Harvard’s Biggest Faculty No Longer Requires DEI Pledges in Hiring

People walk through the gate on Harvard Yard at the Harvard University campus in Cambridge, Mass., on June 29, 2023. Scott Eisen/Getty Images

Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), the Ivy League school’s biggest faulty division, said Monday it will no longer require tenure-track applicants to submit statements about their commitment to “diversity, inclusion, and belonging.”

The FAS, which includes Harvard’s entire undergraduate program and some of its graduate schools, had previously demanded a statement from those seeking tenure-track positions on their “efforts to encourage diversity, inclusion and belonging, including past, current and anticipated future contributions in these areas.”

But now, the requirement at Harvard FAS will be replaced with a “service statement” that will have applicants describe “efforts to strengthen academic communities,” in addition to a “teaching and advising statement” about how the applicant will create a “learning environment in which students are encouraged to ask questions and share their ideas.”

Unlike the DIB statement that was universally mandated, the two new statements will only be required from candidates who are finalists in the hiring search.

The change was announced Monday in a faculty-wide email by Dean of Faculty Affairs and Planning Nina Zipser. Ms. Zipser stated that it came in response to feedback from “numerous faculty members” who said the DIB requirement was “too narrow in the information they attempted to gather” and would be confusing to foreign applicants.

In a statement to The Epoch Times, a spokesperson for the FAS said that the change also acknowledges “the many ways faculty contribute to strengthening their academic communities, including efforts to increase diversity, inclusion, and belonging.”

“In making this decision, the FAS is realigning the hiring process with long-standing criteria for tenured and tenure-track faculty positions. These criteria include excellence in research, teaching/advising, and service, which are the three pillars of professorial appointments,” the spokesperson said.

Harvard’s decision came as a growing number of voices in academia expressed skepticism, and in some cases outright criticism, regarding the use of mandatory “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) statements in hiring. Those voices became amplified in the wake of the ouster of former Harvard President Claudine Gay, who pursued DEI initiatives as FAS dean before ascending to presidency.

In April, Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy openly criticized the practice, saying it creates a toxic culture of insincerity and should be abolished.

“Candidates for academic positions at Harvard should not be asked to support ideological commitments,” the professor wrote in an op-ed for the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, a coalition of dozens of faculty members and other Harvard employees advocating for free inquiry.

According to Mr. Kennedy, these so-called diversity statements on the surface are meant to help foster an 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 left-wing agenda.

“It does not take much discernment to see ... that the diversity statement regime leans heavily and tendentiously towards varieties of academic leftism and implicitly discourages candidates who harbor ideologically conservative dispositions,” he wrote.

More recently, Harvard’s neighbor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) became the first elite private institution to stop using mandatory DEI statements in hiring, saying in May that the inclusivity cannot be achieved through coercion at the expense of freedom of expression.

“My goals are to tap into the full scope of human talent, to bring the very best to MIT, and to make sure they thrive once here,” MIT President Sally Kornbluth said in a statement provided to The Epoch Times. “We can build an inclusive environment in many ways, but compelled statements impinge on freedom of expression, and they don’t work.”

Harvard’s reverse course on DEI was cheered by Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute known for his work exposing left-wing bias in education.

“This is a small victory, but a signal that our campaign is gaining momentum,” he wrote on social media platform X. “We will not stop until the entire DEI apparatus is dismantled and salted over.”

While the Harvard FAS is doing away with DEI statements, other departments are holding onto them.

A faculty job listing posted by Harvard Graduate School of Education, for example, still asks applicants to submit a statement of teaching philosophy that includes a description of their “orientation toward diversity, equity, and inclusion practices.”