A new Vanderbilt–WashU report warns that parts of the humanities and social sciences have abandoned the pursuit of truth.
By: John Sailer
Published: Jun 13, 2026
In April, Yale University released a report exploring why Americans have lost trust in higher education. Widely discussed at the time, the report was notable not so much for what it said as for who said it. Many of its conclusions—for instance, that the “high tuition-high aid” model invites distrust—were fairly obvious. The Yale report mattered because it was a Yale report, marking a rare moment of self-reflection by an elite university.
Now, another report offers further self-reflection, but with far greater substance. Last week, Vanderbilt University and Washington University in St. Louis released a jointly commissioned report on the “state of scholarship” in the humanities and social sciences. The report takes on a question closely related to higher education’s crisis of trust: has scholarship itself been politicized or otherwise degraded?
While hedging considerably, the report’s authors land on a clear thesis: a noteworthy contingent of contemporary scholars subordinates the pursuit of knowledge to political and social goals. These goals, the authors note, “are generally though not exclusively associated with the progressive left,” and involve “turning the humanities into vehicles for social justice, or the elimination of pernicious social hierarchies,” as manifested in causes such as anti-racism, feminism, and decolonization.
Despite identifying this progressive trend, the report’s committee is not recognizably conservative. It is composed of mainstream academics. That includes several philosophers from New York University—widely considered one of the world’s best philosophy departments—along with notables like NYU history professor Katherine Fleming, who is also president of the $8-billion J. Paul Getty Trust.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the committee’s concern is not with “viewpoint diversity,” or lack thereof. “The problem,” the report notes, “is not that scholars in these areas are significantly more liberal or progressive than the general public.” Instead, the core issue is epistemological—having to do, that is, with how certain scholars understand the nature of truth and evidentiary standards.
The report argues that politicized scholarship operates in three main ways. Some scholars simply dismiss unwanted views. Others reject understanding as the primary purpose of scholarship. Still others reject the idea of objective, value-independent truth altogether—in other words, they embrace relativism.
From start to finish, the report blames relativism. In the preface, the committee quickly reject the “complaint” about politicized research in its “bald form”—but nevertheless argues that the “sharpest version” of the critique traces the degradation of scholarship to the “pervasive repudiation of the very idea of scholarly objectivity in favor of the view that since claims to knowledge are inevitably ideological, it is fair game to assess academic scholarship on political and social grounds.” In contrast with the tepid Yale report, the committee is scathing in its assessment of relativism: “To the extent that views of this sort have taken hold, they represent a catastrophe for the humanities and the social sciences understood as academic disciplines.”
This is the strength of the report, but also its weakness. It relies on an assumption one might expect from analytic philosophers: that bad scholarship is driven by faulty philosophical views. In the report’s telling, these misguided scholars start with relativism as a foundational premise, which then allows them to dismiss any standard on ideological grounds. These scholars, the report elaborates, are almost inevitably inconsistent, since they believe that their claims about social justice are indeed true; ultimately, they support their views by “giving reasons and marshalling evidence.”
But it’s possible that the report gets the story backwards, with relativism playing a supporting role, rather than the central one. A scholar-activist’s foundational commitment might be to their political goals, in which case relativism becomes just another way to dismiss opposing views without making real arguments. If you can’t defeat your interlocutor’s reasoning, simply dismiss it as cisheteropatriarchal reasoning. From this angle, it is entirely predictable that scholar-activists apply their relativism inconsistently, as it wasn’t a core commitment to begin with.
It’s worth noting, moreover, that the prevalence of scholar-activism is likewise entirely predictable phenomenon, given the explicit commitment of many universities—and their funders. As I’ve reported before, universities have for many years carried out large-scale hiring programs that, in practice, select for scholars who openly embrace social justice advocacy. Every year, the University of California’s President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program hires dozens of fellows who receive special consideration for tenure-track jobs, prioritizing scholars whose research contributes to “diversity” and “equal opportunity.” While funding for the humanities and social sciences is scarce, aspiring scholar-activists can look to deep-pocketed supporters like the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for financial backing throughout their careers.
Of course, to sort out the exact causes and consequences of scholar-activism, data on actual scholarship would be helpful. Unfortunately, although the committee “compiled detailed internal reports” on scholarship in philosophy, anthropology, sociology, history, literary studies, and music studies, these reports were not released.
Perhaps it’s best to leave the exact diagnosis open to debate. The key point remains: some scholars have seriously lost their way—and that may warrant breaking norms. Early on, the report notes that disciplines are rightly afforded a great deal of deference. No president, provost, or dean can assess quality in every field. But, as the report notes, “even this foundational principle has its limits.” Time will tell whether Vanderbilt and WashU take their own report seriously.
What happens in California usually doesn’t stay in California — and that’s bad news for higher education. [...]Read More...
