In August, a conservative group produced a study showing how widespread the “diversity” industry was on America’s college campuses.
As The Free Press reported at the time, the Heritage Foundation’s report indicated that at many of the nation’s major universities the “diversity, equity and inclusion,” or DEI, staff often doubled or tripled the number of faculty within their history departments, for instance.
And those diversity police often come with grandiose titles and accompanying bloated paychecks.
Now, another conservative group has issued a report showing how pervasive the DEI mantra runs through the hiring process.
The American Enterprise Institute culled through job openings at a wide array of institutions – from some of America’s most elite schools to local community colleges – in the fall of 2020. Its researchers were looking for announced job descriptions for new hires that included requirements for DEI “statements.”
For example, the job candidate was asked to respond to a question such as: “How do you think about diversity, equity, and inclusion [DEI], including factors that influence underrepresentation of particular groups in academia, and the experiences of individuals from particular groups within academia?”
The research ultimately settled on 999 job vacancies.
Of those, 19 percent featured diversity statements as a condition of hiring, while 68 percent referred to “diversity” or “diverse,” although that was usually in relation to the campus climate.
The AEI report noted DEI statements were most commonly found in political science jobs, with journalism, engineering, and history not far behind.
Such statements were least common within business schools.
Regionally, schools in the West were most likely to mandate DEI statements, while such a requirement was least likely in the South.
The study noted the potential effect of such policies with one example.
The researchers pointed to an analysis of a faculty opening in the life sciences department at the University of California-Berkeley, where “the scale of the resulting purge would make Stalin blush.”
Overall, 893 nominally qualified candidates applied, yet 679 were immediately eliminated “solely due to insufficiently woke diversity, equity, and inclusion statements.”
“In other words, Berkeley used a political litmus test to eliminate over three-quarters of the applicant pool,” the report noted.
In their conclusion, the AEI researchers wrote, “Nearly one in five professors are now being selected based on not only academic merit but also their commitment to a particular ideological vision. … Indeed, this number may be even higher than one in five: We believe our coding schemes are conservative and, if anything, likely underestimate the prevalence of DEI statements.”
“If the primary purpose of DEI statements is to effect political change in higher education rather than achieve greater diversity or institutional effectiveness, then their track record on the latter may not matter to proponents,” the report added.
“As of now, we believe we are on firm ground in asserting that the evidence does not yet support the contention that these practices will improve the campus climate or research productivity of higher education.”
“If policymakers do not intervene,” they argued, “DEI requirements are likely to grow substantially in the years to come, in part since trends that start at elite institutions are soon adopted by others.”
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