> Professor Halley believes these innovations are “forced speech and viewpoint discrimination in the First Amendment context”
That's an interesting viewpoint and I'm not sure how it squares with a university's First Amendment right to freedom of association. After all, they're at liberty to grant tenure to whomever they think is worthy of it, by their own criteria. If they think that a tenured physics professor's views on getting more people of diverse backgrounds into physics are as important as their views on plasma confinement, who has authority to tell them otherwise? How does such a requirement differ from, say, a requirement that a tenure-track professor have teaching experience (because a prof who can't pass knowledge on is worthless to the university)?
>I'm not sure how it squares with a university's First Amendment right to freedom of association.
The short answer from the courts is - if you take money from the federal government, in any way, or have students who take money from the federal government, in any way, or distribute funds from the federal government, in any way, as a corporate entity you lose out on many of the rights entailed to a private citizen.
Hard for Europeans and some Americans to comprehend this but the US Constitution restricts the government not the other way. The Bill of Rights is meant to protect natural human rights from government systems. US funded academics are bound by it so I suspect these schools would loose in court. And I work for a government research lab and this nonsense is foreign to me.
As a practical matter the meaning of the Constitution is determined by the courts. In many, many cases, the Constitution is simply ignored (or, if you're trying to be charitable, "interpreted") in favor of the political convenience of the Supreme Court justices.
The argument is that the University, by requiring a DEI statement/commitment, is creating a situation where it's forcing speech. "Forced Speech" is one of those things the First Amendment/government get tetchy about. It's not a "right to not have DEI statements," it's a "right to not have to say things I don't believe."
Compelled speech, at least for public employment. Some states like California also designate political affiliation as a protected class. Can a company mandate that employees take a pledge condemning abortion as immoral and murderous?
DEI statements are absolutely viewpoint statements, and DEI statements are graded according to their adherence to a specific political ideology (and frankly, it’s closer to a religious ideology than a political one).
If a public school’s “organization goals” have extended into the realm of advancing DEI political ideology, then the organization is operating outside its remit.
> DEI statements are absolutely viewpoint statements,
No, they aren’t. They are “how have/would/will you achieve specific goals” statements. Some actual prompts (with institution names removed as a distraction here, if included) [0]:
“Applicants should submit a statement explaining how their teaching at the College will contribute to a culture of inclusion and campus diversity.”
“A description of how the applicant would contribute to the development of a diverse and inclusive learning community at <institution> through her/his teaching, research, and/or service.”
“[…] discuss how the candidate would help achieve <institution>’s goal to attract and graduate more women, Hispanic, and students from other underrepresented groups.”
“Qualified candidates should submit […] a diversity statement (describing how you incorporate diversity into your teaching, research, and/or service)”
“Pursuant to the college’s vision for cultivating a diverse and inclusive community, the search committee will ask all applicants to address how their past and/or potential contributions might serve to advance <institution>’s commitment to teaching and mentoring young people from a variety of personal experiences, values, and worldviews that arise from differences of culture and circumstance.”
> If a public school’s “organization goals” have extended into the realm of advancing DEI political ideology,
Diversity is well-established (in cases both supporting and striking down particular diversity policies) as a compelling government interest under; promotion of diversity is not outside the remit of public universities, and, therefore, neither is asking prospective employees both their track record on advancing, and their plans going forward to advance, that interest in their work.
You are downvotes but you are of course correct. The worst kind of DEI statement you could write would be one that just blindly parrots progressive ideology. Sometimes we get those and they are given a very low score. To say the essay is supposed to express a political viewpoint is to admit one has never been involved in this process.
And yet the First Amendment doesn't protect a tenured professor from being fired for failing to disclose relevant information (https://www.dailynebraskan.com/news/breaking-news-board-of-r...), so I'm not sure where the "compelled speech" protection ends and the requirements of the public university begin.
By this logic, anything on any employment form for a government job would be compelled speech. This is so facially stupid, yet you are here arguing it with no shame.
Is there a threat of legal penalty stopping a person from responding to a DEI prompt with " I wouldn't do anything to promote diversity"? A person doesn't have a right to employment with a university and the interview process is chock full of questions for which not saying the right answer is grounds for elimination.
This is of course a separate issue from whether or not the statements are a good idea, but my layman's perusal of supreme court cases around compelled speech found that this almost certainly doesn't rise to the level of a first amendment violation.
I think we'll find a pendulum effect where schools that lean far into DEI are going to lose out on top students, grants, researchers, etc. They'll have to readjust and swing back into pedagogy because it will be very clear that if e.g. UC Berkeley is training students in DEI and not as much focus is spent on the actual subject matter their students won't start great companies, they won't get PhD's at other top schools, they won't win Nobel Prizes, etc. It's a guaranteed death spiral for them. Meanwhile somewhere like University of Chicago which has made great strides to protect free speech and explicitly prohibits Diversity statements, will likely continue to put out excellent students and research.