By: John Sailer
Published: Sep 9, 2023
What happens in California usually doesn’t stay in California — and that’s bad news for higher education.
In his latest piece for the New York Times, Michael Powell catalogs just how extensively the Golden State’s universities have embraced mandatory diversity statements when hiring faculty. From junior college to prestigious research university, scientists and scholars throughout the state must demonstrate their commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) to remain in good standing.
By now, this should come as no surprise, but it is striking to see some of the most egregious ways the policy plays out. In 2016, the piece notes, at least five University of California (UC) campuses decided to initially screen faculty job applicants based only on diversity statements. For one large hiring initiative at UC Berkeley — the Life Sciences Initiative — the faculty search committee eliminated three-fourths of the applicant pool on the basis of diversity statements alone. Berkeley’s rubric for assessing diversity statements, moreover, dictates a low score for candidates who speak positively about diversity but in vague terms. Even more remarkably, it gives a low score to candidates who say they prefer to “treat everyone the same.”
All of this is especially notable because of what California represents to American public higher education. Out of any state, California best embodies the American vision of universal higher education — its promises and perils.
In 1960, UC System President Clark Kerr spearheaded the “California Master Plan for Higher Education,” an attempt to modernise the state’s system of higher education. The Master Plan institutionalised a rigidly tiered system for California’s colleges and universities, reserving the UC system for the top 12.5% of the state’s graduating high school students, the California State system for the top 33.3%, and the California Community Colleges system for everyone else.
The plan captured the country’s strong faith in higher education, its aspiration to send virtually every young person to college. Kerr once jokingly quipped that the mission of the university is “to provide sex for the students, sports for the alumni, and parking for the faculty” — an amusing, and functionally accurate, description.
No doubt, California set the example. Today, it remains a powerhouse; according to the U.S. News and World Report rankings, the UC system includes six out of the top 10 American public universities.
California still sets the tone for American higher education. And for that reason, we might add one more item to Kerr’s tongue-in-cheek summary of the university’s mission: “DEI initiatives for the administrators.” The trend Powell describes — whereby enthusiasm for DEI, whatever that might mean in practice, has become a virtual job requirement for scientists and scholars —has trickled down.
Berkeley’s Life Sciences Initiative, for example, was designed to test whether universities could use a method known as “cluster hiring” to advance the goal of diversity. Basically, the approach involves hiring multiple faculty at once with a heavy emphasis on DEI. In a forthcoming National Association of Scholars report, I describe how DEI-focused cluster hiring has boomed since Berkeley undertook its Life Sciences Initiative.
In 2020, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center carried out a cluster hire — hiring researchers in cancer, infectious disease, and basic biology — which heavily weighed DEI contributions. In 2021, Vanderbilt University’s Department of Psychology undertook a cluster hire; it eliminated approximately 85% of its candidates based solely on diversity statements. And the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has allocated $241 million in grant money for cluster hires at universities around the country — with the condition that every search committee must require and heavily weigh diversity statements.
Berkeley’s rubric — the one that gives a low score to anyone who espouses race-neutrality — is likewise ubiquitous. Two of the universities receiving NIH money for cluster hires are the University of New Mexico and the University of South Carolina. Through a public records request, I acquired both universities’ rubric for assessing diversity statements, which was published earlier this year. Both universities use the Berkeley rubric verbatim.
As a consequence of these measures, trust in higher education will likely continue to fall, owing in part to a sense that some views are simply not tolerated. But DEI litmus tests do not merely diminish the public’s trust in higher education. They degrade higher education itself. Clark Kerr knew that the mission of the university isn’t sex, sports, or parking. It isn’t social justice, either. It’s the pursuit of truth, which, following California’s example, all too many universities seem to forget.
==
There are still some people who say stupid things like, "how can you be against equality and diversity?" Except, we all know at this point that these are ideologically-charged words. The rubrics themselves tell you that liberal principles of equality are unacceptable; rather, contested and ideological notions about the world. This makes "DIE statements" ideological loyalty oaths.
It would be like saying something stupid like, "what, are you not against people being bad and doing bad things?" when people object to making commitments and oaths against "sin."
An obsession with Diversity, Equity and Inclusion threatens students, professors, and the very credibility of higher education in the U.S.
By: John Sailer
Published: Jan 9, 2023
In June 2020, Gordon Klein, a longtime accounting lecturer at UCLA, made the news after a student emailed him asking him to grade black students more leniently in the wake of the “unjust murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd.”
Klein’s response was blunt. It stated in part:
Thanks for your suggestion in your email below that I give black students special treatment, given the tragedy in Minnesota. Do you know the names of the classmates that are black? How can I identify them since we’ve been having online classes only? Are there any students that may be of mixed parentage, such as half black-half Asian? What do you suggest I do with respect to them? A full concession or just half?
He went on:
Remember that MLK famously said that people should not be evaluated based on the “color of their skin.” Do you think that your request would run afoul of MLK’s admonition?
