When Arizona’s public universities announced last year that they would stop requiring diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) statements from job applicants, it was a welcome deviation from what looked like an unstoppable march through academic and corporate hiring departments. Despite a name intimating dedication to opening employment processes for a full range of applicants, DEI statements have proven to be ideological loyalty oaths that filter out dissenters from a progressive worldview. But instead of a brief note of relief, Arizona may have been an early domino to fall in a wave of rethinking the issue.
According to a report last week by The Chronicle of Higher Education, over 200 colleges and universities across the U.S. have taken steps this year to roll back DEI efforts. Among the moves are: changing policies on the use of DEI statements in admissions, hiring, and promotion; making training programs optional; closing, restructuring, or renaming DEI departments; or eliminating or renaming DEI jobs.
Some of these changes are more serious than others, of course. Rebranding a DEI department doesn’t necessarily make it less intrusive or more respectful of disagreement. But, as the Chronicle’s Declan Bradley notes, these rollbacks began under pressure from state legislatures. However, “today, more colleges are eliminating diversity offices and staff even though they aren’t required to do so.” Separately, the Chronicle notes that some of the shifts are occurring at private colleges that aren’t subject to government dictates about ideological tests.
That suggests colleges are responding to changes in the culture, not just complying under protest with legal directives. The changes mirror a similar retreat at corporations that were climbing aboard the DEI bandwagon just a couple of years ago.
“Walmart is ending some of its diversity programs, the latest big company to shift gears under pressure from a conservative activist,” The Wall Street Journal’s Sarah Nassauer reported last month. The article attributed the shift to pressure brought by a conservative movement led by activist Robby Starbuck, which “has successfully nudged other companies including retailer Tractor Supply and manufacturers Ford and Deere to back away from diversity efforts and other topics.”
Undoubtedly, some of this change has to do with the recent election, which handed the GOP the presidency and majorities in both the Senate and the House of Representatives. During their successful campaign, Republicans charged that DEI efforts are totalitarian and dangerously displace merit and innovation as priorities for government and private industry alike. But as the Chronicle piece makes clear, the rejection of ideological commitments began earlier. Bloomberg reported in March that “Wall Street’s DEI retreat has officially begun.”
As is usual, politics is downstream of culture. And American culture, at least for a great many people, has had entirely enough of being force-fed an ideology while being told the obvious lie that it’s just an effort to bring diversity to education and employment.
“Vague or ideologically motivated DEI statement policies can too easily function as litmus tests for adherence to prevailing ideological views on DEI, penalize faculty for holding dissenting opinions on matters of public concern, and ‘cast a pall of orthodoxy’ over the campus,” the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) warns.
In 2022, a survey by the American Association of University Professors found DEI criteria included in consideration for tenure at 21.5 per cent of colleges and universities and at 45.6 per cent of large schools. Plenty of academics have had the opportunity to experience what that means for their work.
DEI, and related environmental, social, and governance (ESG) principles, also appeared to be the wave of the future for corporate hiring and investing. As recently as January of this year, investor Mark Cuban was touting DEI as an effective means “to find the employees that will put your business in the best possible position to succeed” even as other entrepreneurs were backing away (Elon Musk charged that “DEI is just another word for racism”).
Unfortunately, DEI quickly went well beyond its originally advertised goal of expanding opportunity for all. In April, in a much-quoted column, Harvard University Law Professor Randall L. Kennedy denounced DEI statements as “pledges of allegiance that enlist academics into the DEI movement by dint of soft-spoken but real coercion: If you want the job or the promotion, play ball — or else.”
Harvard’s neighbor, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, proved the point in 2021 when it rescinded an invitation to geophysicist Dorian Abbot to give a lecture because he criticized DEI efforts.
Others in the corporate world and academia developed a similar fear of the growing movement.
In a survey of over 6,000 faculty members at 55 colleges and universities published last week by FIRE, half of respondents said requiring statements pledging commitment to DEI is “never” or “rarely” acceptable in hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions. Just a third of respondents endorsed mandatory DEI statements.
Academia is known for being overwhelmingly left-wing in its political sentiments. Only 20 per cent of respondents to the same survey said conservatives would “fit in” at their departments. But even at campuses where most people could be expected to be sympathetic to the progressive ideology behind DEI, professors are sick of being told what to think.
The less uniform denizens of corporate America are also tiring of pretending to be OK with being told to endorse a particular ideology. A November survey by Pew Research found workers souring on DEI initiatives relative to a year ago, though the balance of opinion remained slightly positive.
Across the country, conditioning employment on loyalty oaths to a particular worldview appears to have hit its high-water mark.
That doesn’t mean the battle is over. Academia remains almost uniform in ideology and could revert to screening out dissent in the future. Corporations are prone to adopting whatever is fashionable, and perhaps DEI will regain that status. But what seemed an unstoppable wave of ideological litmus tests now faces public opposition. Once a means to stifle disagreement, DEI has become a topic of debate.
National Post