Diversity statements have endured a rough few months.
The statements, which generally ask people applying for faculty jobs or seeking promotion or tenure to describe how they can contribute to a college’s diversity, equity, and inclusion goals, have seen nine states pass bans on their use in the past two years. And when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences each announced earlier this year that they would no longer require job candidates to write diversity statements, commentators across higher education began to ask: Is the diversity statement dead?
The question would have seemed ludicrous just a handful of years ago, at the height of the racial unrest that followed George Floyd’s murder in 2020. Now, though, even some proponents of the diversity statement wonder whether what was once considered a key tool in the effort to diversify the professoriate has been permanently blunted. But the statements clearly haven’t disappeared: A Heterodox Academy analysis found that nearly a quarter of ads for full-time professorships in August 2024 required candidates to either submit a diversity statement or address diversity in other written materials.
Though there isn’t much longitudinal data to indicate whether that proportion has changed over the years, the intensity of the pushback against diversity statements raises several questions. Are they flawed as a concept? Are they a good idea that has been poorly executed? Have they been irreparably damaged by campus and national politics? Or will diversity statements, in some form, remain a part of higher ed?
A Long History
One of the earliest known examples of an institution requesting diversity statements came in 2001, at Bucks County Community College, in Pennsylvania. As part of its job application, Bucks County asked candidates to “provide a brief statement of your commitment to diversity and how this commitment is demonstrated in your work.”
To James J. Linksz, then the president of Bucks County, the request was a “rather pragmatic” one. It was, he says, “simply the tenor of the times” to account for the changing demographics of the student body and what was at the time a nascent movement toward diversity in the hiring process. Why not tell applicants, he reasoned, that the college was “looking for people who are comfortable working with a variety of students?”
Many scholars credit the University of California system with bringing diversity statements to national prominence. The system revised its policies in 2015 to note that “contributions in all areas of faculty achievement that promote equal opportunity and diversity should be given due recognition” in the promotion and tenure processes. Several of its campuses had undertaken pilot projects putting that policy to work in faculty searches.
In 2018, the University of California at Los Angeles went a step further, announcing it would require diversity statements of all tenure-track job candidates and of professors going up for tenure or promotion. The decision made “all the sense in the world,” recalls Jerry Kang, then UCLA’s vice chancellor for equity, diversity, and inclusion. “What is the point of saying that part of the merit criteria include promoting ‘equal opportunity and diversity,’ and giving due recognition to it, if we never ask what it is that you’ve done to promote equal opportunity and diversity?” A year later, the system’s Academic Council adopted a recommendation that diversity statements be required across the system.
Resistance followed. The then-chair of the University of California at Davis’s mathematics department took to The Wall Street Journal with an op-ed whose headline declared the diversity statement to be “The University’s New Loyalty Oath.” It wasn’t a new argument, and it echoed the critique that such statements were inherently flawed because they constituted viewpoint discrimination. In 2001, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (then known as the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) described the diversity-statement requirement at Bucks County as a “politically correct equivalent of a loyalty oath, as objectionable as a 1950s question asking for a statement from an applicant about his or her ‘commitment to patriotism’ or ‘commitment to Americanism.’ Such inquisitorial abuse of authority was beyond the pale then; it is beyond the pale now.”
FIRE does not oppose diversity per se — just the notion of forcing faculty members or job candidates to endorse specific views, says Daniel Ortner, a lawyer there. “State public universities can’t discriminate based on viewpoint. They can’t say you have to agree with antiracism or you have to oppose antiracism. This kind of cuts both ways.”
To Linksz, such resistance wasn’t unexpected. “I don’t know that it was a surprise to us that not everybody would have been 100 percent in favor of explicitly saying what we were doing.” What did surprise him, though, was the fervor with which “conservative voices began to organize” in opposition. “To me,” he says now, “that was the beginning of what we see today.”
Procedural Concerns
As diversity statements spread, a different critique emerged, especially among those who don’t particularly object to the goals of such statements.
“The idea of a DEI statement in and of itself is not objectionable,” says Linda S. Ficht, a clinical associate professor in Purdue University’s business school. “It’s how it’s being done and when it’s being done that is causing the problems.”
Placing a greater emphasis on candidates’ beliefs about diversity instead of on their actions, as many statements do, increases the likelihood that candidates will simply “tell the university what they think it wants to hear,” without any “sincere commitment,” Ficht and her co-author wrote in a 2023 paper on the role of diversity statements in job searches.
“What is the value in getting a statement from someone that is very likely not to even be accurate,” Ficht asks, “and then to use that statement as a primary tool for selection?” Ficht and her co-author Julia Levashina call that phenomenon “lieversity,” and they say it makes diversity statements an unreliable standard for hiring.
“Lieversity” can extend to institutions, too. Asking applicants to faculty jobs for diversity statements rings hollow when administrators aren’t required to submit them, Ficht argues. “If this was a true attempt to align goals with organizational values, it would be done at all levels of the organization.” (At the time the article was published, Ficht was an assistant professor of business law at Christopher Newport University.)
A better bet, Ficht and Levashina suggest, is to ask candidates to list specific DEI-related work they’ve done, which committees could verify.