Thanks, G. Klein
Klein’s response enraged students. They organized a petition to remove him that quickly gained nearly 20,000 signatures, resulting in the professor being placed on leave and banned from campus. But the story got national attention, and a counter-petition signed by more than 76,000 people demanded his reinstatement. In less than three weeks, Klein was allowed to return to the classroom.
Yet his encounters with what UCLA calls Equity, Diversity and Inclusion were far from over.
Just under a year later, Klein, the author of a textbook on ethics in accounting, was up for a merit raise. For the first time in his 40 years at UCLA, Klein told me he had to submit a statement on equity, diversity, and inclusion. UCLA had adopted this as a promotion requirement in 2019, and now demands that all faculty members express how they will advance these principles in their work, and how their mentoring and advising helps those “from underrepresented and underserved populations.”
Klein inquired of the EDI office just what groups of students they meant. When they failed to reply, he wrote a dissent he made available to me, which reads in part:
“I find it abhorrent for the University to encourage faculty members to classify and prioritize students based on their group identities. I intend to continue helping all students equally, regardless of their backgrounds.”
Although his previous teaching evaluations were sterling, and he had received prior merit raises, this one was declined. Klein has brought suit against UCLA.
The struggle between Klein and UCLA represents a major shift in the mission of higher education in America.
The principles commonly known as “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) are meant to sound like a promise to provide welcome and opportunity to all on campus. And to the ordinary American, those values sound virtuous and unobjectionable.
But many working in academia increasingly understand that they instead imply a set of controversial political and social views. And that in order to advance in their careers, they must demonstrate fealty to vague and ever-expanding DEI demands and to the people who enforce them. Failing to comply, or expressing doubt or concern, means risking career ruin.
In a short time, DEI imperatives have spawned a growing bureaucracy that holds enormous power within universities. The ranks of DEI vice presidents, deans, and officers are ever-growing—Princeton has more than 70 administrators devoted to DEI; Ohio State has 132. They now take part in dictating things like hiring, promotion, tenure, and research funding.
More significantly, the concepts of DEI have become guiding principles in higher education, valued as equal to or even more important than the basic function of the university: the rigorous pursuit of truth. Summarizing its hiring practices, for example, UC Berkeley’s College of Engineering declared that “excellence in advancing equity and inclusion must be considered on par with excellence in research and teaching.” Likewise, in an article describing their “cultural change initiative,” several deans at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine declared: “There is no priority in medical education that is more important than addressing and eliminating racism and bias.”
DEI has also become a priority for many of the organizations that accredit universities. Last year, the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, along with several other university accrediting bodies, adopted its own DEI statement, proclaiming that “the rich values of diversity, equity and inclusion are inextricably linked to quality assurance in higher education.” These accreditors, in turn, pressure universities and schools into adopting DEI measures.
Much of this happened by fiat, with little discussion. While interviewing more than two dozen professors for this article, I was told repeatedly that few within academia dare express their skepticism about DEI. Many professors who are privately critical of DEI declined to speak even anonymously for fear of professional consequences.
The Invention of DEI
How has this fundamental shift taken place? Gradually, then all at once.
For decades, university administrators have emphasized their commitment to racial diversity. In 1978, Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell delivered the court’s opinion in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, taking up the question of racial preferences in higher education. Powell argued that racial preferences in admissions—in other words, affirmative action—could be justified on the basis of diversity, broadly defined. Colleges and universities were happy to adopt his reasoning, and by the 1980s, diversity was a popular rallying cry among university administrators.
By the 2010s, as the number of college administrators ballooned, this commitment to diversity was often backed by bureaucracies that bore such titles as “Inclusive Excellence” or “Diversity and Belonging.” Around 2013, the University of California system—which governs six of the nation’s top 50 ranked universities—began to experiment with mandatory diversity statements in hiring. Diversity statements became a standard requirement in the system by the end of the decade. The University of Texas at Austin in 2018 published a University Diversity and Inclusion Action Plan, which began to embed diversity committees throughout the university.
Then came the Black Lives Matter demonstrations of 2020. The response on campus was a virtual Cambrian explosion of DEI policies. Any institution that hadn’t previously been on board was pressured to make large-scale commitments to DEI. Those already committed redoubled their efforts. UT Austin created a Strategic Plan for Faculty Diversity, Equity, and Inclusivity, calling for consideration of faculty members’ contributions to DEI when considering merit raises and promotion.
White Coats For Black Lives, a medical student organization that calls for the dismantling of prisons, police, capitalism, and patent law, successfully petitioned medical schools around the country to adopt similar plans, including at UNC–Chapel Hill, Oregon Health & Science University, and Columbia University. In some cases, administrators even asked White Coats For Black Lives members to help craft the new plans.
