’s office was woefully inadequate, denying that the chancellor or the board of governors could ever violate a professor’s academic freedom. The regulations are now in effect in the State Center Community College District, and FIRE’s clients have already been forced to change their syllabi and teaching materials, lest they face repercussions.

FIRE’s California suit comes almost a year after FIRE filed a lawsuit against Florida’s “Stop WOKE Act” as it applies to college classrooms. In that case, Florida’s legislature, like California Community Colleges, sought to dictate what views public university professors can express when teaching. In November 2022, a federal court granted FIRE’s motion for a preliminary injunction to block enforcement of the Stop WOKE Act, calling it “positively dystopian.” 

“Whether it’s states forcing professors to teach DEI concepts or states forcing them not to teach concepts that lawmakers deem ‘woke,’ the government can’t tell university professors what views they are or aren’t allowed to debate in the classroom,” said FIRE attorney Jessie Appleby. FIRE is representing professors James Druley, David Richardson, Linda de Morales, and Loren Palsgaard of Madera Community College, Bill Blanken of Reedley College, and Michael Stannard of Clovis Community College. The defendants are California Community Colleges Chancellor Sonya Christian, the State Board of Governors, State Center Community College District Chancellor Carole Goldsmith, and the District Board of Trustees.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to defending and sustaining the individual rights of all Americans to free speech and free thought — the most essential qualities of liberty. FIRE recognizes that colleges and universities play a vital role in preserving free thought within a free society. To this end, we place a special emphasis on defending the individual rights of students and faculty members on our nation’s campuses, including freedom of speech, freedom of association, due process, legal equality, religious liberty, and sanctity of conscience.

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Professors must “acknowledge” that “cultural and social identities are diverse, fluid, and intersectional,” and they must develop “knowledge of the intersectionality of social identities and the multiple axes of oppression that people from different racial, ethnic, and other minoritized groups face.”

This is cult language. It's meaningless drivel to anyone who does not subscribe to the ideology it comes from. It's like someone talking about "sin" when you don't believe in Abrahamism: "You must teach students their fallen nature, their sin and their salvation through Jesus Christ." It obligates academics and students to subscribe to intersectional feminism as an institutional mandate, and is therefore both compelled speech and compelled thought.

By: John Sailer

Published: Sep 9, 2023

What happens in California usually doesn’t stay in California — and that’s bad news for higher education. 

In his latest piece for the New York Times, Michael Powell catalogs just how extensively the Golden State’s universities have embraced mandatory diversity statements when hiring faculty. From junior college to prestigious research university, scientists and scholars throughout the state must demonstrate their commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) to remain in good standing.

By now, this should come as no surprise, but it is striking to see some of the most egregious ways the policy plays out. In 2016, the piece notes, at least five University of California (UC) campuses decided to initially screen faculty job applicants based only on diversity statements. For one large hiring initiative at UC Berkeley — the Life Sciences Initiative — the faculty search committee eliminated three-fourths of the applicant pool on the basis of diversity statements alone. Berkeley’s rubric for assessing diversity statements, moreover, dictates a low score for candidates who speak positively about diversity but in vague terms. Even more remarkably, it gives a low score to candidates who say they prefer to “treat everyone the same.” 

All of this is especially notable because of what California represents to American public higher education. Out of any state, California best embodies the American vision of universal higher education — its promises and perils.

In 1960, UC System President Clark Kerr spearheaded the “California Master Plan for Higher Education,” an attempt to modernise the state’s system of higher education. The Master Plan institutionalised a rigidly tiered system for California’s colleges and universities, reserving the UC system for the top 12.5% of the state’s graduating high school students, the California State system for the top 33.3%, and the California Community Colleges system for everyone else.

The plan captured the country’s strong faith in higher education, its aspiration to send virtually every young person to college. Kerr once jokingly quipped that the mission of the university is “to provide sex for the students, sports for the alumni, and parking for the faculty” — an amusing, and functionally accurate, description. 

No doubt, California set the example. Today, it remains a powerhouse; according to the U.S. News and World Report rankings, the UC system includes six out of the top 10 American public universities.

California still sets the tone for American higher education. And for that reason, we might add one more item to Kerr’s tongue-in-cheek summary of the university’s mission: “DEI initiatives for the administrators.” The trend Powell describes — whereby enthusiasm for DEI, whatever that might mean in practice, has become a virtual job requirement for scientists and scholars —has trickled down. 

Berkeley’s Life Sciences Initiative, for example, was designed to test whether universities could use a method known as “cluster hiring” to advance the goal of diversity. Basically, the approach involves hiring multiple faculty at once with a heavy emphasis on DEI. In a forthcoming National Association of Scholars report, I describe how DEI-focused cluster hiring has boomed since Berkeley undertook its Life Sciences Initiative.

In 2020, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center carried out a cluster hire — hiring researchers in cancer, infectious disease, and basic biology — which heavily weighed DEI contributions. In 2021, Vanderbilt University’s Department of Psychology undertook a cluster hire; it eliminated approximately 85% of its candidates based solely on diversity statements. And the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has allocated $241 million in grant money for cluster hires at universities around the country — with the condition that every search committee must require and heavily weigh diversity statements.

Berkeley’s rubric — the one that gives a low score to anyone who espouses race-neutrality — is likewise ubiquitous. Two of the universities receiving NIH money for cluster hires are the University of New Mexico and the University of South Carolina. Through a public records request, I acquired both universities’ rubric for assessing diversity statements, which was published earlier this year. Both universities use the Berkeley rubric verbatim.

As a consequence of these measures, trust in higher education will likely continue to fall, owing in part to a sense that some views are simply not tolerated. But DEI litmus tests do not merely diminish the public’s trust in higher education. They degrade higher education itself. Clark Kerr knew that the mission of the university isn’t sex, sports, or parking. It isn’t social justice, either. It’s the pursuit of truth, which, following California’s example, all too many universities seem to forget.

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There are still some people who say stupid things like, "how can you be against equality and diversity?" Except, we all know at this point that these are ideologically-charged words. The rubrics themselves tell you that liberal principles of equality are unacceptable; rather, contested and ideological notions about the world. This makes "DIE statements" ideological loyalty oaths.

By: Zack K. De Piero

Published: Dec 23, 2023

Looking for a job in today’s politicized job market?

