In an essay published in our pages last week, the literary critic Michael W. Clune perceives something surprising in a moment as unstable and hyper-polarized as ours: an emerging consensus on the part of both liberals and conservatives that big swaths of academic policy and culture had been degraded by activist politics and were in need of reform. One aspect of that culture: policies that distributed faculty positions on the basis of race, not just by giving some faculty applicants a boost but by formally excluding people from the wrong group.
Clune recounts an experience he had at Case Western Reserve University while serving on a search committee in 2021. The search, Clune writes, was “aimed at diversifying the faculty”; he recommended an Arab American writer whose work he liked and whose “nuanced views on the Middle East conflict would add a perspective missing from our faculty.”
No dice. “A few days after my request, I got an email informing me that the administration deemed the Arab American candidate to have the wrong race for the position. My request to bring him to campus was denied.”
None of this surprised me — I’d heard similar stories before. But for fact-checking purposes, I asked Clune for corroborating documents. I quote them below with his permission. First, an email from the then-chair of the English department:
The English Opportunity Hire Committee met yesterday and we have begun the process of consolidating, vetting and selecting candidates. To remind you, the North Star Targeted Opportunity Hiring Initiative requires recruitment efforts “to focus on strong tenure-track candidates that prioritize URM, that is underrepresented racial minorities from historically excluded groups (African American/Black, Native American/Indigenous, and Latinx).”
(As far as I can tell, all evidence of the North Star Targeted Opportunity Hiring Initiative at Case Western has been scrubbed from the university’s website; a search turns up a list of articles, but the links are all dead or redirected.) The chair’s email continues by quoting Joy Bostic, at the time Case Western’s interim vice president of the office of inclusion, diversity, and equal opportunity, who offered the committee this guidance: “Identifying URM candidates who can contribute to diversity in ways that are intersectional such as with an LGBTQ foci would certainly be a priority.” And the chair concludes by asking the members of the committee to submit a handful of names of suggested candidates along with a brief description “explaining why they would be worth pursuing.”
Clune suggested Philip Metres, a widely published and much-decorated poet and essayist whose roots in the Middle East inform his work. The chair of the department felt that Metres was “a strong contender,” but, alas, “Arab Americans are not among the URM cohorts Bostic lists.”
Case Western is not the only college that excluded Arabs and Middle Easterners from the ranks of beneficiaries of the last decade’s push for rapid diversification. The reason is straightforward: a quirk of U.S. census policy, to which some institutions conformed their DEI categories. As Zaid Rami Sahawneh explains, “in the scope of legal recognition as a qualified minority on the United States Census and for legal policies that protect minorities like affirmative action, Arabs are strictly white.” So, under pressure to increase non-white faculty representation, administrators told hiring departments that Arabs didn’t count. (As the North Star Initiative’s guidance indicates, Asians of any kind also didn’t count; that’s a story for another day.)
Diversifying the faculty was always in part supposed to be about diversifying — and thereby improving — academic research. As the Yale Law professor Cristina Rodríguez put it in a recent discussion in our pages, by “ensuring that people read scholarship from people with different backgrounds ... suddenly you get articles about colonialism and Native American and Indian law, and you get articles about race and the Constitution,” for instance. Clune tried to bring his department’s attention to Philip Metres for analogous reasons, but Case Western’s DEI policies instead preemptively excluded Metres from consideration. Such policies seem to many to have imposed a spoils system based on dubious and arbitrary racial classifications — at the expense of academic mission.
Read Michael W. Clune’s “Left and Right Agree: Higher Ed Needs to Change.”
