It’s Time to Stop the Double Talk Around Diversity Hiring

A few days ago, a Yale University history postdoc named David Austin Walsh blew up the internet with a since-deleted X post lamenting the fact that being a white male helped make him “unemployable as a 20th-century American historian.” The post went viral in part because Walsh, in addition to being an early-career academic, is known as a prominent progressive polemicist. So his critics delighted in his seeming disillusionment with progressive diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, while his allies incredulously lambasted him for claiming that his white maleness might be costly on the job market. Walsh quickly deleted his post, apologized, and renounced his newfound supporters on the right.

I don’t know Walsh. I wish him well, and I’m not interested in further discussing his case. But I do think his story offers an opportunity for a long-overdue conversation about diversity hiring in academe. By “diversity hiring,” I mean using demographic factors (usually race and gender, occasionally sexual orientation and gender identity) as pivotal criteria in hiring faculty members.

I have seen this done in three different ways. First, it can be done within normal open faculty searches, when a candidate is elevated or passed over for demographic reasons. This can be done underhandedly or explicitly. Open searches sometimes target fields like race or justice for the purpose of facilitating or laundering diversity hiring, but some searches in these areas have different purposes, of course, and they are legitimate fields of study.

Second, diversity hiring can be done through targeted hires. Usually these hires come from set-aside programs, where the university holds a certain number of positions for targeted diversity hires. Departments nominate candidates for these positions, bypassing an open search. Targeted hires can also happen on an ad-hoc basis, for example, when a dean makes an extra tenure line available to a finalist in an open search who was not initially selected but who is demographically appealing.

Third, open searches can explicitly advertise that only candidates with specific demographic characteristics will be considered. This is rare in the United States, where race and sex discrimination are illegal under Titles VI and VII of the Civil Rights Act, but it is common in Canada, where such discrimination is often legal.

An honest conversation about diversity hiring must start by acknowledging the basic fact that, whether we like it or not, diversity hiring has been happening on a large scale for the past decade (the period in which colleges shifted sharply to the left by many measures), especially in the years since the summer of 2020.

It is plainly obvious to anyone who has been a faculty member over the past decade that diversity hiring is widespread. In my experience, it is frankly discussed in private, by both its supporters and its opponents. I’ve also seen it up close, as both a job candidate and a faculty member.

When I was on the job market between 2016 and 2018, I had seven on-campus interviews. I was told during three of them (all in 2018) that my demographic identity was in some way disqualifying. Two of these interviews were at public colleges in California, where diversity hiring is clearly illegal under Proposition 209. In one case, a search-committee member, who I knew before the search, told me, “Half the search committee didn’t want to interview another white man, but we liked your diversity statement.” In the second case, the search was in a broad interdisciplinary area and I asked a member of the faculty if they had insights into what the department was looking for. Their answer: “Honestly? Women.” In the third case (which took place in Canada), I was told by the search chair that the university had an explicit policy (Article 20.01a, on page 66, here) stating that departments whose faculty composition failed to meet multidimensional demographic quotas could only hire a straight able-bodied white man if he was “substantially apart” in his qualifications from the other candidates — i.e., better by a lot.

For the record, I think it’s highly plausible that diversity hiring didn’t cost me any of these jobs. All the candidates who were eventually hired were excellent, and I ended up getting a great job somewhere else. I’ve also had a privileged upbringing in many important ways. I’m not asking anyone to feel sorry for me.

Still, my experience, like Walsh’s, speaks to an incontrovertible truth: Colleges do consider race, gender, and other demographic factors in faculty hiring. I know many white male job candidates who have similar interview stories from the past 10 years, and I think diversity hiring probably was pivotal to some of them leaving academe. And I also know non-male and/or non-white job candidates who were invited to apply for faculty positions by members of search committees who told them that only members of their demographic group would be given serious consideration.

Confidentiality prevents me from sharing anecdotes from the searching side, but my current dean told our college’s faculty senate in November 2022 (the minutes are supposed to be public record) that roughly 90 percent of the 20 most recent hires were made through a program called the Faculty Diversity Action Plan (FDAP), which started shortly after the murder of George Floyd. (Before publishing this, I reached out to the University of Colorado at Boulder’s director of issues management, Nicole Mueksch. She told me that the College of Arts and Sciences hired 22 faculty members who started between the fall of 2021 and the fall of 2022, of which 12 were funded by FDAP.) FDAP sets aside a large fraction of vacated positions for diversity hires, which were often targeted (i.e., a department proposed to hire a specific person rather than run a search). It was clear from the get-go that the intent of FDAP was to conduct diversity hiring. For example, the 2020 template for FDAP hiring requests asked departments to answer the following question: “How will this hire increase the number of underrepresented faculty members in the unit (e.g., U.S. Faculty of Color, women in disciplines where underrepresented)?” (In 2023, FDAP was rebranded as “Critical Needs Hiring” and the demographic objectives were made somewhat more opaque.) My university is in no way an outlier here; similar programs are widespread at other institutions.