All at once, policies that previously seemed extreme—like DEI requirements for tenure and mandatory education in Critical Race Theory—became widespread.
Saturate the Campus
The upshot is that the entire experience of higher education—from earning a college degree to seeking a career in academia—now requires saturation in the principles of DEI.
Many American college students are now required to take DEI, anti-racism, or social justice courses. At Georgetown, all undergraduates must take two Engaging Diversity courses. At Davidson College, the requirement goes under the title of Justice, Equality, and Community, which students can fulfill by taking courses like Racial Capitalism & Reproduction and Queer(ing) Performance. Northern Arizona University recently updated its general education curriculum to require nine credit hours of “diversity perspectives” courses, including a unit on “intersectional identities.”
DEI is also becoming a de facto academic discipline. In 2021, Bentley University in Massachusetts created a DEI major. Last year, the Wharton School announced its introduction of a DEI concentration for undergraduates and a DEI major for MBA students.
Meantime, the open faculty position listings at universities across the country illustrate how a focus on race, gender, social justice, and critical theory can be crucial to landing a job. Last year, the University of Houston–Downtown sought an instructor in Early Modern British Literature, including Shakespeare, with a preferred specialization in “critical race studies.” At Wake Forest University, an applicant for assistant professor of Spanish should be someone “whose critical perspectives are linked to the experiences of groups historically underrepresented in higher education in ways that inform and influence their pedagogical approach.” Williams College recently sought an assistant professor of German who works “in the areas of migration, race and anti-racism, post- and decolonial approaches, disability, and/or memory studies.”
These imperatives often come from the top. In May, the Board of Governors for California Community Colleges (CCC), the largest system of higher education in the country, decreed that every employee—faculty, staff, and administrators—must be evaluated for their “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility” competencies. Each district in the system ultimately decides how to enforce the new rule, but the Chancellor’s Office released a list of recommended competencies. It suggested faculty create a curriculum that “promotes a race-conscious and intersectional lens” and advocate for “anti-racist goals and initiatives.”
Ray Sanchez, faculty coordinator of the academic success centers at Madera Community College, sent me a document published by the system that describes how to incorporate DEI into curricula. “Take care,” the document declares, “not to ‘weaponize’ academic freedom and academic integrity as tools to impede equity in an academic discipline or inflict curricular trauma on our students, especially historically marginalized students.”
It is telling that the CCC system warns against taking academic freedom too far—especially for the sake of avoiding “curricular trauma.” After all, a successful liberal education inevitably involves challenging students’ unquestioned assumptions, an experience that is unsettling by design. Applying the language of trauma to this enterprise pathologizes learning itself.
In higher education, academic freedom is sacrosanct, a vital tool for facilitating the pursuit of truth. But now the CCC treats academic freedom with suspicion. “If we need to be culturally responsive in the classroom, well, what does that look like? We have it right here,” Matthew Garrett, professor of history and ethnic studies at the CCC’s Bakersfield College, and a rare public critic of the system’s new policy, told me about the document. He added, “You can’t weaponize academic freedom.”
A Radically New Definition of Racism
Some DEI initiatives seem almost designed to create distrust, especially between faculty and students. In an article last year for City Journal, I wrote about the “cultural change initiative” taking place at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine. When describing their work, the program’s creators asserted that it’s important to accept that “if we are White, we are a big part of the problem. We are part of the reason that structural racism imprisons and oppresses people of color every day, everywhere they go, and no matter what they do.”
The program’s creators also emphasized that when anyone on campus reports a concern about racism and bias, “We unconditionally accept that what they are describing really happened and needs to be explored, addressed, and resolved.” They acknowledge there can be multiple versions of a story, but assert that “someone’s lived experience of racism and bias is all we need to know about its impact on them, whether intended or not.” They followed up this initiative with the Anti-Racist Transformation in Medical Education training program to help other medical schools emulate Mount Sinai. The first adopters included top schools such as Duke and Columbia.
The Mount Sinai program underscores a point that came up repeatedly when I spoke with faculty members for this article: Some claims, especially about race and racism, are treated as unassailable.
Jonathan Haidt, the coauthor of The Coddling of the American Mind and a professor of ethical leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business, has warned about this redefinition of racism—and about the rise of ideological groupthink in academia and in his field of social psychology in particular. Twelve years ago Haidt gave a keynote address at the annual convention of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP), pointing out the trend toward groupthink and arguing it was bad for science.
Fast-forward to September 2022, the month Haidt announced his departure from SPSP, citing the organization’s new diversity statement policy. For scholars to present their work at SPSP’s annual convention, they now must submit a statement explaining how their talk advances the “equity, inclusion, and anti-racism goals” of the society.
