Conor Friedersdorf on the hypocrisy of mandatory diversity statements:

John D. Haltigan sued the University of California at Santa Cruz in May. He wants to work there as a professor of psychology. But he alleges that its hiring practices violate the First Amendment by imposing an ideological litmus test on prospective hires: To be considered, an applicant must submit a statement detailing their contributions to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

That sounds like a stretch to me, but I’m not a lawyer. But whether it violates amendment #1 or not, it is at least an irritating mode of gatekeeping. It’s jargon, and jargon of that kind tends to put people off more than it inspires them to help minorities dismantle barriers. Don’t get me wrong: I think it’s good to help minorities kick over those barriers, it’s just that I think pious jargon isn’t the way to do that.

The lawsuit compares the DEI-statement requirement to Red Scare–era loyalty oaths that asked people to affirm that they were not members of the Communist Party. It calls the statements “a thinly veiled attempt to ensure dogmatic conformity throughout the university system.”

Plus it’s pious jargon.

Imagine if we get dueling pious jargons – the air won’t be fit to breathe.

The Haltigan lawsuit—filed by the Pacific Legal Foundation, a right-leaning nonprofit—is the first major free-speech challenge to a public institution that requires these statements. If Haltigan prevails, state institutions may be unable to mandate diversity statements in the future, or may find themselves constrained in how they solicit or assess such statements.

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Alternatively, a victory for UC Santa Cruz may entrench the trend of compelling academics to submit DEI statements in institutions that are under the control of the left—and serve as a blueprint for the populist right to impose its own analogous requirements in state college systems it controls. For example, Christopher Rufo of the Manhattan Institute, who was appointed by Governor Ron DeSantis to help overhaul higher education in Florida, advocates replacing diversity, equity, and inclusion with equality, merit, and colorblindness. If California can lawfully force professors to detail their contributions to DEI, Florida can presumably force all of its professors to detail their contributions to EMC. And innovative state legislatures could create any number of new favored-concept triads to impose on professors in their states.

One, two, many Pious Jargons!

This specialty gatekeeping seems to have developed and ballooned very quickly.

The regime these administrators created is a case study in concept creep. Around 2005, the UC system began to change how it evaluated professors. As ever, they would be judged based on teaching, research, and service. But the system-wide personnel manual was updated with a novel provision: Job candidates who showed that they promoted “diversity and equal opportunity” in teaching, research, or service could get credit for doing so. 

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If matters stood there, the UC approach to “diversity and equal opportunity” might not face legal challenges. But administrators successfully pushed for a more radical approach. What began as an option to highlight work that advanced “diversity and equal opportunity” morphed over time into mandatory statements on contributions to “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” The shift circa 2018 from the possibility of credit for something to a forced accounting of it was important. So was the shift from the widely shared value of equal opportunity to equity (a contested and controversial concept with no widely agreed-upon meaning) and inclusion. The bundled triad of DEI is typically justified by positing that hiring a racially and ethnically diverse faculty or admitting a diverse student body is not enough—for the institution and everyone in it to thrive, the best approach (in this telling) is to treat some groups differently than others to account for structural disadvantages they suffer and to make sure everyone feels welcome, hence “inclusion.”

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Perhaps the most extreme developments in the UC system’s use of DEI statements are taking place on the Davis, Santa Cruz, Berkeley, and Riverside campuses, where pilot programs treat mandatory diversity statements not as one factor among many in an overall evaluation of candidates, but as a threshold test. In other words, if a group of academics applied for jobs, their DEI statements would be read and scored, and only applicants with the highest DEI statement scores would make it to the next round. The others would never be evaluated on their research, teaching, or service.

Wo. That’s startling. It’s not an add-on at the very end, it’s the first gate.

This approach—one that is under direct challenge in the Haltigan lawsuit—was scrutinized in detail by Daniel M. Ortner of the Pacific Legal Foundation in an article for the Catholic University Law Review. When UC Berkeley hired for life-sciences jobs through its pilot program, Ortner reports, 679 qualified applicants were eliminated based on their DEI statements alone. “Seventy-six percent of qualified applicants were rejected without even considering their teaching skills, their publication history, their potential for academic excellence, or their ability to contribute to their field,” he wrote. “As far as the university knew, these applicants could have well been the next Albert Einstein or Jonas Salk, or they might have been outstanding and innovative educators who would make a significant difference in students’ lives.”

I hate to agree with Catholic University on anything, but that’s appalling if it’s true.