At Case Western Reserve University, deans examined every list of faculty-job applicants to certify that the pool was sufficiently diverse—a task that factored into deans’ performance reviews. At the University of California, Irvine, each search committee was required to have an “Equity Advisor,” who monitored the applicant pool for sufficient diversity and had the power to sign off—or not—on the candidate search. Federal dollars were behind both policies.
The policies are examples of diversity checkpoints, whereby university administrators delay or cancel searches when they deem the applicant pool insufficiently diverse. Far from emerging organically, the practice has been spearheaded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), according to documents I’ve acquired via public records requests.
Finally, a reason to check your email.
Sign up for our free newsletter today.
Support for such practices extends to the top of the NSF. (For a comprehensive look at the organization’s long-standing support for diversity-focused research and policies, see Heather Mac Donald’s feature article in City Journal’s upcoming summer issue.) Earlier this year, Deborah Loewenberg Ball, the former dean of the University of Michigan School of Education—and two-time member of the National Science Board, which governs the NSF—spoke on a panel on the “manufactured rage” against diversity, equity, and inclusion.
In the discussion, Loewenberg Ball described her diversity efforts as dean. “You had to be very strictly rule-bound and create a bunch of very strict rules” when overseeing faculty hiring, she explained. Most importantly, “You’d say, this search doesn’t go forward ‘til you go back and bring me back a pool that looks decent before we even take another step.”
The practice that Loewenberg Ball describes is controversial. It raises serious legal questions and shifts power from faculty to administrators—particularly to diversity officers. Yet, with the help of funding from the NSF, on whose board Loewenberg Ball twice sat, diversity checkpoints have proliferated at universities around the county.
Consider, for example, a Wichita State University program proposal from 2023. The proposal, which I obtained via a records request and which netted the university $1 million, sought “to increase the representation, retention, and advancement of women and underrepresented minority . . . STEM faculty at WSU.” The university pledged to “monitor the diversity of the pool and if needed recommend pausing the process to continue looking for diverse candidates.” The proposal adds: “The process is applicable to all tenure-eligible positions, and we expect it to be adopted in other colleges as part of the WSU DEI plan.”
Such diversity-focused faculty hiring projects have, until recently, been a longstanding NSF priority. Wichita State requested the grant through the NSF ADVANCE program, a nearly quarter-century-old initiative to get universities to hire more women and “intersectional” scientists.
Many universities that have embraced these practices first did so as part of grants that date back decades. In 2003, Case Western Reserve University received one of the early NSF ADVANCE “institutional transformation” grants. One document summarizing several ADVANCE-funded programs notes that, as a part of the grant, “deans could send a list back to the department if it did not reflect the diversity of the national pool.”
Administrators would even reap professional benefits—or consequences—for their demographic results. “Deans and department heads were held accountable for progress on diversity as an element of their annual reviews,” the document notes.
Case Western received $3.5 million for the project. It would later tout the result as “a model of institutional transformation, particularly in the areas of faculty recruitment, advancement, development, and retention policies.”
The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV) won a $3 million NSF ADVANCE grant over a decade ago, which had similarly transformative effects on the university’s hiring practices. A progress report from 2015 notes that, as a result of the grant, the university’s vice president for faculty affairs and diversity “now oversees the recruitment process, which includes approving ads and short lists plus certifying applicant pools.”
Diversity checkpoints have become a national “best practice.” In several more recent proposals, universities pointed to early adopters of the model as success stories fueled by federal tax dollars.
“We will adapt practices from the University of Michigan and UTRGV,” a University of Missouri, St. Louis (UMSL) proposal notes, “to require departments to collect and submit demographic information at the various stage [sic] of the search process (applicant pool, short lists for interviews, offers, etc.) which depending on the results, may affect the allocation of future faculty lines or other funding opportunities.”
The proposal, pointing to another early adopter, adds that “as with ADVANCE institutions like Case Western Reserve, we will also empower the Deans to return the lists of applicants to the Departments to extend the search or reconsider the short lists when they do not reflect the diversity of the national pool.”
In a 2022 grant proposal, Central Michigan University made similar promises. It pledged to release a new hiring-request form that would require departments to “submit demographic information regarding the national applicant pool,” and charged deans with “ensuring that the demographics of the people on each list (e.g., phone and campus interviews) reflect the national applicant pool.” Much like Case Western’s enforcement mechanism, Central Michigan’s proposal calls for “college-level accountability for inclusive interview pools.”
Many university leaders have denounced Donald Trump’s interventions in campus affairs. Yet, as the rise of diversity checkpoints illustrates, the federal government has fueled some of the most controversial and consequential university hiring practices, which gave power-seeking administrators a tool that’s hard for any university to resist: cash.
For years, federal dollars empowered administrators who were committed to using their institutions as vehicles for social justice. Loewenberg Ball, who held that vision for higher education, posed a revealing question before the panel: “I think that becomes a question for us . . . what is freedom, actually, in a racist society? And whether that’s actually what we mean by freedom, to allow people to do whatever they want.”
Photo by Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Source link
