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.
NEW: Universities across the U.S. have embraced diversity checkpoints in faculty hiring.
Administrators monitor the demographics of applicants throughout the process, with consequences for searches that don't "pass muster"—according to a trove of records I've obtained.
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In one email—acquired via a records request—UT Austin professor Carma Gorman asked diversity-dean John Yancey whether her search committee’s pool was sufficiently diverse to advance.
The dean said yes, but if the numbers dropped “then things don’t look good anymore.”
At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), the Human Resources director would send weekly “diversity of the pool reports,” which would continue up to the selection of finalists.
If the makeup was deemed “insufficient,” more administrators would get involved.
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.
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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.
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.”
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.
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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."
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..."
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.
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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.”
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.
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?
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.
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.