Prepare to submit a résumé, cover letter, references — and a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Statement: A page-long explanation of how you intend to bring those three seemingly benign principles into the workplace.

DEI statements have become standard practice in academia, but a tide might be turning: UNC and UMass Boston recently un-required mandatory DEI statements for student admission, employee recruitment and faculty promotion. 

Here’s hoping this sets an industry precedent — a step towards reining in DEI in every sector. 

When I taught at Penn State Abington from 2018-2022 as an English professor, their obsession with DEI created a hostile work environment teeming with discrimination.

Case in point: writing faculty were subjected to a video called “White Teachers are a Problem.”

After making my opposition known, I was retaliated against.

My perceived insubordination was branded on Affirmative Action Office notices, and I was sanctioned by HR as well as on my annual performance review. 

Penn State’s stance was clear: Blind loyalty is required by the DEI machine. 

The premier job board across academia, HigherEdJobs, shows how deeply entrenched compulsory left-think has become.

Whether you want to teach French at SUNY Oswego, Dance at Chapman, Soil Science and Nutrient Management at Colorado State, or Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Syracuse, your prospective employer will expect a DEI statement, so prepare to bend the knee. 

Even if you aspire to become the Beef Center Assistant Manager at Washington State University: Yep: DEI statement.

And these are just a few random examples posted since Thanksgiving.

It’s an epidemic. 

Make no mistake, the DEI machine has always been about toeing an ideological line — never any meaningful change.

Consider the case of Dr. Tabia Lee — a former faculty member of De Anza Community College in California.

While facilitating a “Decentering Whiteness” event featuring a BLM co-founder, Lee (who’s Black) made waves by allowing students to ask unscripted follow-up questions. For doing so, her tenure was sabotaged.

Despite being “diverse,” it turns out that Lee’s actual diversity didn’t gel with De Anza’s agenda.

A commitment to actual diversity requires respecting diverse viewpoints.

But wrong-think isn’t tolerated by the DEI Industrial Complex. 

Fortunately, federal law has something to say about that: neither De Anza nor Penn State has the authority to suppress Dr. Lee or my speech, nor can they discriminate on the basis of race.

That’s why she and I — supported by the nonpartisan group, the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism — are bringing lawsuits against our former employers. 

Pull back this sacred academic curtain, and see the emperor’s new clothes for yourself.

In 2021, Pennsylvanian’s taxes and students’ tuition went towards workshops on microaggressions, intersectional feminism, anti-racism, and white privilege led by the Penn State Abington DEI grifters.

Its leader’s Juneteenth email directed white faculty and staff to “stop talking,” “find an accountability partner,” and “stop being afraid of your own internalized white supremacy.” 

Such DEI efforts ooze with divisiveness, so yes, DEI statements are clearly a form of compelled speech, and thus, a violation of First Amendment free speech protections.

[ Dr. Tabia Lee says her tenure-track position at De Anza College in California was derailed after she failed to conform to DEI orthodoxy. ]

What’s worse, though, is the type of educational environment that DEI-ified initiatives create for students — and the culprit is the “E”: Equity. 

Here’s how “equity” played out in the misguided minds of my DEI-obsessed former colleagues. A former supervisor, who endorsed the view that “reverse racism isn’t racism,” also announced that “racist structures” exist “regardless of [anybody’s] good intentions” and that “racism is in the results if the results draw a color line.”

The apparent guiding subtext here: students should be graded on the basis of race so all achieve similar outcomes.

Suppose you deflated the grades of Asian-Americans — a group that often disproportionately excels — much like Harvard deflated their acceptance rates until the Supreme Court put a stop to race-based admissions.

That’s somehow acceptable in the name of “equity?” Of course not, but disagree with enforced equity in education and in the eyes of antiracist activists, that makes you – you guessed it — a “racist.” 

Alternatively, performative equity could be achieved by inflating everybody’s grades — straight A’s all around! 

Harvard’s almost there: in 2020-2021, 80% of all grades were A’s, according to an October article in the Harvard Crimson. 

The road to equity is paved by the soft bigotry of low expectations.

And in a world where grit, labor, and integrity win the day, academia’s obsession with “equity” breeds a “survival of the weakest” mindset. 

Nevertheless, the DEI machine continues to reign supreme.

Over a five-year span, Ohio State’s DEI annual budget bloated to $20 million with nearly 200 DEI bureaucrats who cite the leftist scripture of Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo.

But before we can enter their church, us natural-born sinners must repent by issuing performative DEI statements?

Yeah. No thanks.

Paradoxically, the more elite institutions obnoxiously virtue-signal their allegiance to DEI, the less committed they are to actual diversity and inclusion — and the more they obscure actual equality in the process. 

These institutions aren’t hiding what they’re doing.

Even in the throes of my lawsuit, Penn State Abington has doubled down on DEI: there’s now a sister office — the Office of Inclusive Excellence — complete with its own cabinet-level director. 

Folks: this isn’t going away unless you take action.

Here’s a start: if you’re ever asked to submit a DEI statement, don’t bend the knee to their “E” — Equity.

Reframe their game, and tell them how and why you stand up for the honorable “E”: Equality. 

By: Jonathan Haidt

Published: Sep 23, 2022

In 2016 I gave a lecture at Duke University: “Two Incompatible Sacred Values in American Universities.” I suggested that the ancient Greek word telos was helpful for understanding the rapid cultural change going on at America’s top universities that began in the fall of 2015. Telos means “the end, goal, or purpose for which an act is done, or at which a profession or institution aims.” The telos of a knife is to cut, the telos of medicine is to heal, and the telos of a university is truth, I suggested. The word (or close cognates) appears on many university crests, and our practices and norms — some stretching back to Plato’s academy — only make sense if you see a university as an institution organized to help scholars get closer to truth using the particular methods of their field.

I said that universities can have many goals (such as fiscal health and successful sports teams) and many values (such as social justice, national service, or Christian humility), but they can have only one telos, because a telos is like a North Star. An institution can rotate on one axis only. If it tries to elevate a second goal or value to the status of a telos, it is like trying to get a spinning top or rotating solar system to simultaneously rotate around two axes. I argued that the protests and changes that were suddenly sweeping through universities were attempts to elevate the value of social justice to become a second telos, which would require a huge restructuring of universities and their norms in ways that damaged their ability to find truth.

