John Sailer Profile picture
Aug 3, 2022 8 tweets 8 min read Read on X
Thread: For faculty seeking promotion and tenure, the UNC School of Medicine requires both "positive contribution(s) to DEI efforts" and a DEI statement.

The school has tried to downplay these requirements, but its own P&T documents reveal the obvious compelled speech issues. Image
According the the promotion and tenure guidelines, these "DEI efforts" include:

Participating in "advocacy groups," engaging in "health equity" research, "promoting social justice," and creating "curricular content that uses inclusive concepts." Image
As an appendix shows, at best, the requirement turns all faculty into adjunct DEI officers.

Recommended DEI activities include: applying "material learned in DEI trainings," giving "social justice-focused lectures," presenting on DEI topics at conferences, building DEI curricula Image
This policy was prompted by the school's "Task Force for Integrating Social Justice Into the Curriculum," which issued a list of far-reaching DEI recommendations.

Even after pushback, the school mostly defended those recommendations, including the those that compel speech. ImageImageImage
The P&T guidelines also link to a list of example DEI statements. While a few are more benign, some include overtly ideological language.

In effect, the sample letters suggest to faculty that they should embrace these concepts (e.g. "intersectionality") or risk losing promotion. ImageImage
The second letter mentions the school's Safe Zone training. I attended one of these trainings last year.

It was essentially a crash course in the ideology of gender self-identification. (Complete with a nod to pediatric transition.) Image
In short, the UNC School of Medicine has implemented a promotion and tenure policy that violates academic freedom and creates serious issues of compelled speech. And on top of that, the policy rewards the promotion of a ludicrous ideology.

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with John Sailer

John Sailer Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @JohnDSailer

Jun 30
DOCUMENTS: At Cornell, search committees that were hiring biomedical scientists had to pass four "checkpoints" to make sure their pools were "sufficiently diverse."

"That certainly looks like a Title VII violation," one legal expert told me when discussing the program.

🧵 Image
In 2021, Cornell received a $16 million NIH grant for the Cornell FIRST hiring program—aiming, in the proposal’s words, to "increase the number of minoritized faculty" at Cornell and beyond.

I acquired a trove of documents that show how this played out. Image
According to a proposal and set of progress reports, the program's leadership team screened applicants at four separate stages—the initial pool, longlist, shortlist, and finalist slate—to ensure “as diverse a pool as possible.” Image
Read 10 tweets
Jun 2
DOCUMENTS: The University of Michigan’s “anti-racism and racial justice” cluster hire wrapped up last year—recruiting at least 20 new professors.

I’ve acquired the proposals via a record request. They show how U-M aggressively hired social justice activists.

🧵🧵🧵 Image
For a cluster focused on the arts, a proposal declares that the new faculty will teach students to become "change agents," as art should aim to "challenge policies" which "perpetuate white supremacy." Image
Image
The cluster search in "data justice" was especially aimed at recruiting scholars in critical race studies," decolonization, and racial capitalism.

Adding: "UM needs to show these new faculty that we believe that it is not the job of the oppressed to reform the oppressor..." Image
Image
Read 12 tweets
May 29
Trust in higher ed has crashed over a decade.

Why?

My take: because in that time, universities launched huge ideologically-charged faculty hiring schemes.

But these schemes are legally vulnerable. They came hand-in-hand with overt discrimination.

🧵
I’ve acquired hundreds of documents describing the inner workings of social justice university hiring schemes.

Just in my capacity as an investigative journalist, I’ve found dozens of examples of universities seemingly violating civil rights law—and hiring based on race.
1) “Our aim is specifically to hire a Black, Indigenous, or Latinx faculty member.”

At the University of Colorado Boulder, the Faculty Diversity Action Plan funded special faculty position, if departments could demonstrate how the role would enhance diversity.

Many of the roles created through these programs were overtly ideological, like the one for a German studies professor who examined fairy tales, folklore, and fantasy through a “critical race studies perspectives.”

When @ and I acquired the proposals, we found that many just openly stated the intention to discriminate.

— “Our commitment, should we be successful with this application, is to hire someone from the BIPOC community.”

— “This cluster hire has the goal of doubling our underrepresented faculty in the college.”

— “[This search] emphasizes hiring Black, Indigenous, Asian American, Latinx, and Pacific Islander faculty”

— “We have an urgent and qualified need for BIPOC femme/women of color faculty in an Africana Studies focus who will contribute to the social science division thematic cluster hire in racism and racial inequality.”Image
Image
Image
Image
Read 8 tweets
May 28
Today, I argue that the challenge of higher education reform can be boiled down to one issue: the talent pipeline.

If we rewire the academic talent pipeline, the reform movement will succeed. If not, no other list of policies will suffice. Image
2/ Universities have long provoked criticism. But acute mistrust is a recent trend. Ten years ago, 57% of Americans had high confidence in higher ed, and only 10% had “little or none.” Today, only 36% have high trust, and 32% have low-to-no confidence.

What changed? Image
3/ The rise of what I call the “scholar-activist pipeline” helps explain the shift.

Over the past decade, universities—from Columbia to Ohio State to UVA to Texas A&M to CU Boulder—invested aggressively in ideologically-charged hiring schemes, recruiting 100s of new professors. Image
Read 8 tweets
May 6
Accreditors have played a serious and underrated role in ramrodding ideological and discriminatory policies throughout higher ed.

Some examples 🧵
The problem is perhaps worst in the medical sciences, of all places.

Example 1: In 2020, the Liaison Committee for Medical Education found Oregon Health and Science University’s medial school lacking in the area of "faculty diversity." Image
OHSU responded with a mammoth DEI action plan, which promised “incorporate DEI, anti-racism and social justice core competencies” in performance appraisals.

Also, “consequences” for faculty who didn’t get on board. Image
Image
Read 10 tweets
Apr 30
Faced with outside pressure, universities continue to circle the wagons in the name of "faculty governance" and autonomy.

But for years, big donors and university administrators have blatantly undercut faculty authority—all to promote sweeping social justice projects.

🧵
Dozens of universities have embraced fellow-to-faculty hiring schemes to promote their social justice goals, as I’ve described before.

Through these programs, an admin-led team hires postdocs who are then given special favor for tenure-track jobs. Image
Turns out, this is a powerful tool for strong-arming departments.

Multiple professors have told me how deans denied or limited their departments’ funds for regular hiring, while strongly encouraging them to hire through fellow-to-faculty programs. Image
Read 13 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us!

:(