“When SPSP specifically used the word ‘anti-racism,’ that’s when I had to act. Because I read Ibram Kendi’s work,” said Haidt, referring to the author of 2019’s How to Be an Antiracist. Kendi’s work is the basis of much employment training both in academia and business. It popularized the notion that “anti-racism” requires embracing race-conscious policies and asserts that all racial disparities are, by definition, racist. “Kendi demands a totalizing approach that means everything must be actively anti-racist, and if you’re not actively anti-racist, you’re racist,” Haidt told me.
In other words, SPSP—one of the organizations where Haidt first expressed his concerns about ideological conformity—now mandates ideological conformity.
‘Fake Research and Fake Standards’
It’s easy to imagine that DEI would find its natural home in the humanities. But disciplines such as engineering, medicine, and physics quickly are becoming bastions of DEI as well. Leaders from the Association of American Medical Colleges recently proclaimed that DEI “deserves just as much attention from learners and educators at every stage of their careers as the latest scientific breakthroughs.”
The federal government also is doing its part to infuse DEI into the sciences. The Department of Energy’s Office of Science is the nation’s largest sponsor of the physical sciences. It recently announced that all new research proposals must include its Promoting Inclusive and Equitable Research (PIER) Plan. To get a grant, scientists must describe how equity and inclusion are “an intrinsic element to advancing scientific excellence in the research project.”
One medical researcher at an elite institution who requested anonymity told me that grants for medical research increasingly use veiled ideological language that focuses on issues such as health equity and racial disparities. “The answer is preordained: The cause of disparities is racism,” he told me. “If you find some other explanation, even if it’s technically correct, that’s problematic.”
This fixation can have a stultifying effect on medical research, and eventually medical care, the researcher told me. “We’re abdicating our responsibility. We’re creating fake research and fake standards, aligning ideology with medicine, and undermining our basic ability to engage in meaningful sensemaking.”
Another physician-scientist at a top medical school also pointed out that an all-out focus on research that documents racial disparities crowds out other, more consequential areas of scientific research. “In general, science is a zero-sum game with a relatively limited pot of resources,” he told me. “And therefore, it means that biological discovery, mechanisms of basic science, new insights, new molecules, don’t get discovered because you have this other type of research going on.”
The physician-scientist was concerned that an obsession with equity has shifted attention away from pursuing groundbreaking scientific breakthroughs that will benefit everyone. “We are distributing more equitably therapies that largely don’t work. We’re still rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic,” he said. “It’s a very foolish tactic when the death rate from cancer is still as high as it is.”
‘Morally Wrong and Incompatible with Scientific Inquiry’
A growing number of universities, such as UCLA, where Gordon Klein ran into trouble, now consider their faculty members’ contributions to DEI as a criterion for hiring, promotion, and tenure. UC Berkeley’s rubric for evaluating DEI contributions, which is used by universities around the country, dictates a low score for a candidate who professes a desire to “treat everyone the same.”
Diversity statements—short essays on job candidates’ past efforts and future plans to advance DEI—have long been in vogue for hiring. And according to the American Association of University Professors’ 2022 survey of tenure practices, 45.6 percent of large institutions surveyed had DEI criteria for tenure, and 35.5 percent were considering adding them. Only 18 percent didn’t have and weren’t considering them.
To boost faculty diversity (explicit racial preferences in hiring are illegal), many universities are resorting to a practice known as “cluster hiring”—that is, hiring multiple professors at once, across multiple departments. To increase the likelihood of hiring minority faculty members, cluster hiring initiatives often assess candidates’ contributions to DEI as the first criterion.
In 2018, UC Berkeley launched a cluster hire across several life sciences departments. Of 893 qualified applicants, the hiring committee narrowed the pool to 214 based solely on the candidates’ diversity statements. Finalists then were asked to describe their DEI efforts during their interviews. The initiative yielded eyebrow-raising results: The initial applicant pool was 53.7 percent white and 13.2 percent Hispanic. The shortlist was 13.6 white and 59.1 percent Hispanic.
In 2020, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) began a $241 million cluster hiring grant program—specifying that the faculty hired must have “a demonstrated commitment to promoting diversity and inclusive excellence.” So far, it has awarded grants for hires at twelve institutions, including the University of South Carolina, Cornell University, and Florida State University.
One humanities professor told me that after his department creates a final group of candidates, “a lawyer in the DEI office will make a determination as to whether this slate of candidates is diverse enough. If it’s not diverse enough in their estimation, they can kick the slate back to the search committee.” Professors across multiple disciplines told me this is standard practice. One said DEI officers have the power to simply cancel searches.
“If we’ve got this gaming of the hiring process across the board, so that the new generation of professors are that much more ideologically pure, these are the people who believe that dissident research shouldn’t be given a voice at all,” Adam Ellwanger, a professor of rhetoric at the University of Houston–Downtown, told me. He pointed out that these professors go on to conduct peer review and decide what scholarship gets published.