I expanded on this argument in a blog post for Heterodox Academy, predicting that “the conflict between truth and social justice is likely to become unmanageable. … Universities that try to honor both will face increasing incoherence and internal conflict.”

It’s now six years later, and I think it’s clear that this prediction has come true. It has been six years of near-constant conflict, with rising numbers of attempts to get scholars fired or punished for things they have said, and a never-ending stream of videos showing students (and sometimes professors) saying and doing things that are gifts to critics of universities and of the left. As one university president said to a friend of mine in 2019, “Universities are becoming ungovernable.” Public trust in universities has plummeted since 2015, first on the right, but later across the board. We are in trouble.

How do we get out of this mess? How do we regain the respect of the public? There is no easy answer because many of our problems are tied to the broader problems of the country, particularly its ever-intensifying political-polarization spiral, and the increasing levels of anxiety and fragility of our incoming students.

But even if America is far down the road to political and institutional collapse, it is still incumbent on every professor to act properly and professionally in the meantime — in part because professionals abandoning their duties in our political and epistemic institutions is a major cause of the collapse. So how do we act properly and professionally? What is the right thing to do when there are so many competing crises, each with its own moral demands? Should professors engage in political activism — in their teaching and in their research — and push their universities and professional associations to do so as well?

In the rest of this essay I’d like to introduce the concept of fiduciary duty, which complements the concept of telos and can help explain the moral incoherence that has overtaken the academy since 2015, as well as give us a moral foundation upon which to stand when we resist pressures to violate our duties.

The word fiduciary comes to us from the Latin fidere, “to trust.” In any large-scale society, people need to rely on others who are not kin, often when they are in a position of vulnerability. Roman, English, and later American law all developed legal designations that enable some people or institutions to hire themselves out as “trustees” who act as “agents” of the person (the “principal”) who invests trust in them. Such agents have fiduciary duties toward their beneficiaries, which means first and foremost absolute loyalty. They must put the needs of the beneficiary first and must never, ever profit at the beneficiary’s expense. They must avoid and eliminate all conflicts of interest, because the lure of such potential benefits can — and often does — corrupt and subvert the fiduciary’s ability to carry out their duty.

American corporate law has interpreted fiduciary duties using the psychology of purity and sanctity. A fiduciary relationship is treated as something different, higher, purer, than a simple contractual relationship. As explained by the Supreme Court justice Benjamin Cardozo in 1928:

A trustee is held to something stricter than the morals of the market place. Not honesty alone, but the punctilio of an honor the most sensitive, is then the standard of behavior. As to this there has developed a tradition that is unbending and inveterate. ... Only thus has the level of conduct for fiduciaries been kept at a level higher than that trodden by the crowd.

Is the concept of fiduciary duty useful in the academy? To what must professors show such absolute loyalty, such elevated ethics, with no deviations or compromises?

We have two such duties, related to our two distinct roles as teachers and as scholars. As teachers I believe we have a fiduciary duty to our students’ education. As scholars I believe we have a fiduciary duty to the truth.

Let me note right away that the concept doesn’t fit perfectly. Our students are not our principals, and we are not their agents. We are not obligated to act in their best interest overall; we are duty-bound to advance their education and never to act in a way that retards it. When we do our jobs well, we are professional educators, not therapists, coaches, or parents. Similarly for the truth: It is not a person or “principal” who hired us as “agents” and can give us orders. So I’m going to call these relationships “quasi-fiduciary duties.”

But the elements of elevated ethics, near-sacredness, and a ban on conflicts of interest work quite well, as you can see from some hypothetical examples of professors with such conflicts. The mere contemplation of such situations should give us all a feeling of discomfort or disgust.

Professor A assigns his own textbook to his psychology class even though the book is 20 years out of date because he wants to maximize his royalty payments.

Professor B plans her psychology lecture on love and sexuality in a way that she knows will make her appealing to young men because she likes to date those men after they have graduated from college and become “fair targets.”

Professor C is an evangelical Christian teaching English literature in a secular university who chooses readings and uses his lectures to encourage students who are lapsed Christians to renew their faith in Jesus Christ.

Professor D is a right-wing activist teaching English literature at a state school in a red state. She chooses readings and uses her lectures to encourage students to support her favorite right-wing causes and candidates.

Do you agree that all four of these professors have behaved unprofessionally? All four are treating their students as means to advance their own ends: financial, sexual, religious, and political. (I made Professor D be right-wing, but I assume you’ll agree that the violation is just as bad for a left-wing activist in a blue state.) All four have therefore violated their quasi-fiduciary duty of loyalty, which requires them to advance their students’ education, not their own projects. All four should be subject to disciplinary action.

We can do the same thought experiment for professors as scholars and scientists who violate their quasi-fiduciary duty to the truth:

Professor A works hard to prove that social media is not harmful to adolescents because a social-media platform pays her $100,000 for each study she publishes that supports that conclusion.

Professor B decides to spin his research findings away from what he knows is true in order to avoid taking a controversial stance because he knows that such a stance would reduce his ability to find sexual partners.

Professor C is a biblical scholar who distorts her translation of an ancient manuscript because she believes that an accurate translation would cause some people to lose faith in God.

Professor D is a left-wing political scientist who deletes all of the qualitative interviews he has conducted for his book that he thinks might make progressives look bad.

What do you think of these four professors? Did they behave professionally, or did they violate their quasi-fiduciary duty to the truth? I think they all distorted their scholarship and put work out into the public that is not honest, not faithful to the truth, because they were pursuing their own personal agendas — for money, sex, religion, and politics. (Once again, I assume you’ll agree that Professor D is equally culpable whether he’s on the left or the right.) All four would bring disgrace to the academy if their actions became known.

I have been thinking a lot about fiduciary duty because my main professional association — the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, known as SPSP — recently asked me to violate my quasi-fiduciary duty to the truth. I was going to attend the annual conference in Atlanta next February to present some research with colleagues on a new and improved version of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. I was surprised to learn about a new rule: In order to present research at the conference, all social psychologists are now required to submit a statement explaining “whether and how this submission advances the equity, inclusion, and anti-racism goals of SPSP.” Our research proposal would be evaluated on older criteria of scientific merit, along with this new criterion.

