A Harvard Law School professor has spoken out against forcing those seeking university faculty posts to submit a statement about their commitment to the cause of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), a practice he says creates a toxic culture of insincerity.
“I am a scholar on the left committed to struggles for social justice,” he wrote. “The realities surrounding mandatory DEI statements, however, make me wince.”
These so-called diversity statements, according to the professor, on the surface are meant to facilitate a “more open and welcoming environment for everyone,” but in fact act as no more than “ideological litmus tests” for job applicants who know that they won’t be hired if they show opposition or even not enough enthusiasm for the leftist agenda.
“It does not take much discernment to see, moreover, that the diversity statement regime leans heavily and tendentiously towards varieties of academic leftism and implicitly discourages candidates who harbor ideologically conservative dispositions,” Mr. Kennedy wrote.
“In addition to exerting pressure towards leftist conformity, the process of eliciting diversity statements abets cynicism,” he continued, noting that the prevalent DEI statement requirement has already bred a whole industry to provide job applicants with “prefabricated, boilerplate rhetoric.”
Mr. Kennedy’s comments come as Harvard University found itself at the center of a series of controversies, ranging from discrimination against Asian undergraduate applicants to anti-Semitic activities on campus to former President Claudine Gay’s alleged plagiarism. Critics have attributed the emergence of all these issues, at least in part, to Harvard’s dominant DEI regime.
To showcase how prevalent the DEI ideology is in the Ivy League school’s hiring process, Mr. Kennedy pointed to an application from Harvard’s Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning.
“How does your research engage with and advance the well-being of socially marginalized communities?” one question asks, while another asks the applicant, “Do you know how the following operate in the academy: implicit bias, different forms of privilege, (settler-)colonialism, systemic and interpersonal racism, homophobia, heteropatriarchy, and ableism?”
“DEI statements will essentially constitute 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,” he commented.
The law professor went on to argue that DEI pledges pose a “profound challenge to academic freedom” and must be abolished.
“The practice of demanding them ought to be abandoned, both at Harvard and beyond,” he wrote.
In his column, Mr. Hall suggested not to “eliminate,” but rather to “improve” DEI statements by asking candidates for their thoughts about how they would live up to values essential to the school’s core educational mission.
“We should direct that anger at its proper target: not diversity statements themselves, but rather the horribly distorted view that has taken hold about what they should contain,” wrote Mr. Hall.
Amid the nationwide debate over the role of DEI policies in corporations and government institutions, a growing number of states have introduced legislation that would ban the use of DEI statements in higher education employment.
At least six states—Florida, Idaho, North Carolina, North Dakota, Texas, and Utah—have passed laws or implemented policies to ban DEI statements in university hiring, while several others have prohibited mandatory DEI training for employees.