Little is being done to halt the intrusion of DEI into higher education. Academic jobs are perilously scarce for many disciplines, which encourages graduate students and young scholars to avoid rocking the boat at all costs. “There’s just a general fear that, if you push back, you’ll be marked for being on the wrong side,” one professor told me. “There’s no way to guard against how your colleagues will evaluate you for tenure in the future.”
And as allegiance to DEI has become a formal job requirement, even many senior faculty members remain silent out of a sense of self-preservation. As former dean of Harvard Medical School Jeffrey Flier told me, “It is considered politically and socially tenuous to bring up the subject.”
Still, some are pushing back. In August, the Academic Freedom Alliance released a statement, coauthored by Flier, calling for an end to the practice of mandatory DEI statements.
“It is one thing for schools to take action against wrongful discriminatory conduct; institutions are under a legal as well as moral and pedagogical obligation to do that,” the statement read. “A very different and disturbing thing is monitoring beliefs by demanding pledges of allegiance to an array of policies that are often vague, frequently ambiguous, and invariably controversial.”
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has also issued numerous statements opposing DEI requirements that violate the First Amendment. The organization I work for, the National Association of Scholars, frequently publishes reports on DEI, serving as a watchdog on the issue.
NYU’s Jonathan Haidt hopes his resignation from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology will be a wake-up call for his fellow academics, but his outlook is pessimistic.
“It is morally wrong, but it’s also incompatible with scientific inquiry, which requires total fidelity to the truth,” Haidt told me of the DEI requirement that prompted his decision to leave.
“The way that institutions collapse is that they become structurally stupid. That means people can no longer object, they have to go along with the orthodoxy.” Haidt said this isn’t an issue just in his field of psychology. “It’s about the biggest problem facing our country—the collapse of our institutions.”
==
America’s institutions continue their descent into madness, shifting seamlessly from knowledge production to ideological convents and giving foreign entities not engaged in this nonsense the opening to surpass them.
When the acceptable answers have already been pre-ordained and delivered from on high, and any deviation from this orthodoxy is punished as blasphemy - all great discoveries originate as blasphemies - you’re not creating or discovering, you’re just churning out religious zealots with the prescribed beliefs.
This, of course, is a feature of this ideology, not a bug. The purpose of institutional capture is to produce activist clerics to spread the gospel.
We already have experience with what it looks like when doctrinal conformity supersedes intellectual integrity: it looks like 1400 years of Islamic intellectual suffocation.
@JohnDSailer: In 2022, a paper drawing from “critical whiteness studies" analyzed how "whiteness" shows up in Physics 101—concluding that, a
By: John Sailer
Published: Nov 2, 2024
In 2022, a paper drawing from “critical whiteness studies" analyzed how "whiteness" shows up in Physics 101—concluding that, among other things, the use of whiteboards perpetuate whiteness in physics.
Here's what's crazy: this "research" was funded by the federal government.
But first: what's Critical Whiteness Studies?
Per the article, it's a research framework that starts with the assumption that omnipresent, invisible whiteness pervades our ordinary interactions and institutions to ensure "white dominance."
t's a bold starting point—with more than a hint of racial animosity. Applied to physics, it gets weird.
The article finds that the values of "abstractness" and "disembodiment" in physics ("physics values") reify whiteness and reflect human domination and entitlement.
It goes on to declare that, yes, even whiteboards "play a role in reconstituting whiteness as social organization."
They do this by "collaborat[ing] with white organizational culture" where ideas gain value "when written down."
Again, this is funded by, well, you...
Look at the National Science Foundation's recent budget requests: The federal agency has spent a quarter-billion-dollars annually on it's "Division of Equity for Excellence in STEM."
That doesn't account for projects on race and equity funded by other division.
Thus, "Observing whiteness in introductory physics" was funded by the National Science Foundation.
It was a part of a half million-dollar project unpacking which "strategies, tools, and materials" contribute to marginalization.
This sort of research is the most noticeable consequence of the NSF's now-well-documented push to fund social justice projects.
But, in my latest, I argue that it's not by any means the most consequential, and it's why I'm not at all convinced that "wokeness" has peaked.
--
New developments on campus may seem promising for academic freedom, but the more meaningful problems are deeper
By: John Sailer
Published: Oct 31, 2024
It’s undeniable that identity politics plays a different role in American life than it did four years ago. Far-fetched tales of omnipresent racism, once received with deference, are now out of vogue. For some, in light of this substantial cultural change, it seems that “wokeness” is in remission.
Viewed from a certain angle, even developments in higher education, despite the tumult of the last year, might serve as an example of how we’re past “peak woke.” In May, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology suddenly banned the practice of requiring faculty job applicants to write “diversity statements,” becoming the first elite private university to ditch the policy. It turned out to be a watershed moment: Left-of-center academics applauded MIT. Bill Maher praised the decision on his late-night show. Even the Washington Post’s editorial board came out against the policy. Soon after, Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences followed suit.
