In a recent Chronicle Review essay, Jeffrey Flier repudiated the growing practice of asking faculty members to include diversity statements in their hiring, promotion, and review materials. On the face of it, Flier’s argument is reasonable and thoughtful. After all, he agrees that much has been achieved, and that much still remains to be done, in the elimination of bias and prejudice. But, he claims, mandatory diversity statements risk introducing “politically influenced litmus tests” to faculty evaluations and undermining the “objectivity of these reviews … essential to the integrity of the academy.” These are serious charges and need to be addressed.
Contrary to Flier’s scaremongering, diversity statements are a way to strengthen the academy’s mission to serve all of its constituencies with integrity and fairness. He objects that there is no consensus about the definitions of diversity, equity, and inclusion. But scholars are often tasked with assessing our peers’ work in domains that are not static or settled. In such situations, we look to experts and peers — but we also embrace the freedom to introduce our own ideas.
Claims that the academy is a space of objective assessment do not square with reality, particularly for those on the margins. The progress that Flier and others rightly point to occurred precisely because scholars employed strategies to create more-diverse and inclusive admissions, retention, and career-development paths. It didn’t happen by chance or simply because of demographic shifts.
Recently, Carmen Mitchell, a Ph.D. student at the University of Louisville, presented a compelling argument supporting the University of California at Los Angeles’s diversity-statement policy with examples of how equitable and inclusive environments had led to her own pursuit of a doctorate. Much of the work of producing such environments is invisible — not credited in decisions on promotion and tenure — and disproportionately performed by people of color, women, queer, and other underrepresented faculty members. This is the genesis of education scholar Amado Padilla’s concept of “cultural taxation” and Geneva Gay’s notion of “problematic popularity” (in the vernacular, the “Black/Brown tax” and its many variants). In response, the university must acknowledge that diversity work is in fact critical to the values that have led to progress — and that it must be shared by all members of the academic community. Instead of relying on Herculean efforts by marginalized faculty members, it should be distributed among all, as well as administrators.
This is the origin of diversity policies like UCLA’s. Such policies put those who have relied on the efforts of culturally taxed colleagues on notice that they, too, must do their part to build an academy that provides opportunity for all. It is notable that UCLA asks for “past, present, and future (planned) contributions to equity, diversity, and inclusion.” If issues of equity and diversity were not already on one’s radar, this invites engagement. For example, a faculty member might create a plan to introduce students from an underrepresented population to their research area via guest lecturing in a colleague’s class or presenting research at a community forum.
Further, the exercise of writing, reviewing, and committing to a statement of equity, diversity, and inclusion can be instructive to all members of the academic community, not only those who hold marginalized identities. As the literary scholar Patricia Matthew suggests in the preface to Written/Unwritten: Diversity and the Hidden Truths of Tenure (University of North Carolina Press, 2016), thinking about inclusion efforts can help scholars learn that “it’s not enough not to be racist … or offer a sympathetic nod when they see that faculty of color are being treated unfairly.” Further engagement by all faculty members can help them understand “what to do (and what not to say)” and to develop “a fuller understanding of what their colleagues of color face.” While Matthew’s anthology focuses on race, diversity statements address the many forms of exclusion with which higher education struggles.
The university must acknowledge that diversity work is critical to its values.
Providing equitable environments that inspire students to pursue their academic dreams, and ensuring that they can do their work free from harassment or violence, is a task our profession must commit to with immediacy and zeal. This is an articulation of values that academics of every political stripe should be faithful to. Diversity statements as critical scholarly documents will foster productive conversations about the faculty’s role in shaping and improving higher education.
To be sure, requiring such statements runs the risk of participating in what Roderick Ferguson calls the “bureaucratization of diversity” — institutional lip service that does not actually bring about change. In order for diversity statements to avoid this pitfall, they must ask faculty members not to toe a line or embrace a single ideology but to demonstrate deep engagement with their students and their community. There can be no single model for this, because what constitutes diversity, equity, and inclusion in the rehearsal room, science lab, playing field, library, lecture hall, or seminar room will differ by discipline and instructor.
This discussion is an apt opportunity to broaden the dialogue about how all faculty members, but especially marginalized faculty members, are taxed with demands on their time and energy — and how the academy has not invested sufficient resources to measure those contributions. Indeed, it has allowed many faculty members to simply opt out of the critical work of broadening access and progress. As the feminist scholar Sara Ahmed says, “When diversity becomes a conversation, a space is opened up.” Diversity statements can illuminate the invisible labor that goes into making that conversation possible — and help replace good intentions with actions and accountability.
Charlotte M. Canning is a professor of drama at the University of Texas at Austin, where Richard J. Reddick is an associate professor of educational leadership and policy and of African and African Diaspora Studies.