That's going to be the pudding the proof would be in, indeed.
It'll be interesting to see what happens if they not only continue to generate excellent students and research but excel because the diversity theories are correct.
If my goal is to hire e.g "the best physicists" in the world then its probably going to be low on my list. Particularly in stem where disagreeableness is high in general.
Also if a University is optimizing for say "Most High Impact Research published" by a prospective hire, their skin color is going to be pretty irrelevant.
So assuming that's what the university is optimizing for, I can see your point.
As noted in peer comments in these threads though, universities aren't solely in the business of pure research. They optimize for a wide band of goals, including teaching, grant acquisition and use, and publication. Those are human interaction skill-spaces, not particle-behavior-comprehension skill spaces.
And even in the realm of pure research: of the top ten big physics and astronomy institutions, four are in Europe (across three countries), one in China, one in Japan, two in Russia, and two in the United States. The ability to work cross-culturally with diverse people is extremely important for physics collaboration in the 21st century.
Why can't that just be "ability to work with people" full stop, regardless of their background? If society is very, very diverse, then surely we all have to work, live and grow up with different people anyway.
Sure that’s fine a fine sentiment to hold. But it’s also anodyne and unspecific. It’s certainly not the kind of thing that’s going to differentiate you in a competitive job application process.
Because the job in fact is to teach a diverse classroom. So if all you have to say are banal platitudes in your DEI statement, you will be passed over.
Not because your position is wrong, it’s not. But because others are able to articulate with specificity and examples as to how they handle the job of teaching a diverse classroom. That’s what you’re up against as an applicant.
If you are a math teacher, the job is to teach math to a diverse classroom. For example, one thing you could talk about in a DEI statement could be your experience e.g. teaching math to a student who was bound to a wheelchair and couldn’t talk except through a computer, and how that impacted your teaching practice in general.
> top students, grants, researchers, etc.... Nobel Prizes
LMAO. If you're hiring top-tier researchers there's enough cut-throat competition for revenue that DEI statements are marginal and everyone agrees no one gives a shit about Service (DEI is service). I'm sure there's an exception here or there, but even in those cases... Harvard/MIT have thousands of qualified candidates for every spot, and any of those people would do the job well. In a very real sense, Harvard/MIT/etc. pick who wins as much as the other way around.
> It's a guaranteed death spiral for them.
No, it's EXACTLY the other way around.
The schools where DEI statements matter the most in hiring may or may not even have an office of sponsored research (aka not even enough grant revenue to bother budgeting for a secretary or accountant to help with paperwork). They depend on tuition dollars.
Their student base is declining by as much as 20% in 2025 due to a collapse in birth rates after 2008, and they NEED to increase the size of the pie or they will die. The easiest way to do that is to recruit non-WASP students, since the WASP demographic is already college-saturated. Enter DEI. It's about $$$, not Ideology.
Ie, the reason many institutions are requiring DEI has more to do with the fact that they're terrified they will run out of money and blink out of existence if they don't manage to start recruiting non-traditional student demographics between now and 2030, and right or wrong (imo wrong btw) they think DEI focus in faculty is crucial to recruitment of certain degraphics: https://www.capturehighered.com/how-to-climb-higher-eds-impe...
>LMAO. If you're hiring top-tier researchers there's enough cut-throat competition for revenue that DEI statements are marginal and everyone agrees no one gives a shit about Service (DEI is service).
So why play the kabuki game at all if it's all so pointless.
>The schools where DEI statements matter the most in hiring may or may not even have an office of sponsored research (aka not even enough grant revenue to bother budgeting for a secretary or accountant to help with paperwork). They depend on tuition dollars.
We're talking about the UC schools which have been top of the world generally and the DEI stuff seems to matter quite a lot there.
>Their student base is declining by as much as 20% in 2025 due to a collapse in birth rates after 2008, and they NEED to increase the size of the pie or they will die. The easiest way to do that is to recruit non-WASP students, since the WASP demographic is already college-saturated. Enter DEI. It's about $$$, not Ideology.
This doesn't map to reality because it's some of the most elite schools, with the most applicants, the largest endowments, the most Federal Research Money, etc. that have been pushing this the most aggressively, Harvard, Yale, the UC's etc.
> So why play the kabuki game at all if it's all so pointless.
That's academia. I'm really, really serious.
