Love them or hate them, diversity statements are going away at public colleges in a growing number of states.
But the problem of inequitable outcomes in higher education — from the underrepresentation of certain demographic groups to disparities in graduation rates — will not. Experts with a range of feelings about diversity statements have pitched a variety of alternative strategies to try to achieve the same goals.
Diversity statements are intended to allow those applying for faculty jobs or seeking tenure to reflect, typically in one or two pages, on how their teaching, research, and service have helped to advance an institution’s diversity goals.
Kelly A. Hogan, a professor of practice and director of undergraduate studies in the department of biology at Duke University, believes colleges ask for diversity statements in part because teaching, mentoring, and research statements are not always providing them with the kinds of information they are looking for about applicants.
Hogan said that colleges often do a poor job of explaining what they are looking for in diversity statements, as with teaching statements. As a result, applicants sometimes say the right kinds of words but offer no real proof as to what they have done. “A lot of times they don’t have evidence of actions someone has taken or things that can be observed or measured,” Hogan said.
Diversity statements vary across institutions, but they are intended to highlight faculty members’ contributions toward diversity goals, such as mentoring students or colleagues from underrepresented groups, designing a curriculum with diverse voices, or conducting research focused on minority groups. They are also used to give recognition to the “invisible labor” that often falls on women and faculty of color. While most colleges look at a campus’s diversity broadly, including first-generation college students, students with disabilities, veterans, and women in STEM fields, critics tend to focus on race, gender, and sexuality.
Diversity statements grew in popularity across higher education during the so-called racial reckoning that focused national attention on racial justice and police brutality starting in 2020. As more colleges are dealing with demographic changes and faltering enrollment, attracting and retaining students of color, who attend college and graduate at lower rates than white students, is increasingly seen as a matter of institutional survival. About one-fifth of the institutions surveyed by the American Association of University Professors in 2022 considered diversity, equity, and inclusion in tenure review in some way, although there are few solid statistics about the use of diversity statements specifically.
College administrators say the efforts are an effective way to repair decades of discrimination. Republican politicians say the practices violate the law.
Diversity statements were one area targeted by state legislation this year as lawmakers — mostly Republican — aimed to restrict diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts at public colleges, gaining traction in more states than efforts to ban diversity offices, prohibit the consideration of identity characteristics in hiring or admissions, and end mandatory diversity training. Florida, North Carolina, North Dakota, and Texas have all adopted laws this year prohibiting the use of diversity statements; the Idaho State Board of Education and the Arizona Board of Regents have banned their use at public colleges, and a handful of public universities and university systems, including the University of Missouri system and the University System of Georgia, have also ended the practice.
Critics argue diversity statements actually serve as loyalty oaths or political litmus tests and that they should be illegal for public institutions.
Diversity statements are “like asking people to write a letter of reference for themselves.”
Brian Leiter, a professor of jurisprudence and director of the Center for Law, Philosophy, and Human Values at the University of Chicago, believes both diversity statements and teaching statements are useless because they are “like asking people to write a letter of reference for themselves.”
Leiter is skeptical of how well colleges can assess a job candidate’s ability to, say, teach a diverse group of students, based solely on such statements. He said reviewing teaching evaluations or observing an instructor in class would provide better insight. “There’s really no way to assess that going in, right?” Leiter said. “It is very, very hard to do.”
He suggests that colleges provide expert guidance to professors from people who are “not diversity experts, but people [who] actually know something about teaching,” and that institutions seriously evaluate how well professors teach when they’re up for tenure review.
Brian Soucek, a professor of law at the University of California at Davis who has been among the most vocal supporters of diversity statements, said that some of their critics appear to misunderstand how they are supposed to work. He argues that diversity statements should focus on a candidate’s actions or plans regarding diversity, equity, or inclusion, rather than their ideological beliefs.
But Soucek acknowledged that the term “diversity statement” has come to have certain connotations that are not helpful. “It’s not unlike critical race theory or other things that have recently been attacked by the right,” he said. “And maybe it’s gotten to a point where using that term is no longer useful, whereas asking people to discuss how their teaching and research reaches [a] broad set of students and audiences might be something that more people can coalesce around [and] doesn’t have the same connotations of DEI.”
Soucek said colleges can “absolutely” ask about those types of contributions in research and service statements if diversity statements are no longer allowed. “What matters is just that the university be clear that these are contributions that they value,” he said, adding, “I’d hate to think that they’re just going to do this through winks and nods.”
Another approach would be to treat inclusive teaching, which emphasizes treating all students equitably, ensuring they have the tools they need to succeed, and helping them feel welcomed and valued, as a distinct skill set.
Bryan Dewsbury, an associate professor of biology at Florida International University whose research focuses on STEM education, said colleges could seek out job candidates who have been trained in inclusive-teaching strategies, for example, to find candidates with those skills, “without maybe the performative aspect of a diversity statement.”
Another way to address the concerns of diversity-statement critics would be to ask job candidates deeper questions about how their teaching or research considers diversity. For example, Hogan, the Duke professor, said employers could ask job candidates or faculty seeking tenure “not just how do you know students are learning, but in which ways do you know that all students are learning? And what do you do when it’s clear that it’s not working for some students or some student groups?” Then ask for examples that can be observed and measured.
A job candidate could then talk about introducing guided-reading questions to help more students be able to prepare before class. They could reference research showing which groups of students this strategy might help more. And then they might include notes from an observation of a class showing the professor using the technique, Hogan said.
Students come in with some inequities in terms of their backgrounds, but one instructor can actually make a difference.
Hogan was inspired to learn about inclusive techniques after she had been teaching introductory-science classes at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for several years, and a colleague shared demographic data about Hogan’s students that she found surprising and incredibly disappointing.
Hogan learned that Black and Latino/a students in her classes were struggling, prompting her reflect to on whether she was a good teacher, or perhaps an excellent one, but only for some students. She started to think seriously about what she could do to help close the gaps, and then she started experimenting with different teaching strategies and collecting data to assess the results. While all of her students benefited from the new techniques, she found that underrepresented students benefited disproportionately.
“Students come in with some inequities in terms of their backgrounds, but one instructor can actually make a difference,” Hogan said. “And it’s really about thinking about the course and the structure and the interactions with students rather than blaming the students.”
