Assessing a debate about a controversial hiring practice
This month, Professor Randall L. Kennedy, an eminent scholar of race and civil rights, published an op-ed in The Harvard Crimson denouncing the use of diversity, equity, and inclusion statements in academic hiring. “I am a scholar on the left committed to struggles for social justice,” he wrote. “The realities surrounding mandatory DEI statements, however, make me wince.”
More and more colleges started requiring faculty to submit these statements in recent years, until legislatures in red states began to outlaw them. They remain common at private institutions and in blue states. Kennedy lamented that at Harvard and elsewhere, aspiring professors are required to “profess and flaunt” their faith in DEI in a process that “leans heavily and tendentiously towards varieties of academic leftism.” He concluded that DEI statements “ought to be abandoned.”
Conor Friedersdorf: The hypocrisy of mandatory diversity statements
But a “contrasting perspective” on diversity statements that the Crimson published argued that “furor over diversity statements in hiring is a red herring.” Edward J. Hall, a Harvard philosophy professor, acknowledged flaws in the way DEI statements are currently used, going so far as to declare, “I share my colleague professor Randall L. Kennedy’s anger.” However, he continued, “we should direct that anger at its proper target: not diversity statements themselves, but rather the horribly distorted view that has taken hold about what they should contain.”
The headline of his op-ed, “Don’t Eliminate. Improve,” seemed to endorse a reformist position on DEI statements that I’ve begun to encounter often in my reporting. Lots of liberal-minded academics feel favorably toward diversity and inclusion as values, but they also dislike dogmatism and coercion, qualities that they see in today’s DEI statements. If only there were a way for a hiring process to advance DEI without straying into illiberalism.
But people who see the flaws of the status quo should not be seduced by the illusion that tweaking how DEI statements are solicited or scored is a solution. In fact, interviewing Hall, the ostensible reformer in the Harvard Crimson debate, left me more convinced that abolishing DEI statements is the best way forward.
In Kennedy’s case against DEI statements, he provides an example: a job opening for an assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where applicants are required to submit a statement of teaching philosophy that includes “a description of their ‘orientation toward diversity, equity, and inclusion practices.’”
Notice what is implied: that there is a set of known DEI practices professors can deploy to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion, if they possess the desire to do so. In reality, however, there are robust scholarly debates about how best to advance or even define diversity, equity, and inclusion, let alone a bundle of all three values. One cannot reliably distinguish among applicants by their “orientation to DEI practices” without advantaging one side in such debates, infringing on academic freedom and contributing to an ideological monoculture.
I am not a neutral observer here. In 2023, I published “The Hypocrisy of Mandatory Diversity Statements,” in which I argued that forcing all who seek faculty jobs to pledge fealty to the same values will make colleges less diverse. I interviewed a math professor who grew up in the Soviet Union about why he abhors diversity. I documented how California’s community colleges are violating the First Amendment rights of their faculty by enforcing conformity with DEI ideology. And I endorsed Utah’s decision to eliminate diversity statements in public institutions.
Still, each time I encounter a new proposal for a reformed diversity-statement regime, I try to evaluate it on the merits. Frustratingly, Hall’s op-ed stopped short of offering details about what an improved system for DEI statements would look like. In a best-case scenario, what specific prompt would applicants be compelled to write on? How would the answers be evaluated? When pressed, Hall was up for wrestling with my skeptical questions. And his answers were illuminating. To my surprise, he and I barely disagree.
Although Hall’s op-ed was titled “Don’t Eliminate. Improve,” the position he actually wants to stake out is better summed up this way: Critics should be clear about what makes today’s DEI statements flawed, because otherwise the understandable and necessary backlash against them could go too far. It could convey the conclusion that there is no legitimate reason a faculty hiring process would be concerned with diversity, inclusion, or belonging. He believes an applicant’s orientation to diversity, if defined in the right way, is useful to probe.
“Students should come out of a liberal-arts education vastly more skilled at diagnosing, combating, and guarding against ignorance,” Hall said. “I don’t mean mere lack of knowledge but the kind of ignorance that is akin to having a blind spot.” He recounted the old riddle about the father and son who get in a car accident. Both are rushed to the hospital, where the surgeon says, “I can’t operate on this boy, he’s my son.” How can that be? Those confounded by the riddle have a blind spot: They assume the surgeon is a man, when, of course, the surgeon is the boy’s mother.