You also submit, as a 20-something who has only ever been a student:
1. a multi-page research statement summarizing a five year research agenda,
2. a multi-page teaching statement (in some cases the candidate has literally just been a grader for one course and stretches that out for 2.5 pages),
3. three letters of reference (multiple pages, must be glowing with lots of anecdotes, preferably from senior and respected people in your field),
4. 5 page CV summarizing your first six years of work (at least one of which was just taking classes; lol), and
5. A diversity statement and/or statement of faith.
That's before your first phone interview. After the phone interview you have a 2 day on-site interview that involves an hour long talk, one-on-one interviews with dozens of people, and every meal with a different group of stakeholders. They sometimes even pick you up from the airport, drop you off at the airport, and have you sleep in a university house that you are "always on" from touch-down to take-off. No shit: I heard an anecdote about a candidate that didn't get an offer because he left the bedroom messy.
That's the process for an entry-level position that might only pay $60K.
Faculty hiring is straight up insane, and DEI/Faith statements don't even make the top 10 list of reasons why.
> We're talking about the UC schools which have been top of the world generally and the DEI stuff seems to matter quite a lot there.
Are we? The article starts with a discussion of Berkeley, but quickly generalizes to the rest of the industry. Very few of the comments here are about the UC system in particular.
By institution count, CA's public system is a teeny tiny fraction of the US's 4000+ colleges and universities.
But I get it. For a certain mark, California gets the cortisol goin'.
> ...pushing this the most aggressively, Harvard, Yale, the UC's etc.
LOL no they're not. The push is FAR stronger at no-name tuition-dependent corn row colleges in the midwest who have snow white undergrad populations and are literally existentially threatened by the coming decline in white 18 year old midwesterners.
But the Big Elite Coastal Schools are only institutions that people who lose their god damned brains over stuff like this ever want to talk about.
>Faculty hiring is straight up insane, and DEI/Faith statements don't even make the top 10 list of reasons why.
The idea that because there are other issues with hiring in Academia that these "Faith Statements" don't matter rings pretty hollow imo.
>By institution count, CA's public system is a teeny tiny fraction of the US's 4000+ colleges and universities.
But I get it. For a certain mark, California gets the cortisol goin'.
I'm actually a fan of the UC's and California generally but I also think that the UC's are the gold standard for Public Education in the US and what happens there often spreads across the rest of the big State University systems.
>LOL no they're not. The push is FAR stronger at no-name tuition-dependent corn row colleges in the midwest who have snow white undergrad populations and are literally existentially threatened by the coming decline in white 18 year old midwesterners.
Not sure how you can say this with such assurance, given we can see countless examples of DEI gone wild at the Ivies or Stanford or Wellesley, etc. You did your undergrad/phd at multiple Ivies and have worked at a dozen of those corn row schools and know what's happening there?
> Not sure how you can say this with such assurance
I'm wondering if you're willing to tell us how many faculty DEI statements you've actually read. I'm very sure that if we forced the posters here to disclose the same, the median across this thread would be 0 or 1 (that one being the first hit that could be found searching Google).
Personally I've read dozens upon dozens in my role as an educator, and thwayunion has been spot on in their assessment. As for this:
> given we can see countless examples of DEI gone wild at the Ivies or Stanford or Wellesley
There's always going to be examples of things going wrong in a chaotic and distributed process. Pointing them out doesn't prove much. That said, a lot of the "gone wild" examples that people can bring up are also based in the same ignorance as people complaining about DEI statement who haven't read a single DEI statement. The recent Stanford word list that you probably have in mind is just one example; in that case, the freakout was over some overzealous members of an IT department publishing their internal content guidelines. It was probably misguided, but the ensuing freakout on the internet was overblown and rooted in a deep ignorance at how organizations like Universities operate.
So as far as this conversation goes, thwayunion's perception is properly calibrated. It seems to come from experience.
> The idea that because there are other issues with hiring in Academia that these "Faith Statements" don't matter rings pretty hollow imo.
You may have missed it, but by "Faith Statements" I literally meant "Faith Statements". As in religious institutions requiring you to write about your religious beliefs.
> Not sure how you can say this with such assurance, given we can see countless examples of DEI gone wild at the Ivies or Stanford or Wellesley, etc. You did your undergrad/phd at multiple Ivies and have worked at a dozen of those corn row schools and know what's happening there?
I have a lot of experience in both of those worlds, yes.
> You also submit, as a 20-something who has only ever been a student:
Tbf the process is the same for senior candidate applications. It may seem like a lot for junior applicants but the bar is lowered significantly. But like you say, it’s competitive, so naturally the pageantry gets turned to 11.
WASP? You mean they don't have enough Catholics or Germanic students? You mean to tell me Harvard/MIT can't recruit foreigners? I see MIT's first year student survey shows Asian American as the highest group at 40%. Internationals are 11%.