No doubt, MIT and Harvard’s decisions marked a real victory for academic freedom. The practice of requiring prospective faculty to demonstrate their commitment to a progressive social cause is so obviously contrary to the spirit of intellectual freedom that even many staunch progressives have voiced their opposition to it.
But this sort of policy—much like the decision by Vanderbilt, Stanford, Penn, and many others to adopt the principle of institutional neutrality on political issues—demonstrate far less serious reform than one might expect. This is because the policies most emblematic of “wokeness” didn’t simply leap onto campus out of nowhere in the summer of 2020. They are the result of structural incentives, and those incentives have yet to change. The worst offender might be the National Science Foundation.
A recent and widely circulated report by the Republican members of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation hints at a serious problem for higher education reformers: structural impediments to change, built up in recent years, will be more difficult to undo than changing a few policies. The report reviewed the number of NSF grants related to diversity, equity, and inclusion—finding that it spent $2.05 billion funding DEI projects over the last four years.
It’s worth noting that even by the NSF’s own accounting, the spending on social-justice-related grants is immense. In the NSF’s annual budget, the spending by the “Division of Equity for Excellence in STEM” has gradually increased, from $214 million in spending in 2021 to $267 million in the NSF’s 2025 budget request.
The report highlights how these grants span the full gamut of DEI-related projects, including one grant to a Georgia Tech professor for a project on deconstructing “racialized privilege in the STEM classroom” by acknowledging “Whiteness and White Supremacy.” The report’s takeaway clearly frames the problem: “these kinds of projects mask Marxist social ideology as rigorous and thoughtful investigation. Many of these awards—based on subjective, qualitative research incapable of repetition—failed to follow basic tenets of the Scientific Method.”
Of course, pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into universities to advance a social agenda will inevitably produce a string of consequences. It’s therefore worth expounding on the ranking member’s conclusion.
First, and most basically, it is worth acknowledging that the National Science Foundation—and by extension, the federal government—is responsible for a substantial amount of research that typifies the absurdity of 2010s and 2020s academia. Such entries include “Observing whiteness in introductory physics: A case study,” by Seattle Pacific University professor Amy Robertson—a study that “synthesize[s] literature from Critical Whiteness Studies and Critical Race Theory” to “identify and analyze whiteness as it shows up in an introductory physics classroom interaction.”
Robertson goes so far as to assert that whiteboards have perpetuated racism in the physics classroom: “Whiteboards display written information for public consumption; they draw attention to themselves and in this case support the centering of an abstract representation and the person standing next to it, presenting. They collaborate with white organizational culture, where ideas and experiences gain value (become more central) when written down.”
“Observing whiteness in introductory physics” could be mistaken for Sokal-style parody, but for Robertson, it serves as evidence of career success. As the article notes, the research was funded by the NSF, specifically as a part of a half-million-dollar project on “Centrality and Marginalization in Undergraduate Physics Teaching.”
When grantmakers flood academia with research dollars pointed at certain conclusions, they eventually create the illusion of consensus, irrespective of evidence. A 2020 paper purported to find that black newborn mortality is higher when the infants are cared for by white doctors. The paper has now been widely debunked, yet the conclusion still made its way into Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. Even a single paper can shape a politically useful narrative; a steady flow of tendentious research can have a much greater effect.
Second, taking one step back, this type of funding shapes a wide array of downstream incentives at universities. For many in the sciences, the NSF is a career-maker that just can’t be ignored. As I’ve argued before, when a key source of cash and prestige declares a priority, everyone down the funding food chain—from graduate students to scientists to administrators—will inevitably adapt.
To give just one example of how this plays out: by NSF’s own account, the CAREER award is the agency’s most prestigious source of funding for early career scientists. As a further honor, the NSF nominated the “most meritorious” CAREER recipients or the “Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers” (PECASE). But, remarkably, one of the three criteria for selecting PECASE awardees is a “commitment to STEM equity, diversity, accessibility, and/or inclusion.”
The effect of this sort of mechanism goes far beyond politicized or low-quality research. It creates an incentive to act and speak a certain way. For young scientists, the value of “getting with the program”—that is, at the very least, getting behind race conscious policies—is too high to ignore. And of course, since the NSF openly funds this priority to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, it’s not just early career scientists who inevitably find themselves weighing the costs and benefits of a certain brand of social justice language.
Third, and most relevant to the pedantic “peak woke” debate: the funding ensures that universities will maintain the NSF’s race-conscious priorities in ways that are hard to roll back.
Last month, the New York Times ran an expose of the sprawling inclusion bureaucracy at the University of Michigan. The article notes how the university evaluates its job candidate diversity statements for their “commitment to allyhood through learning about structural inequities.” As it turns out, the University of Michigan’s hiring protocols—which encourage search committees to heavily weigh diversity statements—have been adopted across the country. This is thanks in no small part to the NSF.