These sorts of mandatory diversity statements have been proliferating across the academy in recent years. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, the Academic Freedom Alliance, and many professors have written about why they are immoral, inappropriate, and sometimes illegal. I’ll add one additional concern: Most academic work has nothing to do with diversity, so these mandatory statements force many academics to betray their quasi-fiduciary duty to the truth by spinning, twisting, or otherwise inventing some tenuous connection to diversity. I refuse to do this, but I’ve never objected publicly.

The SPSP mandate, however, forced us all to do something more explicitly ideological. Note that the word diversity was dropped and replaced by anti-racism. So every psychologist who wants to present at the most important convention in our field must now say how their work advances anti-racism. I read Ibram X. Kendi’s book How to Be an Antiracist in the summer of 2020, so I knew that I could no longer stay silent.

I wrote to Laura King, the president of SPSP (and a friend from way back in the first years of positive psychology). I asked her if this was really now an SPSP policy. In her response she reaffirmed the telos of SPSP: “SPSP’s mission remains to advance the science, teaching, and application of social and personality psychology.” She then said that she thought part of that mission “should involve amplifying the voices of those who have historically been underrepresented in our field.” That is a view I agree with: Diversity stated in that unobjectionable form can be a value of the organization. But (like all values), I think it must not be raised to a second telos. She also affirmed that, yes, the mandatory statements are now official policy, and she added: “I am not super clear on why anti-racism is viewed as problematic.”

I wrote back to explain why I thought it was problematic, quoting passages from Kendi’s book, such as this one:

The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.

I explained why I thought the claim was incorrect from a social-science perspective because there are obviously many other remedies. And I explained why I thought the claim was incorrect morally because it requires us to treat people as members of groups, not as individuals, and then to treat people well or badly based on their group membership. That’s exactly the opposite of what most of us who grew up in the late 20th century thought was a settled moral fact. (I should note that in her response to me, King said that SPSP didn’t necessarily endorse Kendi’s version of anti-racism, and she pointed out that there were other definitions available.) I can add, in retrospect, a quote from Paul Bloom and his colleagues Christina Starmans and Mark Sheskin. In a 2017 essay in Nature Human Behaviour, they reviewed research on the psychology of fairness and then argued that “humans naturally favour fair distributions, not equal ones, and that when fairness and equality clash, people prefer fair inequality over unfair equality.”

I believe that anti-racism has a place at SPSP, and I said so to King. Let there be speakers, panels, and discussions of this morally controversial and influential idea at our next conference! But to adopt it as the official view and mission of SPSP and then to force us all to say how our work advances it, as a precondition to speaking at the conference? This is wrong for two reasons: First, it elevates anti-racism to be a coequal telos of SPSP, which means that we would no longer rotate around the single axis of excellent science. Every talk would have to be both scientifically sound and anti-racist, even though good science and political activism rarely mix well. Second, it puts pressure on social psychologists — especially younger ones, who most need to present at the conference — to betray their fiduciary duty to the truth and profess outward deference to an ideology that some of them do not privately endorse.

In 1970 the economist Albert O. Hirschman wrote the important book Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. Hirschman was analyzing what happens when members of an organization perceive that the quality of an organization, or its value to them, has declined. They then have three alternatives: They can exit the organization, they can voice their objections within the organization, or they can stay loyal to the organization as it currently is by doing nothing or by attacking those who criticize it.

In 2011 I began to perceive a problem in social psychology: Almost all of us were on the left, and I began to see how our political homogeneity damaged the quality of some of our research. I love my field, and I loved SPSP and its conferences, so I raised my voice about it. At the 2011 SPSP conference, I gave a plenary talk on how social psychology was becoming a tribal moral community. I raised my voice again when I joined with five other social psychologists to write a paper in Behavioral and Brain Sciences titled “Political Diversity Will Improve Social Psychological Science.” That collaboration laid the groundwork for what became Heterodox Academy, once we learned that these problems were happening in many academic fields.

I raised my voice again to write to King and object to the new policy. But soon it will be time for exit. I cannot remain loyal to an organization that is changing its telos and asking its members to violate their quasi-fiduciary duties to the truth. I am especially dubious of the wisdom of making an academic organization more overtly political in its mission, especially in the midst of a raging culture war, when trust in universities is plummeting.

So I’m going to resign from SPSP at the end of this year, when my membership dues run out, if the policy on mandatory statements stays in place for future conventions. I hope that other members will raise their voices.

In the second century CE, Marcus Aurelius wrote this in his Meditations:

Never regard something as doing you good if it makes you betray a trust, or lose your sense of shame, or makes you show hatred, suspicion, ill will, or hypocrisy, or a desire for things best done behind closed doors.

It is timeless advice for professors who strive to live up to their two quasi-fiduciary duties: to our students’ educations, and to the truth.

This essay first appeared as a blog post on the Heterodox Academy website.

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By: John Sailer

Published: Jan 9, 2023

In June 2020, Gordon Klein, a longtime accounting lecturer at UCLA, made the news after a student emailed him asking him to grade black students more leniently in the wake of the “unjust murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd.”

Klein’s response was blunt. It stated in part:

Thanks for your suggestion in your email below that I give black students special treatment, given the tragedy in Minnesota. Do you know the names of the classmates that are black? How can I identify them since we’ve been having online classes only? Are there any students that may be of mixed parentage, such as half black-half Asian? What do you suggest I do with respect to them? A full concession or just half?

He went on:

Remember that MLK famously said that people should not be evaluated based on the “color of their skin.” Do you think that your request would run afoul of MLK’s admonition?

Thanks, G. Klein

Klein’s response enraged students. They organized a petition to remove him that quickly gained nearly 20,000 signatures, resulting in the professor being placed on leave and banned from campus. But the story got national attention, and a counter-petition signed by more than 76,000 people demanded his reinstatement. In less than three weeks, Klein was allowed to return to the classroom.  

Yet his encounters with what UCLA calls Equity, Diversity and Inclusion were far from over.

Just under a year later, Klein, the author of a textbook on ethics in accounting, was up for a merit raise. For the first time in his 40 years at UCLA, Klein told me he had to submit a statement on equity, diversity, and inclusion. UCLA had adopted this as a promotion requirement in 2019, and now demands that all faculty members express how they will advance these principles in their work, and how their mentoring and advising helps those “from underrepresented and underserved populations.”

