Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences announced Monday that it is ending mandatory written declarations of fidelity to diversity, equity, and inclusion as a prerequisite for applying to tenure-track positions.
Instead of a DEI statement, a more general “service statement” that “describes efforts to strengthen academic communities, e.g. department, institution, and/or professional societies” will be asked of candidates for FAS. The policy shift was quietly implemented in the spring and shared publicly Monday.
The FAS, which applies to professors in the undergraduate program and some of the university’s graduate schools, started requiring DEI statements as part of tenure-track job applications in 2019-2020, the Boston Globe reported. Gay presided over FAS as dean at the time.
Parallel scandals involving leftist anti-Israel demonstrations on campus and the ouster of former president Claudine Gay have placed a spotlight on the role of identity politics at Harvard in recent months.
“By requiring academics to profess — and flaunt — faith in DEI, the proliferation of diversity statements poses a profound challenge to academic freedom,” Randall Kennedy, a Harvard Law School professor, wrote in an April op-ed in the Harvard Crimson. The title of Kennedy’s article was, “Mandatory DEI Statements Are Ideological Pledges of Allegiance. Time to Abandon Them.”
While the FAS has scrapped DEI statements, other departments at Harvard are still holding onto them, such as the Harvard Graduate School of Education. That school asks applicants to submit a statement of teaching philosophy that includes a description of their “orientation toward diversity, equity, and inclusion practices.”
In May, MIT announced it will no longer require diversity statements in its faculty-hiring process, making it the first elite university to ditch the practice.
“We can build an inclusive environment in many ways, but compelled statements impinge on freedom of expression, and they don’t work,” MIT president Sally Kornbluth told National Review.
In March, the University of Florida shut down its diversity department, fired all of its DEI staff, and canceled DEI contracts with outside vendors to comply with a Florida Board of Governor’s regulation that prohibits funding of such programs. As a result of the policy, the college shut down the Office of the Chief Diversity Officer and eliminated DEI positions and administrative appointments.
In May, the Board of Trustees for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill slashed funding for diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in next year’s budget, diverting the money to public safety and policing instead.
“…DEI statements will essentially constitute pledges of allegiance that enlist academics into the DEI movement by dint of soft-spoken but real coercion: If you want the job or the promotion, play ball — or else,” Kennedy wrote in his op-ed for the Crimson. “… It does not take much discernment to see, moreover, that the diversity statement regime leans heavily and tendentiously towards varieties of academic leftism and implicitly discourages candidates who harbor ideologically conservative dispositions.”
Last week, Harvard said it will stop making official public political statements. The move followed a report from an “Institutional Voice Working Group” formed by interim president Alan Garber. Overseen by interim Harvard Provost John F. Manning, the group was created to investigate whether the university should publicly wade into politics, likely prompted by the outcry over its morally lukewarm stance after Hamas invaded Israel on October 7.
Co-chaimanr of the working group and Harvard Law School professor Noah Feldman told the Crimson that the report advocates for the school to adopt political neutrality while encouraging open debate, discourse, and truth-seeking.