“You don’t produce knowledge without well-structured inquiry. You don’t have well-structured, healthy inquiry if it’s infected by this kind of ignorance,” Hall said. “A good liberal-arts education should provide the kind of flexibility of mind and social skills needed to identify, guard against, and combat ignorance. And if this kind of vaccination against ignorance is a core part of what we’re trying to give our students, it’s essential that students learn how and why to disagree with each other and with us.”
Conor Friedersdorf: The state that’s trying to rein in DEI without becoming Florida
And “disagreement requires diversity,” he said. “So now you’ve got a rationale for valuing diversity. You’ve got a rationale for valuing inclusion and belonging, understood the right way.” He sees belonging as classrooms where all students have “equal standing to have their voices taken up, responded to, and engaged with,” so their diverse viewpoints can work to combat ignorance.
I followed his logic. But in this example, why not ask prospective hires how they’d teach students to combat ignorance rather than about their perspective on diversity?
He agreed, noting that there is no shared understanding of what diversity means today, and that lots of applicants try to guess at what those evaluating DEI statements want to hear. “The language has been corrupted,” he said. To yield useful information, better to avoid the word diversity. Then he offered what he’d consider an improved prompt: “What do you do to foster a culture in the classroom in which students can engage in serious, good-faith, curiosity-driven disagreement? That’s a question I would like to see.”
I asked how he would evaluate different answers to that prompt.
Say one applicant writes, Having delved deeply into research literature on authoritarian personality types, I feel the best way to minimize racial animus in classroom culture is to treat members of every racial group in a color-blind manner, because who we consider “other” is malleable and raising the salience of race could foster a climate that resulted in more minority students being othered.
Meanwhile, a competing job candidate writes, Having delved deeply into critical race theory, explicitly race-conscious approaches to classroom management strike me as vital for students of color to participate as equals in curiosity-driven disagreement.
Both applicants are earnestly and cogently propounding theories that are plausibly derived from peer-reviewed scholarship and utterly in conflict. Who scores more highly?
“They both can’t be right, but they could both be excellent candidates, and they’ve signaled that by the seriousness with which they took the question,” Hall said. “I would probe for signs that they try to evaluate whether their approach is actually working. Are they absolutely convinced of the soundness of their theory, which would be worrying, or are they empirical about it and open to adjustments if it isn’t working? But on the content, I would judge them equally strong.” In a university, he argued, “you shouldn't take for granted that something as complex as teaching is an area where we should all agree there’s one right way to do it. I’m happy with a kind of pluralism.”
The information that Hall wants to elicit from job candidates, and his pluralistic attitude toward evaluating their answers, strikes me as defensible and even sensible.
But his approach is wildly different from every actual DEI-statement process I’ve seen. “Wouldn’t most supporters of today’s DEI statements hate the approach you’re proposing?” I asked.
Conor Friedersdorf: A uniquely terrible new DEI policy
“What I’m proposing is absolutely a different thing,” he said. “My vision would be viewed as hostile by many who are ardent supporters of DEI in its current incarnation.”
Hall told me that “given the current climate, it’s really not possible to get useful information from diversity statements.” In fact, “we probably should just get rid of them,” he clarified soon after. “There is not any kind of useful purpose that they’re serving, and there’s a pretty destructive purpose that they can serve.” As a result of all the signaling around DEI in academia, “we need to do some counter-signaling,” he added, to make clear that hiring committees are open to diverse perspectives from job seekers––otherwise, the effect is “perceived pressure to align with politicized concepts” that “narrows the range of perspectives we get in our applicant pools.”
After talking with Hall, I want to slightly amend my position in this debate: Colleges should fully abolish diversity statements in hiring––while noting that by doing so, they aren’t in any way implying that diversity, inclusion, or any other value is irrelevant to good teaching.
In fact, my ideal college press release announcing the end of mandatory DEI statements would clarify that lots of values, including DEI, can bear on research and teaching––and that healthy universities allow faculty members to contest how best to define and prioritize such values. The alternative, where the DEI bundle is treated as so important as to justify coercion, is anti-diversity and authoritarian.
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