Klein inquired of the EDI office just what groups of students they meant. When they failed to reply, he wrote a dissent he made available to me, which reads in part:

“I find it abhorrent for the University to encourage faculty members to classify and prioritize students based on their group identities. I intend to continue helping all students equally, regardless of their backgrounds.”

Although his previous teaching evaluations were sterling, and he had received prior merit raises, this one was declined. Klein has brought suit against UCLA.

The struggle between Klein and UCLA represents a major shift in the mission of higher education in America.

The principles commonly known as “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) are meant to sound like a promise to provide welcome and opportunity to all on campus. And to the ordinary American, those values sound virtuous and unobjectionable.

But many working in academia increasingly understand that they instead imply a set of controversial political and social views. And that in order to advance in their careers, they must demonstrate fealty to vague and ever-expanding DEI demands and to the people who enforce them. Failing to comply, or expressing doubt or concern, means risking career ruin.

In a short time, DEI imperatives have spawned a growing bureaucracy that holds enormous power within universities. The ranks of DEI vice presidents, deans, and officers are ever-growing—Princeton has more than 70 administrators devoted to DEI; Ohio State has 132. They now take part in dictating things like hiring, promotion, tenure, and research funding.

More significantly, the concepts of DEI have become guiding principles in higher education, valued as equal to or even more important than the basic function of the university: the rigorous pursuit of truth. Summarizing its hiring practices, for example, UC Berkeley’s College of Engineering declared that “excellence in advancing equity and inclusion must be considered on par with excellence in research and teaching.” Likewise, in an article describing their “cultural change initiative,” several deans at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine declared: “There is no priority in medical education that is more important than addressing and eliminating racism and bias.”

DEI has also become a priority for many of the organizations that accredit universities. Last year, the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, along with several other university accrediting bodies, adopted its own DEI statement, proclaiming that “the rich values of diversity, equity and inclusion are inextricably linked to quality assurance in higher education.” These accreditors, in turn, pressure universities and schools into adopting DEI measures.

Much of this happened by fiat, with little discussion. While interviewing more than two dozen professors for this article, I was told repeatedly that few within academia dare express their skepticism about DEI. Many professors who are privately critical of DEI declined to speak even anonymously for fear of professional consequences.

The Invention of DEI

How has this fundamental shift taken place? Gradually, then all at once.

For decades, university administrators have emphasized their commitment to racial diversity. In 1978, Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell delivered the court’s opinion in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, taking up the question of racial preferences in higher education. Powell argued that racial preferences in admissions—in other words, affirmative action—could be justified on the basis of diversity, broadly defined. Colleges and universities were happy to adopt his reasoning, and by the 1980s, diversity was a popular rallying cry among university administrators.

By the 2010s, as the number of college administrators ballooned, this commitment to diversity was often backed by bureaucracies that bore such titles as “Inclusive Excellence” or “Diversity and Belonging.” Around 2013, the University of California system—which governs six of the nation’s top 50 ranked universities—began to experiment with mandatory diversity statements in hiring. Diversity statements became a standard requirement in the system by the end of the decade. The University of Texas at Austin in 2018 published a University Diversity and Inclusion Action Plan, which began to embed diversity committees throughout the university.

Then came the Black Lives Matter demonstrations of 2020. The response on campus was a virtual Cambrian explosion of DEI policies. Any institution that hadn’t previously been on board was pressured to make large-scale commitments to DEI. Those already committed redoubled their efforts. UT Austin created a Strategic Plan for Faculty Diversity, Equity, and Inclusivity, calling for consideration of faculty members’ contributions to DEI when considering merit raises and promotion.

White Coats For Black Lives, a medical student organization that calls for the dismantling of prisons, police, capitalism, and patent law, successfully petitioned medical schools around the country to adopt similar plans, including at UNC–Chapel Hill, Oregon Health & Science University, and Columbia University. In some cases, administrators even asked White Coats For Black Lives members to help craft the new plans.

All at once, policies that previously seemed extreme—like DEI requirements for tenure and mandatory education in Critical Race Theory—became widespread.

Saturate the Campus

The upshot is that the entire experience of higher education—from earning a college degree to seeking a career in academia—now requires saturation in the principles of DEI.

Many American college students are now required to take DEI, anti-racism, or social justice courses. At Georgetown, all undergraduates must take two Engaging Diversity courses. At Davidson College, the requirement goes under the title of Justice, Equality, and Community, which students can fulfill by taking courses like Racial Capitalism & Reproduction and Queer(ing) Performance. Northern Arizona University recently updated its general education curriculum to require nine credit hours of “diversity perspectives” courses, including a unit on “intersectional identities.”

DEI is also becoming a de facto academic discipline. In 2021, Bentley University in Massachusetts created a DEI major. Last year, the Wharton School announced its introduction of a DEI concentration for undergraduates and a DEI major for MBA students.

Meantime, the open faculty position listings at universities across the country illustrate how a focus on race, gender, social justice, and critical theory can be crucial to landing a job. Last year, the University of Houston–Downtown sought an instructor in Early Modern British Literature, including Shakespeare, with a preferred specialization in “critical race studies.” At Wake Forest University, an applicant for assistant professor of Spanish should be someone “whose critical perspectives are linked to the experiences of groups historically underrepresented in higher education in ways that inform and influence their pedagogical approach.” Williams College recently sought an assistant professor of German who works “in the areas of migration, race and anti-racism, post- and decolonial approaches, disability, and/or memory studies.”

These imperatives often come from the top. In May, the Board of Governors for California Community Colleges (CCC), the largest system of higher education in the country, decreed that every employee—faculty, staff, and administrators—must be evaluated for their “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility” competencies. Each district in the system ultimately decides how to enforce the new rule, but the Chancellor’s Office released a list of recommended competencies. It suggested faculty create a curriculum that “promotes a race-conscious and intersectional lens” and advocate for “anti-racist goals and initiatives.”

Ray Sanchez, faculty coordinator of the academic success centers at Madera Community College, sent me a document published by the system that describes how to incorporate DEI into curricula. “Take care,” the document declares, “not to ‘weaponize’ academic freedom and academic integrity as tools to impede equity in an academic discipline or inflict curricular trauma on our students, especially historically marginalized students.”

