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.
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."
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
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.
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.
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.)
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.
I talk to a lot of professors who hesitate to publicly push back against institutional madness.
It makes sense. Universities can make their lives miserable.
But two recent examples should inspire dissenters. Faculty who take a stand hold more card than one might think...
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Yesterday, a University of Michigan physics professor called out the president and board of regents — directly, in a public setting — for supporting what he described as blatantly discriminatory programs.
A truly remarkable statement.
That brings to mind an episode from the University of Washington.
In the summer, a professor stood up at a meeting and—while others tried to shout her down—directly confronted several administrators over allegedly wide-spread illegal hiring.
At the University of Michigan, a large-scale hiring program only recruits scholars who show a “commitment to DEI.”
In practice, its a career pipeline program for scholars in activist disciplines—like “trans of color epistemologies” and “queer of color critique."
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After the New York Times published on Michigan’s DEI bureaucracy, the university scrubbed (❗️❗️) the Collegiate Fellows Program directory from its webpage.
But I saved archived links.
Here’s what the much-celebrated initiative looks like in practice.
1⃣ A gender studies professor hired through the program studies how “transgender Latinas are racialized and sexualized in sexual economies of labor and the US nation more broadly.”
At the NIH, the Distinguished Scholars Program hires scientists who show a “commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
Through a public records request, I’ve acquired redacted NIH hiring documents that show what this criterion looks like in practice.
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Note, the NIH's former chief DEI officer emphasized that this program does not limit hiring based on race or sex—because, as she puts it below, “legally we cannot.”
Instead, it purports to boost diversity by proxy, hiring scientists who value DEI.
But...
...the records I acquired show—first of all—that NIH applicant reviewers repeatedly highlight gender and minority status.
Here's an example, in the section soliciting positive and negative comments on the potential NIH scientists.
NEW: The University of Michigan has hired over 50 professors via initiatives led by its chief diversity officer, Tabbye Chavous.
In records I've acquired, U-M boasted that, for these hires, diversity statements serve as a near-perfect proxy for racial preferences.
The University of Michigan Board of Regents may soon ditch DEI. In the unfolding drama, Chavous plays a central role. Her vision for higher education hangs in the balance.
In my latest, I unpack the FOIAed record, which sheds light on that vision.
NEW FOIA DOCUMENTS: a UW professor discusses her department's policy of "prioritizing DEI" in the hiring process. This, she says, is "operationalized as focusing on increasing hiring of URM candidates."
Earlier in that thread, when discussing how to rank candidates, search committee members ask whether the department has a policy on BIPOC candidates, like it does on URMs.
In a separate email, a committee member points out that "DEI contributions" are supposed to be their "top priority."
"This is what led to my surprise that DEI didn't seem to be the highest rated criterion in the committee's evaluation of candidates."
NEW: The University of Michigan Board of Regents has asked its president for a plan "to defund or restructure" the Office of Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion—according to the UM faculty senate chair.
In an email, the chair says the board could vote on the plan early next month!
The email, which was addressed to the faculty senate, calls on faculty to defend DEI at an institution that has sunk millions into a sprawling social justice bureaucracy.
It also quickly blames and dismisses @nickconfessore's recent NYT piece ("a tendentious attack").
The email also states that several regents spoke with Confessore, and that they "actively engaged the NY Times journalist" by "offering perspectives, information and contacts in ways that helped set up the articles biased framework and conclusion."