Critics say diversity statements collide with merit and free speech. Should they be replaced?
Students of color constantly gripe to administrators about explicit and implicit acts of racism in the classroom. But administrators have struggled to rid their existing faculty of their biases and unfair classroom practices, and to recruit and retain faculty of color.
Beginning in the 2010s, as the number of students of color attending college after the recession began to plummet, administrators started using diversity statements in their faculty job applications and tenure process.
Our Megan Zahneis wrote in an explainer earlier this year:
“Candidates are asked to explain in a page or two how they’ve contributed to diversity, equity, and inclusion work in their academic lives.
The practice is intended to gauge the attitudes of potential employees toward issues of diversity, and to ensure new hires are committed to recruiting, and working with, a diverse student population. Diversity statements can also ensure that the extra service burdens sometimes borne by scholars of color don’t go unnoticed.”
Diversity statements have become hugely controversial and challenged in the courts, in legislative chambers, and in our Review pages.
In 2019, Jeffrey Flier, former dean of Harvard Medical School, said of the University of California at Los Angeles’s diversity statement requirement that such statements allow for biased interpretations by evaluators and can compel candidates to comply with mainstream ideas. He wrote in our pages that:
“It’s not unreasonable to be concerned that politically influenced attestations might begin to re-emerge in the current hyperpartisan political environment, either in response to politically driven demands for faculty members to support populist or nationalist ideas, or from within the increasingly polarized academy itself. Since progressive/left identifications are dominant in the academy, especially in the humanities and social sciences (as well as in administration), politically influenced litmus tests could easily arise in that sphere.”
In response, Charlotte M. Canning and Richard J. Reddick, both professors at the University of Texas at Austin said:
“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.”
In the courts, plaintiffs have argued that diversity statements violate free-speech laws (no case has yet succeeded in court). Lawyers that Adrienne Lu interviewed earlier this year are split on this debate. While some pointed out that colleges are allowed to set diversity as a goal for certain departments, others said that diversity statements are used inappropriately by colleges and veer into political rhetoric when hiring panels ding applicants for saying every one of their students should be treated equally, regardless of race, for example.
The concept of diversity statements, critics say, collides with merit and free speech, two touchstones of academe. And it affects a large swath of the sector: faculty members. This is likely why the use of diversity statements is one of the first things many college administrators readily backed away from since the 2020 protests.
Several states now have laws that outright ban the use of diversity statements, and several college systems have similarly restricted their use. In a recent article, Lu explored what colleges might do to combat racist actions in the classroom and inequities in academic outcomes.
Options include conducting classroom observations, incorporating questions about diversity efforts in the teaching statement, asking candidates during the interview process to discuss their efforts to better serve students of color, and recruiting professors who are known to conduct research on communities of color and equitably serve students of color.
Experts also referred to emerging research in inclusive teaching strategies, a topic our reporters Beth McMurtrie and Beckie Supiano have written extensively about (subscribe to their newsletter).
What I’m reading
- The science of race partly originated with an essay contest by Bordeaux’s Royal Academy of Sciences, in France, according to this article by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Andrew S. Curran in The New York Review of Books.
- The Marines have just five Black fighter pilots. Hope Hodge Seck discusses why in this Washington Post article.
- Mahzarin Banaji and Frank Dobbin explain in The Wall Street Journal why diversity training doesn’t work and how to fix it.
- The Washington Post profiles a growing movement to rid government forms of race questionnaires. Race is a made-up thing, they argue, and the government should stop legitimizing it.