It is telling that the CCC system warns against taking academic freedom too far—especially for the sake of avoiding “curricular trauma.” After all, a successful liberal education inevitably involves challenging students’ unquestioned assumptions, an experience that is unsettling by design. Applying the language of trauma to this enterprise pathologizes learning itself.

In higher education, academic freedom is sacrosanct, a vital tool for facilitating the pursuit of truth. But now the CCC treats academic freedom with suspicion. “If we need to be culturally responsive in the classroom, well, what does that look like? We have it right here,” Matthew Garrett, professor of history and ethnic studies at the CCC’s Bakersfield College, and a rare public critic of the system’s new policy, told me about the document. He added, “You can’t weaponize academic freedom.”

A Radically New Definition of Racism

Some DEI initiatives seem almost designed to create distrust, especially between faculty and students. In an article last year for City Journal, I wrote about the “cultural change initiative” taking place at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine. When describing their work, the program’s creators asserted that it’s important to accept that “if we are White, we are a big part of the problem. We are part of the reason that structural racism imprisons and oppresses people of color every day, everywhere they go, and no matter what they do.”

The program’s creators also emphasized that when anyone on campus reports a concern about racism and bias, “We unconditionally accept that what they are describing really happened and needs to be explored, addressed, and resolved.” They acknowledge there can be multiple versions of a story, but assert that “someone’s lived experience of racism and bias is all we need to know about its impact on them, whether intended or not.” They followed up this initiative with the Anti-Racist Transformation in Medical Education training program to help other medical schools emulate Mount Sinai. The first adopters included top schools such as Duke and Columbia.

The Mount Sinai program underscores a point that came up repeatedly when I spoke with faculty members for this article: Some claims, especially about race and racism, are treated as unassailable.

Jonathan Haidt, the coauthor of The Coddling of the American Mind and a professor of ethical leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business, has warned about this redefinition of racism—and about the rise of ideological groupthink in academia and in his field of social psychology in particular. Twelve years ago Haidt gave a keynote address at the annual convention of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP), pointing out the trend toward groupthink and arguing it was bad for science.

Fast-forward to September 2022, the month Haidt announced his departure from SPSP, citing the organization’s new diversity statement policy. For scholars to present their work at SPSP’s annual convention, they now must submit a statement explaining how their talk advances the “equity, inclusion, and anti-racism goals” of the society.

“When SPSP specifically used the word ‘anti-racism,’ that’s when I had to act. Because I read Ibram Kendi’s work,” said Haidt, referring to the author of 2019’s How to Be an Antiracist. Kendi’s work is the basis of much employment training both in academia and business. It popularized the notion that “anti-racism” requires embracing race-conscious policies and asserts that all racial disparities are, by definition, racist. “Kendi demands a totalizing approach that means everything must be actively anti-racist, and if you’re not actively anti-racist, you’re racist,” Haidt told me.

In other words, SPSP—one of the organizations where Haidt first expressed his concerns about ideological conformity—now mandates ideological conformity.

‘Fake Research and Fake Standards’

It’s easy to imagine that DEI would find its natural home in the humanities. But disciplines such as engineering, medicine, and physics quickly are becoming bastions of DEI as well. Leaders from the Association of American Medical Colleges recently proclaimed that DEI “deserves just as much attention from learners and educators at every stage of their careers as the latest scientific breakthroughs.”

The federal government also is doing its part to infuse DEI into the sciences. The Department of Energy’s Office of Science is the nation’s largest sponsor of the physical sciences. It recently announced that all new research proposals must include its Promoting Inclusive and Equitable Research (PIER) Plan. To get a grant, scientists must describe how equity and inclusion are “an intrinsic element to advancing scientific excellence in the research project.”

One medical researcher at an elite institution who requested anonymity told me that grants for medical research increasingly use veiled ideological language that focuses on issues such as health equity and racial disparities. “The answer is preordained: The cause of disparities is racism,” he told me. “If you find some other explanation, even if it’s technically correct, that’s problematic.”

This fixation can have a stultifying effect on medical research, and eventually medical care, the researcher told me. “We’re abdicating our responsibility. We’re creating fake research and fake standards, aligning ideology with medicine, and undermining our basic ability to engage in meaningful sensemaking.”

Another physician-scientist at a top medical school also pointed out that an all-out focus on research that documents racial disparities crowds out other, more consequential areas of scientific research. “In general, science is a zero-sum game with a relatively limited pot of resources,” he told me. “And therefore, it means that biological discovery, mechanisms of basic science, new insights, new molecules, don’t get discovered because you have this other type of research going on.”

The physician-scientist was concerned that an obsession with equity has shifted attention away from pursuing groundbreaking scientific breakthroughs that will benefit everyone. “We are distributing more equitably therapies that largely don’t work. We’re still rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic,” he said. “It’s a very foolish tactic when the death rate from cancer is still as high as it is.”

‘Morally Wrong and Incompatible with Scientific Inquiry’

A growing number of universities, such as UCLA, where Gordon Klein ran into trouble, now consider their faculty members’ contributions to DEI as a criterion for hiring, promotion, and tenure. UC Berkeley’s rubric for evaluating DEI contributions, which is used by universities around the country, dictates a low score for a candidate who professes a desire to “treat everyone the same.”  

Diversity statements—short essays on job candidates’ past efforts and future plans to advance DEI—have long been in vogue for hiring. And according to the American Association of University Professors’ 2022 survey of tenure practices, 45.6 percent of large institutions surveyed had DEI criteria for tenure, and 35.5 percent were considering adding them. Only 18 percent didn’t have and weren’t considering them.

To boost faculty diversity (explicit racial preferences in hiring are illegal), many universities are resorting to a practice known as “cluster hiring”—that is, hiring multiple professors at once, across multiple departments. To increase the likelihood of hiring minority faculty members, cluster hiring initiatives often assess candidates’ contributions to DEI as the first criterion.

In 2018, UC Berkeley launched a cluster hire across several life sciences departments. Of 893 qualified applicants, the hiring committee narrowed the pool to 214 based solely on the candidates’ diversity statements. Finalists then were asked to describe their DEI efforts during their interviews. The initiative yielded eyebrow-raising results: The initial applicant pool was 53.7 percent white and 13.2 percent Hispanic. The shortlist was 13.6 white and 59.1 percent Hispanic.