In Canada, diversity hiring is legal, and so it is often (but not always) practiced out in the open. For example, Canadian colleges have a prestigious government-subsidized program called Canada Research Chairs (CRCs), whose intent is to encourage the best and brightest faculty recruits to come to (or stay in) Canada. Over the years, I have noticed an increasing number of CRC job ads explicitly restricting who can apply based on race and gender (or occasionally sexual orientation or disability). The restrictions varied, but they always excluded straight able-bodied white men. After 2020, it seemed to me that the fraction of job ads with demographic restrictions became a clear majority. When I systematically tracked every 2023 CRC posting between July 1 and December 31, and cataloged their demographic restrictions or lack thereof, I found 71 CRC job postings, of which 39 (55 percent) had explicit demographic restrictions, ranging from excluding able-bodied straight white men to requiring candidates to be both Indigenous and female or gender nonconforming (see the table for exact language).

When discussing this topic in academe or online, I often encounter people who will argue one minute that diversity hiring is good and we should do more of it, but who will the next minute angrily deny that it is happening. Colleges breed this kind of cognitive dissonance. They make you undergo trainings when you start your faculty job or join a search committee, which make it clear that the college prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation (and, at my university, political affiliation and political philosophy). But then they create programs like FDAP, and practices like requiring DEI statements from job candidates, whose purpose is plainly to discriminate in exactly these ways. The result is a situation where no one really knows what the rules are.

Why all this double talk? My best guess is it’s a combination of three things.

First, people don’t want to face the hard but unavoidable trade-offs that diversity hiring poses. For example, demographic turnover of faculty is very slow. This means that changing faculty demographics will take a very long time, especially if you’re not allowed to discriminate. Suppose you have 40 faculty members in a unit that gets to hire every three years, on average, and the unit has 25 white male faculty. If you set a goal of only having 15 white male faculty — which most DEI advocates would say is not that ambitious — it will still take 30 years with a policy of no white male hires and only white male retirees to get there. If you adhere to antidiscrimination laws, it will take even longer. What college leader wants to tell their student activists that it will probably take decades to meaningfully change the demographics of the faculty? What college leader wants to tell their white male graduate students or postdocs that their diversity goals may require extreme and long-lasting forms of discrimination that could push them permanently out of the profession?

Relatedly, in a diversifying country like the United States or Canada, the cohort of 18- to 21-year-olds will always be more racially diverse than the cohort of 45- to 55-year-olds (the age of the modal tenure-track faculty member). This means that — even in a fantasy world where all historical injustices have been erased — there will still be a tension between nondiscrimination and having a faculty that reflects the student body’s demographics.

Simple math tells us that constraints never improve, and sometimes hinder, our ability to meet objectives. This means that hiring with a priori demographic constraints should produce worse outcomes than open searches, on average, no matter how talent is distributed across demographics. But admitting that fact risks stigmatizing people hired in targeted searches, the vast majority of whom are eminently qualified and great at their jobs. The stigma of being hired for one’s race or gender is also undesirable.

A second reason for all the double talk is that diversity hiring in the United States is often on shaky legal ground, and college leaders want to avoid calling attention to it. Today, critics of DEI statements think of the practice as a means of enforcing political orthodoxies and compelling speech. But DEI statements actually originated in the University of California system as a way to launder diversity hiring and get around antidiscrimination laws, by defining contributions to diversity as merit-based and thereby exempt them from Proposition 209.

U.S. civil-rights laws may also create self-contradictory mandates, depending on how they are applied and enforced. Colleges may feel exposed to legal scrutiny under the disparate impact doctrine of Titles VI and VII if their faculty demographics stray too far from their talent pools. But illegal discrimination may be the only way to avoid demographic mismatch due to slow turnover or innocuous demographic differences (e.g., in topical interests and other preferences, on average, between men and women) unaccounted for in how talent pools are defined.

