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: a report from Vanderbilt and WashU just dropped, taking on the "state of scholarship in the humanities and social sciences," a big topic among critics of higher ed.
Read along w/ me 🧵
The report's premise is that support for the humanities and social sciences has cratered among basically everyone.
It gives several possible reasons: the misuse of the hard sciences, "problematic philosophical view," and—most notably—ideological distortions.
Interestingly, the report immediately narrows its scope down to that last complaint, that scholarship has been overrun by political goals, distorting disciplinary standards and producing bad research.
American Sociological Association: SOC 101 should be taught "consistent with disciplinary standards" and not "political preferences."
That objection fails when a discipline itself mirrors political preferences—and, judging by the ASA's own output, that seems to be happening 🧵
"Rethinking Social Movements: Can Changing the Conversation Change the World?"
The title of the ASA's 2016 meeting, which asks whether movements like Occupy Wall Street can "muster the power to achieve lasting social change?"
"Feeling Race: An Invitation to Explore Racialized Emotions" was the title of the 2018 ASA conference—which promises to brings "attention to the subject of racialized emotions and to the urgent need to develop policies, practices, and politics to address them."
The University of Alabama scrubbed the "Path Forward Diversity Report" from its website, but archived webpages show just how extensive it was—and how President Bell directly supported it.
"I look forward to the work of this committee," he said. Take a look at that work 🧵🧵🧵
The plan calls for embedding "DEI competencies" into annual performance reviews which would "measure inclusive behavior" and "ensure accountability" for the university's social justice commitment.
It proposes conducting "a review of the tenure and promotion process" to recognize faculty service "in the interest of advancing racial equality."
Whenever you see a bizarre trend in academia, it’s worth asking whether its homegrown or funded from outside. I recently wrote about how the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has worked hard to make “trans studies" a legitimate academic field.
Here are some of Mellon's grants 🧵
The “Black, Indigenous, & Trans of Color Histories Lab” received $460,000 from Mellon in 2024. The “lab” recently hosted a symposium titled “Trans Joy, Pleasure, Freedom.” Its keynote address was delivered by a Rutgers doctoral student & self-described “p*rn archivist.”
Notably, the “lab” includes several Mellon grantees. Co-lead Joshua Reason was a Mellon undergrad & dissertation fellow. Alejandrina Medina, another co-lead, received a Mellon-funded “Trans Studies” fellowship—as did the event’s keynote speaker.
NEW: The Mellon Foundation doesn’t just fund research; it helps distribute jobs. In doing so, it blurs the lines between charitable patronage and a different sort: the patronage of a political machine.
Mellon is the country’s largest funder of humanities by a mile. In its giving, it focuses aggressively on creating career opportunities for scholars.
Mellon money follows—and sometimes ramrods—these scholars through every career chokepoint.
This can virtually guarantee a scholar’s career. To see how it works, consider Kaneesha Parsard, who is now professor at University of Chicago.
DOCUMENTS: In 2018, the $7.7 billion-endowed Mellon Foundation announced that social justice would be its overriding priority. For academia, the consequences have been huge.
Through FOIA, I’ve acquired dozens of proposals for Mellon-funded projects. Here are a few ⬇️🧵
"Humanizing CRT," a $500k project at University of Illinois Chicago, seeks to "integrate... Critical Race Theory in the undergraduate curriculum."
The proposal describes a class module titled "Critical Legal Rhetoric meets English, Classical Studies, and Philosophy" (see ⬇️).
"Race in the Global Past through Native Lenses,: a $1 million project at UCLA, seeks to "counter the lack of Native epistemes in academic disciplines."
It does this in part by employing "tribal critical race theory."