The University of Michigan was one of the first recipients of the NSF ADVANCE award, which funds university offices focused on recruiting women and minorities in STEM. Michigan’s ADVANCE office—which has remained even after its funding expired—produced a hiring framework, “Strategies and Tactics for Recruiting to Improve Diversity and Excellence,” or “STRIDE,” that heavily emphasizes DEI. The University of Louisville, Northeastern University, and Rutgers are among those that have adopted the STRIDE framework, through the work of their own NSF funded ADVANCE offices. At Rutgers, the diversity statement rubric rewards faculty who display their “commitment to allyhood through learning about structural inequities,” a rubric developed with the University of Michigan STRIDE committee.
Low-quality research propped up by excessive cash will end when the funding dries up. But institutional policies, once adopted, can endure. This is the real lesson of the NSF’s decades-long foray into social justice funding.
In fact, mandatory diversity statements, a policy increasingly unpopular amongst even several prominent staunch progressive, emerged as a “best practice” through programs directly funded by the NSF.
In 2013, faculty throughout the University of California System convened to discuss how to require and evaluate contributions to diversity, equity, and inclusion in faculty selection—a convening funded by the NSF ADVANCE program. The result of the discussion was a rubric that evaluated such contributions in three key areas: their awareness of “inequities,” their track records of “removing barriers,” and their future plans for promoting diversity and inclusion initiatives.
This is the prototype for the now notorious rubric used at UC Berkeley, which calls for penalizing faculty who say they prefer to “treat everyone the same.” Versions of this rubric—brought to you in part by, well, you, the American taxpayer—have ended up in the hands of faculty search committees from South Carolina to Texas to Ohio.
These cases make two takeaways inescapable.
First, in assessing the power of identity politics, race-conscious policies, or illiberal progressivism—however you want to define “wokeness”—policymakers should be careful not to mistake changes in weather for changes in climate. In advancing the peak woke thesis, one of the most astute theorists of wokeness, Musa al-Gharbi, points to the demonstrated decline in whiteboards-are-racist style papers. But if the underlying structure remains—if our sense-making institutions still require fealty to race-consciousness—this decline might turn out to be an epiphenomenon, a surface level change.
Second, once again, we should be ever mindful of the extreme power of federal grantmaking, especially in the sciences. MIT banned mandatory diversity statements. States like North Carolina and Texas have pushed a comprehensive reform agenda. Yet, even in these states, NSF funding continues to roll out ambitious personnel-building projects with the explicit goal of “cultural transformation.”
For reformers, this should be cause for sobriety—but also hope. Funders like the NSF shaped the American university we have today, a system inclined to sacrifice its basic mission for the cause of social activism. The same tools can be used to steer higher education back toward true intellectual freedom.
==
The public paying for this pseudoscientific nonsense is out-and-out fraud.
One department seeks applicants who "feel personal responsibility for helping to create an equitable and inclusive environment."
By: John Sailer
Published: May 23, 2024
Want to be a molecular biologist at Yale? Well, make sure you have a ten-step plan for dismantling systemic racism. When making hires at Yale’s department of molecular biophysics and biochemistry, faculty are told to place “DEI at the center of every decision,” according to a document tucked away on its website.
Meanwhile, every job advertised on the site links to a DEI “rubric” that tests candidates’ “knowledge of DEI and commitment to promoting DEI,” their “past DEI experiences and activities,” and their “future DEI goals and plans.”
The questions are designed to find out how they would infuse diversity, equity, and inclusion—a focus on race, gender, sexual orientation, and other categories of “marginalization”—into their work.
Applicants for professor and lecturer jobs, currently advertised on the site, will get “zero” points if they:
Have “no knowledge or awareness about DEI issues”
Do “not feel personal responsibility for helping to create an equitable and inclusive environment”
Were “not involved in activities that promote DEI”
Have “no goals or plans for promoting DEI”
But they are marked “exceptional” if they:
Have “clear knowledge of DEI issues”
Can demonstrate “strong interest in contributing to promoting DEI in teaching”
Have a “sustained track record of multiple efforts in promoting DEI”
Show a “clear and detailed plan for promoting DEI through teaching”
The assessment puts the thumb on the scale for those with progressive sensibilities. Scientists earn a high score in the category of “DEI knowledge” by showing they understand the “specific challenges faced by underrepresented minorities”—a criterion likely to favor those with a strong faith in the concepts of microaggressions, implicit bias, and systemic racism.
Diversity statements raise serious issues about free expression, and they also signal an ill-advised shift in priority—away from disciplinary excellence and toward social activism.
As one of the world’s most influential universities, Yale has popularized diversity statements. But they are finally past their expiration date. Yale should wield its influence and join MIT in putting an end to this misguided experiment.
==
This has literally nothing to do with molecular biology. It's a full-blown religious cult.