If colleges are to defend diversity hiring legally, one of their best arguments may be that diversity makes teams more effective. The U.S. Supreme Court allowed this justification for race-conscious admissions, before the recent SFFA v. Harvard decision. But in my experience, what actually motivates most college leaders to pursue diversity hiring, behind the scenes, is a desire to remedy past and present societal injustices. So, colleges will frame their diversity-hiring programs in the language of diversity, but they practice it in ways that are more consistent with remedying injustice. For example, diversity hiring typically doesn’t target Christians, conservatives, straight people, or men in female-dominated fields, even though these groups are underrepresented among professors.

The third reason for double talk is that diversity hiring is unpopular with the public. A 2019 Pew survey found that 74 percent of Americans believe that employers should “only take a person’s qualifications into account, even if it results in less diversity.” Majorities within the surveyed racial subgroups agreed with this statement, as well as majorities of both Democrats and Republicans. This means that being too open about diversity hiring is reputationally risky to colleges, even if it were legal. Leaders running diversity-hiring programs — who strongly believe in them and don’t want diversity hiring to stop — therefore have an incentive to obfuscate the programs’ intent.

Reasonable people can disagree about the ethics of diversity hiring, which are complex. The project of remedying U.S. history of racial injustice clearly isn’t finished, which strengthens the justice case for diversity hiring. On the other hand, applying racial preferences at the end of the pipeline will tend to benefit relatively privileged members of targeted groups (e.g., minorities from high-income families, women with trailing spouses and no children), and may punish relatively disadvantaged members of other groups (e.g., low-income whites, single dads). The large immigrant populations in the United States and Canada also create related ethical complications for diversity hiring. For example, does it make sense to choose a Nigerian immigrant over a Swedish one for a U.S. faculty position, as a remedy to white Americans’ past treatment of Black Americans? Women now make up the majority of undergraduate students, doctoral students, and junior faculty at U.S. colleges but are still underrepresented at higher ranks and in some fields like the physical sciences. How should these demographic nuances affect diversity hiring?

These are hard questions, which many other industries wrestle with too. Colleges would do society a great service if they could serve as conveners of open, honest, rigorous, and compassionate dialogues on these questions. But at the moment, the topic remains taboo. For example, the University of Chicago geoscientist Dorian Abbot was famously mobbed by his department’s graduate students in 2020, and then uninvited from a prestigious lectureship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2021, for criticizing diversity hiring.

How do we start the conversation? At a minimum, colleges owe it to the public to be transparent about what their diversity-hiring practices are and what the justification for them is. If a university decides that its DEI goals require excluding candidates for demographic reasons, then it should have the decency to say so explicitly and publicly. Don’t make candidates waste their time applying or interviewing for jobs if you have no intention of giving them full consideration. And don’t gaslight candidates into thinking they aren’t being excluded if you are, in fact, excluding them. If a university thinks it has a compelling interest in diversity hiring, then its leaders should have the courage of their convictions and defend the practice publicly and transparently.

Of course, colleges also have a duty to ensure that their hiring practices are both legal and consistent with their stated policies. If their policies state (as most do) that candidates should not be discriminated against on the basis of race, gender, and other characteristics, then colleges should either stick to that commitment or change their policies. If their policies say (as most do) that discrimination is a punishable violation, then they should punish violations, even if they are perpetrated by provosts, deans, chairs, or other senior administrators. If colleges want to practice diversity hiring in ways that are currently illegal, they should publicly make their case that the law needs to change, and they should follow the existing law until it does.

Governments and boards of trustees or regents should hold colleges’ feet to the fire here, too. If the widespread practices I described above are illegal in the United States, then governments should not wait for the courts to intervene. It may be hard to find plaintiffs willing to risk their careers by suing over diversity hiring. Colleges hoping to skirt discrimination laws may be counting on this. Governments should therefore take the lead, for instance, by opening investigations through the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights or the Congress, as has been done recently regarding antisemitism.

Affirmative action is a complex, multifaceted issue with real trade-offs. Any approach we take will affect the careers of real people. We owe it to ourselves to discuss this issue openly, honestly, and with compassion for all involved. To the extent that diversity hiring is intended to remedy individual disadvantage, improve pipelines, and identify promising but unconventional candidates, let’s take those goals seriously too. There are lots of evidence-based ways to advance such goals, even in contexts where diversity hiring itself is illegal. (In fact, some would argue there are much better ways to advance these objectives than diversity hiring.) But colleges also owe it to their constituents — on and off campus — to follow the law and to make their internal policies transparent, consistent, and enforced.