More-concrete information about applicants’ previous work, the scholars add, is also likely to be a better predictor of their future performance. As it stands, they say, there is no research proving a correlation between scholars submitting standout diversity statements and their actual performance in the job, which fundamentally calls into question any process that uses diversity statements as an initial screening tool. Ficht points to a hiring process at the University of California at Berkeley during the 2018-19 academic year that did just that, eliminating 75 percent of candidates for a life-sciences job based solely on their diversity statements. (That statistic has been cited in several other papers critical of the statements’ overreach.) Similarly, a professor claimed last year that he was denied a job offer because of past skeptical comments he’d made about diversity statements.
The idea of a DEI statement in and of itself is not objectionable. It’s how it’s being done and when it’s being done that is causing the problems.
Formalizing how DEI statements are evaluated, through reference checks and through rubrics and guidelines, can also mitigate implicit bias, says Sara P. Bombaci, an assistant professor at Colorado State University at Fort Collins. “We know that if people are following some sort of standardized rubric and trying their best to evaluate candidates by the same yardstick, if you will, the bias is still there. It’s not gone, but we do better,” she says.
Too often, Bombaci and Liba Pejchar, both of the department of fish, wildlife, and conservation biology at Fort Collins, found in a 2022 paper, such yardsticks are missing. Of the nearly 200 DEI officers they surveyed, 85 percent said they lacked guidance from their institutions on evaluating diversity statements. Research and teaching statements, by contrast, are usually included more explicitly in the rubrics faculty committees use to evaluate candidates, Bombaci points out.
But even the existence of a rubric is unlikely to resolve problems in how diversity statements can be used. By nature they cannot be universal, Bombaci says: “What’s going to work in my department or in my college is not going to be the same for another college.”
No measure of scholarly success is infallible, Kang, at UCLA points out. “I’m not saying that these statements can’t be abused or used in a stupid way. It happens all the time,” he says. “Almost everything, whether it be vitaes or teaching statements or h-indices, people could use them in stupid ways.” In the long term, though, he believes that the use of diversity statements will become normalized in much the same way teaching statements have.
A ‘Branding Problem’
Some scholars say the sociopolitical environment of the last two years has made it impossible for diversity statements to serve their intended purpose.
Last year, Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican from Utah, said it was “bordering on evil that we’re forcing people into having a political framework before they can even apply for a job by the state.” Though Cox later said he regretted using the phrase “bordering on evil,” in January he signed a bill banning diversity statements at Utah’s public institutions.
Statements like Cox’s mean that “there’s certainly a branding problem right now, because diversity statements or DEI statements have ‘diversity’ and ‘DEI’ in the name,” says Brian Soucek, a professor of law at Davis who’s been an outspoken proponent of them, “and it’s no secret that there has been a widespread and incredibly well-funded nationwide effort to discredit those terms.”
Remove those words, Soucek says, and the reaction might be different. If prompts were framed to ask about how applicants’ work comports with a specific part of an institution’s mission, he thinks, “people might look at that and say, ‘Oh, yeah, of course schools want to ask candidates and faculty seeking advancement what they’re doing to advance the university’s goals.’”
Critics of that revamped form of diversity statement, Soucek thinks, may not be protesting the statements, but something larger. “They’re really taking issue with DEI as a value, as a component of the university’s mission, as a component of academic merit or excellence,” he says.
Whatever opposition diversity statements have faced in recent years, Kang, at UCLA, attributes it more to the political environment than to the statements’ merit. “Politics encourages people to go after soft points, and the administrability of any slightly vague standard can be properly critiqued,” Kang says. “But it’s not accidental that now is the time that these issues are actually surfacing.”
It’s no secret that there has been a widespread and incredibly well-funded nationwide effort to discredit those terms.
The path diversity statements have followed is the same fate met by other DEI-focused phenomena, like race-conscious admissions, according to Paulette Granberry Russell, president and chief executive of National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education. They have become “demonized,” she says, “in the absence of any evidence that these practices have led to some wholesale hiring of unqualified people.” She says she has yet to see conservative critics “point to evidence that diversity statements have led to the dire consequences that they’re portraying them to have led to.”
Granberry Russell and others say that many of the arguments against diversity statements misrepresent their aim. For example, some critics say the statements are intended to give an edge during the hiring process to candidates of color, while advocates argue that the goal is to find faculty members who are adept at working with students from marginalized backgrounds.
There are other ways to accomplish that goal. Experts have suggested folding contributions to DEI work into teaching and research statements, asking candidates more-direct questions in interviews about how diversity is represented in their scholarship, or placing more emphasis on inclusive-teaching techniques. “I honestly don’t feel strongly that a diversity statement is the only mechanism which somebody can demonstrate” a commitment to the principles of DEI, Bombaci says.
Nearly a quarter-century ago, Linksz, in Pennsylvania, came to the same conclusion. While he initially held firm, refusing to remove the diversity-statement question from Bucks County’s job application, the college eventually reversed course after a review by its Board of Trustees. But scrapping that requirement, Linksz says, had no effect on the college’s philosophy or his own. They would continue to recruit faculty members who were committed to serving diverse students. “We won’t say it, but we’re still going to go ahead and do it,” he says, “because we knew, philosophically and practically, that’s what we needed to do.”
