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.
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."
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.
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.
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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.
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.
As huge NIH funding cuts become a real possibility at places like Harvard, it's worth putting the agency's role in perspective.
Put simply, the NIH is biomedical science in the US. Private money will not be able to pick up its tab.
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2/ This year the NIH requested a fiscal year budget of $50 billion, and in years past its been close to that amount.
The top ten medical schools by NIH funding all get more than half a billion dollars annually.
Let’s put that in perspective…
3/ The top philanthropic funder of the medical sciences, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, happens to also be the second largest charity in the country behind the Gates Foundation.
It’s endowment is $27 billion, just a little more than half the NIH’s total budget.
Princeton President Chris Eisgruber argues: Trump’s demands violate academic freedom, the admin is using science funding to influence policies that have nothing to do with science (e.g. admissions policies).
It's hard to take this completely seriously. Here's why: (🧵)
The federal government constantly uses its funding “clout” to elicit university policies. Most recently, this has come in the form of heavy handed diversity requirements, which of course involves admissions policies.
As far as I know, Eisgruber has never raised the issue. 2/
To give just one example: at the NIH, large scale training grants (T32s) have long required applicants to submit special plans on enhancing diversity, which have to meet a certain scoring threshold for the project to be funded.
Trump is hurling earth-shaking threats at America’s universities. The response from elite opinion leaders has been fascinating, if you read between the lines.
The pattern is: denounce Trump’s actions, but also, in a way, vindicate them. The New York Times is a good example.
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The NYT editorial board declares: now is the time for universities to defend themselves.
But also, universities have valued ideology over truth-seeking (i.e. their basic mission). They've silenced debate. They've ostracized political outsiders.
David Leonhardt says: Trump is borrowing from the Modi/Putin/Erdogan playbook.
But also, universities (even community colleges!) have acted in a way that’s “inconsistent with their mission." Editor Patrick Healy adds a story about required campus orthodoxies.