Sure, if you're creating a high tech company you need high levels of competence in high tech. Which you presumably can gain at somewhere like Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, etc.
why not? quality peers and staff absolutely make each student better thinker, more risk tolerant, and more likely to find suitable cofounders and/ or help during bootstrap
The legal situation is very different between a private university and a state university.
Private entities are protected by the First Amendment while state government entities are restricted by it (technically as incorporated by the Fourteenth).
Conflating the two situations just leads to confusion.
The legal situation for private non-profit universities (particularly those without religious affiliation) is quite a bit more complicated than anyone on this thread seems to realize, mostly for statutory reasons. Maybe with the exception of Hillsdale and a few others.
I have honestly no idea what SCOTUS would do with these cases absent an agency rule or legislation banning DEI statements, for example, and IMO anyone who claims otherwise is a clerk, a SCOTUS judge, married to a SCOTUS judge, or lying :)
I am fairly confident that state legislatures could ban DEI statements at public universities, but I am also fairly confident that this wouldn't actually change anything and that people who think otherwise haven't ever been a serious applicant for a faculty position.
This doesn't seem like forced speech at all. Having to recite the Pledge of Allegiance (as I did, or felt like I did) is forced speech. Asking a question as part of an application isn't forcing any specific speech in response.
"I think many DEI initiatives are treating a symptom of a genuine problem in society and think that striving to treat every individual in a fair manner and ensuring they feel included in my lab is the best way to ensure that all individuals can best succeed and best contribute to society." is an answer a candidate could freely speak/write.
Not really. The only colleges that wouldn't immediately reject a candidate who said something like that also wouldn't have demanded a DEI statement in the first place.
> At other colleges, refusing to identify as a conservative Christian would get the candidate immediately rejected.
Other than a seminary, can you give a specific example of one?
Serious question: how many on-site interviews have you had at conservative christian colleges? Could it be that the mass media outrage machine -- this is the third or fourth article on this topic in a major outlet in the past week -- is masking what you might otherwise recognize as a blindspot in your personal knowledge?
> Not really. The only colleges that wouldn't immediately reject a candidate who said something like that also wouldn't have demanded a DEI statement in the first place.
Nonsense. Many -- I think the majority -- of conservative religious people aren't anti-diversity, anti-equality, or anti-inclusion, even if they're anti-"DEI". And their institutions aren't just conservative talk radio echo chambers. Lots of thoughtful people are conservative and have a multitude of complex viewpoints. Intellectual/nuanced conservatism is over-represented at places like colleges and universities, as you might imagine.
Religiously affiliated institutions often ask about DEI topics at some point in the interview process; sometimes they ask to include discussion in your faith statement, other times they ask in person, and I've seen at least on place ask for both a faith statement and a DEI statement.
The answer above would work very well at those institutions.
> Other than a seminary, can you give a specific example of one?
It's common enough that the CUNY Graduate School includes special instructions for folks who are applying to those jobs. They also mention specific examples of institutions and letter requests in that article: https://careerplan.commons.gc.cuny.edu/blog/religious-statem...
Tons of small religiously-affiliated liberal arts colleges require the Conservative Loyalty Oath equivalent of a DEI statement. Still others use Faith Statements responsibly, the same way some responsible universities use DEI statements.
The pledge of allegiance is idiotic forced speech, but it’s also meaninglessly anodyne.
DEI statements have right and wrong answers, and giving the wrong answer will disqualify you from a job, and ultimately, filter anyone who disagrees out of the academy entirely.
That’s very dangerous forced speech.
Your example, by the way, would score very low as a DEI statement.
As as student you do not need to state the pledge of allegiance. This case went all the way to the Supreme Court, and the court ruled that students do not have to do it as it's compelled speech. Notable this ruling was made even though the US was in the middle of WWII: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Virginia_State_Board_of...
In terms of what the Constitution and the law protect, the source of the consequences does matter.
The First Amendment places broad constraints on the government's ability to impose consequences, and several laws place far narrower constraints on private individuals and privately-owned corporations.
(I personally think "speech with consequences" isn't really 'free', but it's legally free in the sense people mean when they're talking about the First Amendment, and some kind of constraint against any consequences for speech whatsoever would be a massive imposition upon individual liberty. Turns out "we live in a society" and by the nature of that existence, one can't just say and do whatever and expect no response from others. If that's how it worked, we'd just be "full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing").
That's an interesting viewpoint and I'm not sure how it squares with a university's First Amendment right to freedom of association. After all, they're at liberty to grant tenure to whomever they think is worthy of it, by their own criteria. If they think that a tenured physics professor's views on getting more people of diverse backgrounds into physics are as important as their views on plasma confinement, who has authority to tell them otherwise? How does such a requirement differ from, say, a requirement that a tenure-track professor have teaching experience (because a prof who can't pass knowledge on is worthless to the university)?