NY Times: Harvard’s Largest Faculty Division Will No Longer Require Diversity Statements

New York Times, Harvard’s Largest Faculty Division Will No Longer Require Diversity Statements:

Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the university’s largest division, said on Monday that it would no longer require job applicants to submit diversity statements, the latest shift at the university after months of turmoil over its values and the role of equity initiatives in higher education.

Instead, the division will require only finalists for teaching jobs to describe their “efforts to strengthen academic communities” and discuss how they would promote a “learning environment in which students are encouraged to ask questions and share their ideas,” Nina Zipser, the dean for faculty affairs and planning, said in an email to colleagues.

The decision represents a sharp break from Harvard’s recent practices and comes less than six months after Claudine Gay, Harvard’s first Black president and a former dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, resigned amid accusations of plagiarism and complaints that Harvard was doing too little to combat antisemitism. The chaos surrounding Dr. Gay intensified debates about the sway of diversity initiatives in academia.

Dr. Zipser made no mention of Dr. Gay in her announcement on Monday morning. Rather, Dr. Zipser attributed the change to feedback from “numerous faculty members” who feared that diversity statements were “too narrow in the information they attempted to gather and relied on terms that, for many, especially international candidates, were difficult to interpret.”

In a statement that echoed Dr. Zipser’s email, Harvard said the “updated approach” would acknowledge “the many ways faculty contribute to strengthening their academic communities, including efforts to increase diversity, inclusion, and belonging.” The university added that the decision amounted to “realigning the hiring process with longstanding criteria for tenured and tenure-track faculty positions.” ...

Critics of diversity statements, which often require candidates to explain how they would increase or contribute to campus diversity, have long complained that such compulsory writings threaten to suppress robust debate.

Washington Post Editorial, The Problem With Diversity Statements — and What to Do About Them:

As the United States reckoned with racial inequality during and after the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, many saw Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs as a way to address the issues in higher education. As part of the trend, many schools began requiring candidates for teaching positions to submit DEI statements. In these statements, potential hires explain how they would advance diversity, equity and inclusion in their teaching and research activities. One 2021 study found that about one-third of job postings at elite universities required them.

Now, however, some in academia are starting to express second thoughts about this practice. In April, Harvard Law School professor Randall L. Kennedy urged abolition of DEI statements, arguing that they amount to “compulsion” and “ideological litmus tests.” Not long after Mr. Kennedy’s article appeared, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology became the first top university to voluntarily end their use. The decision came after extensive consultations among all six of the school’s academic deans. MIT’s president, Sally Kornbluth, explained: “We can build an inclusive environment in many ways, but compelled statements impinge on freedom of expression, and they don’t work.”

In doing away with DEI statements, MIT was not abandoning the goals of greater diversity, equity and inclusion, which remain not only valid but also vital. DEI programs can have an important place. They should not be abolished or undermined — as red states such as Florida and Texas have done, by forbidding the use of state funds for DEI in public universities. Reshaping universities via such a heavy-handed use of state power could set a dangerous precedent for academic freedom more generally.

And yet as a specific policy, DEI statements advance their declared objectives at too high a cost. In fact, they stoke what Mr. Kennedy, a self-described “scholar on the left,” who formerly served as a law clerk for Justice Thurgood Marshall, called “intense and growing resentment” among academics. Not surprisingly, 90 percent of self-described conservative faculty view the statements as political litmus tests, but so do more than 50 percent of moderates and even one-quarter of liberals, according to a survey by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a nonpartisan watchdog group specializing in campus free speech issues. ...

 Whatever their original intent, the use of DEI statements has too often resulted in self-censorship and ideological policing. Fundamentally reconsidering them could actually strengthen DEI, by placing it on a more sustainable basis — intellectually and politically. MIT is one of the first to tackle the issue; here’s hoping it won’t be the last.