In 2020, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) began a $241 million cluster hiring grant program—specifying that the faculty hired must have “a demonstrated commitment to promoting diversity and inclusive excellence.” So far, it has awarded grants for hires at twelve institutions, including the University of South Carolina, Cornell University, and Florida State University.

One humanities professor told me that after his department creates a final group of candidates, “a lawyer in the DEI office will make a determination as to whether this slate of candidates is diverse enough. If it’s not diverse enough in their estimation, they can kick the slate back to the search committee.” Professors across multiple disciplines told me this is standard practice. One said DEI officers have the power to simply cancel searches.

“If we’ve got this gaming of the hiring process across the board, so that the new generation of professors are that much more ideologically pure, these are the people who believe that dissident research shouldn’t be given a voice at all,” Adam Ellwanger, a professor of rhetoric at the University of Houston–Downtown, told me. He pointed out that these professors go on to conduct peer review and decide what scholarship gets published.

Little is being done to halt the intrusion of DEI into higher education. Academic jobs are perilously scarce for many disciplines, which encourages graduate students and young scholars to avoid rocking the boat at all costs. “There’s just a general fear that, if you push back, you’ll be marked for being on the wrong side,” one professor told me. “There’s no way to guard against how your colleagues will evaluate you for tenure in the future.”

And as allegiance to DEI has become a formal job requirement, even many senior faculty members remain silent out of a sense of self-preservation. As former dean of Harvard Medical School Jeffrey Flier told me, “It is considered politically and socially tenuous to bring up the subject.”

Still, some are pushing back. In August, the Academic Freedom Alliance released a statement, coauthored by Flier, calling for an end to the practice of mandatory DEI statements.

“It is one thing for schools to take action against wrongful discriminatory conduct; institutions are under a legal as well as moral and pedagogical obligation to do that,” the statement read. “A very different and disturbing thing is monitoring beliefs by demanding pledges of allegiance to an array of policies that are often vague, frequently ambiguous, and invariably controversial.”

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has also issued numerous statements opposing DEI requirements that violate the First Amendment. The organization I work for, the National Association of Scholars, frequently publishes reports on DEI, serving as a watchdog on the issue.

NYU’s Jonathan Haidt hopes his resignation from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology will be a wake-up call for his fellow academics, but his outlook is pessimistic.

“It is morally wrong, but it’s also incompatible with scientific inquiry, which requires total fidelity to the truth,” Haidt told me of the DEI requirement that prompted his decision to leave.

“The way that institutions collapse is that they become structurally stupid. That means people can no longer object, they have to go along with the orthodoxy.” Haidt said this isn’t an issue just in his field of psychology. “It’s about the biggest problem facing our country—the collapse of our institutions.”

==

America’s institutions continue their descent into madness, shifting seamlessly from knowledge production to ideological convents and giving foreign entities not engaged in this nonsense the opening to surpass them.

When the acceptable answers have already been pre-ordained and delivered from on high, and any deviation from this orthodoxy is punished as blasphemy - all great discoveries originate as blasphemies - you’re not creating or discovering, you’re just churning out religious zealots with the prescribed beliefs.

This, of course, is a feature of this ideology, not a bug. The purpose of institutional capture is to produce activist clerics to spread the gospel.

By: Robert Maranto, Michael Mills and Catherine Salmon

Published: Nov 7, 2022

With rapidity and stealth, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) ideology has come to replace the classical liberal values of merit, fairness and equality (MFE) in the academy, professional organizations, media, government and large technology companies. DEI bureaucracies have mushroomed. Many operate behind the scenes with ambiguous DEI definitions, goals and policies.

This is a significant cultural and ideological revolution, one that has been accomplished with almost no debate or operationalization of terminology. Who originated DEI? Why DEI and not another set of laudable values? Does “equity” refer to opportunity or result? How do those of mixed race fit in diversity assessments? Is the goal of racial representation proportionate to that of the population, the history of marginalization, or something else? DEI terms are defined so obtusely that they can refer to a spectrum of policies from mere platitudes to radical agendas including litmus tests and racial quotas.

In its most radical forms, DEI is derivative of neo-Marxist identitarian ideologies that attribute virtually all average group differences — from arrest rates to medical school admissions — to systemic discrimination. However, average group differences in outcomes can reflect a variety of factors (see Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs and Steel”). The unexamined acceptance of DEI, however defined, is surprising in a free society where critics are encouraged to challenge and debate significant social changes. The time for a national debate over the conflicting values of DEI and MFE is long overdue.    

For example, one-fifth of the advertisements for higher education faculty jobs (and more for prestigious posts) require applicants to write statements of allegiance to DEI. Academic employment often depends on DEI relevant presentations at scholarly conferences and publications in scholarly journals. Increasingly, scholars are required to explain in advance how their research supports DEI. Such litmus tests are traditionally associated with totalitarian regimes and, in America, with McCarthyism. We all know how well those turned out.

Professional organizations such as the American Psychological Association, the American Bar Association, and even the more moderate American Political Science Association are adopting DEI initiatives, embracing empirically contested concepts such as implicit bias and endorsing legally questionable hiring and admissions policies that utilize de facto racial quotas.

In the academy, DEI and other identitarian orthodoxies are often mandated to be taught in student orientations and required courses, and enforced by campus DEI bureaucrats who now outnumber history faculty. By categorizing virtually any criticism as “prejudiced,” DEI bureaucracies can chill free speech and have empowered some college presidents to slander their critics as bigots and then terminate them. Program renewals for academic departments, and thus continued employment for professors and graduate students, are increasingly tied to embracing DEI rhetoric and goals.

DEI in many respects is a revolutionary ideology. But it is winning. This is in part due to fear of ostracism, censorship or termination — but also because you can’t beat something with nothing.

Enter University of Chicago Professor Dorian Abbot’s DEI alternative, merit, fairness, and equality (MFE), which is consistent with traditional Enlightenment and scientific values. Under MFE, academic decisions are based primarily on academic merit, well validated standardized test scores, grades and, for faculty, publication and teaching records. Individuals are primarily evaluated on their achievements, not by their group identities. This respects individual dignity and promotes the primary mission of research in higher education: the production of knowledge.

MFE also accords with public opinion. The Pew Research Center found that more than 90 percent of Americans want high school grades to influence college admissions and more than 80 percent want standardized testing to play a role. Seventy-five percent of Americans believe that gender, race or ethnicity should not factor into educational admissions decisions. As Kenny Xu points out in “An Inconvenient Minority: The Attack on Asian American Excellence and the Fight for Meritocracy,” MFE would actually increase demographic diversity by ending the unfair quotas against Asians at elite schools. One study found that at Harvard an Asian American applicant with a 25 percent chance of admission would have a 35 percent chance of admission if Caucasion, a 75 percent chance if Hispanic, and 95 percent if Black.

But the powerful avoid debating their critics. Just as Alabama segregationist governor George Wallace never debated Martin Luther King, DEI backers with institutional power show no enthusiasm for defending their ideas in real debates. Without vigorous open and civil debate, DEI bureaucracies will continue to impose doctrinal training programs, litmus tests, censorship and discrimination. Unless this is challenged, we risk entering a new era of institutionalized McCarthyism.

==

By: Lawrence Krauss

Published: Oct 20, 2021

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was supposed to host Thursday’s John Carlson Lecture on climate. MIT’s department of earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences canceled the event because the speaker turned out to have expressed a dissenting opinion—though not about climate science. University of Chicago geophysicist Dorian Abbot argued in a Newsweek piece that universities’ obsession with “diversity, equity and inclusion,” or DEI, “threatens to derail their primary mission: the production and dissemination of knowledge.” If MIT wanted to prove Mr. Abbot’s point, it could hardly have done better. (His lecture will be hosted instead by Princeton’s conservative redoubt, the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.)

DEI efforts have been under way for decades, but recently they have come to dominate teaching and research agendas, including in the hard sciences. Many scientific disciplines, including my own area of physics, had too few women and minorities in the 1970s and ’80s. Newly established diversity offices developed procedures to counter the possibility that underlying issues might interfere with ensuring both excellence and diversity. As chairman of a physics department in the 1990s, I had to write a statement justifying each appointment we made that went to a white man.

Once entrenched, the DEI offices began to grow unchecked. They became huge and expensive offices not subject to faculty oversight and now work to impose “equity” not only by discriminating in favor of female and minority candidates but by demanding and enforcing ideological commitments from new faculty.

Traditionally, applicants for a science faculty position submit published articles, recommendations from mentors and colleagues, and a statement of their proposed research and teaching interests. University selection committees use this information to assess their qualifications for research and teaching.

Several years ago, one began to see an additional criterion in advertisements for faculty openings. As a recent Cornell ad puts it: “Also required is a statement of diversity, equity and inclusion describing the applicant’s efforts and aspirations to promote equity, inclusion and diversity through teaching, research and service.” This sort of requirement became more common and is now virtually ubiquitous. Of the 25 most recent advertisements for junior faculty that appeared in Physics Today online listings as of Oct. 15—from research institutions like Caltech to liberal-arts colleges like Bryn Mawr, and even in areas as esoteric as quantum engineering and theoretical astrophysics—24 require applicants to demonstrate an explicit, active commitment to the DEI agenda.

This isn’t merely pro forma; it’s a real barrier to employment. The life-sciences department at the University of California, Berkeley reports that it rejected 76% of applicants in 2018-19 based on their diversity statements without looking at their research records. A colleague at a major research institution, who asked to remain anonymous to protect her students, wrote to me: “I have a student on the market this year, agonizing more on the diversity statement than on the research proposal. He even took training where they taught them how to write one. It breaks my heart to see this.” Other colleagues relate that their white male postdocs aren’t getting interviews or have chosen to seek jobs outside academia.

This is happening not only in universities. Last week the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a biomedical research charity, announced a $2.2 billion initiative aimed at reducing racial disparity, made possible by a contraction in its funding of significant research for senior investigators. The initiative includes $1.2 billion in grants for early-career researchers. Science magazine reports that because antidiscrimination law prohibits disqualifying applicants on the basis of race and sex, the recipients will be chosen based on their “commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion,” in the words of the institute’s president, Erin O’Shea. How? “Diversity statements,” she says, are “a very promising approach.”

The DEI monomania has contributed to the crisis of free speech on campus. As Mr. Abbot’s cancellation illustrates, even tenured senior faculty aren’t immune.

Stephen Porter, a North Carolina State education professor, has sued the school, alleging that it “intentionally and systematically excluded him from departmental programs and activities that are necessary for him to fulfill his job” for speaking out against the DEI agenda.

All this creates a climate of pervasive fear on campus and shuts down what should be an important academic discussion. After I wrote an article in these pages about the intrusion of ideology into science, I heard from faculty around the country who wrote under pseudonyms that they were afraid of being marginalized, disciplined or fired if administrators discovered their emails.

Beyond these fearful faculty members, and talented would-be scientists who will be dissuaded or excluded from academic research, DEI offices are working to indoctrinate incoming students. This year at Princeton, the New York Post reports, freshmen were required to watch a video promoting “social justice” and describing dissenting debate as “masculine-ized bravado.” If such efforts succeed, a new generation of students won’t have the opportunity to subject their own viewpoints to challenge—surely one of the benefits of higher education.

Critics have likened DEI statements to the loyalty oaths of the Red Scare. In 1950 the University of California fired 31 faculty members for refusing to sign a statement disavowing any party advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government. That violated their freedom of speech and conscience, but this is worse. Whereas a loyalty oath compels assent to authority, a DEI statement demands active ideological engagement. It’s less like the excesses of anticommunism than like communism itself.

Mr. Krauss, a theoretical physicist, is president of the Origins Project Foundation. His newest book is “The Physics of Climate Change.”

==

Remember this?

https://toofab.com/2020/11/25/plumbing-company-eviscerated-on-yelp-after-video-purports-to-show-owner-firing-employee-for-refusing-to-pray/

“You don’t have to believe in God, you don’t have to like it — you have to participate. If you don’t, that’s okay — you don’t have to work here,” the boss says.

“You’re getting paid to be here. This is our first core purpose. So if you don’t want to participate, that’s okay. Leave your stuff here, you don’t have to work here. It’s not an option.”

When one employee objects, he is cast out.

“Well you can’t work here,” he tells him. “So what are you going to do? Listen, you can go get an attorney, leave your stuff here — we’re done.”

Same thing.

When swearing allegiance to your ideology - rather than merit, competence or qualification - makes or breaks professional and academic careers, you’re not fighting the system. You are the system.