In a groundbreaking reversal, Harvard University’s largest faculty division announced on Monday that it would no longer require applicants for tenure-track positions to submit diversity, equity, and inclusion statements.
The Ivy League institution’s announcement about DEI statements, or “Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging,” as the university calls them, comes after the Faculty of Arts and Sciences implemented the policy change earlier this spring.
“We made this change in response to feedback from numerous faculty members who were concerned that the current DIB statements were too narrow in the information they attempted to gather and relied on terms that, for many, especially international candidates, were difficult to interpret,” Nina Zipser, a FAS dean, wrote in an email to faculty Monday morning.
Instead of a DEI statement, applicants are now allowed to write a broader “service statement” that “describes efforts to strengthen academic communities, e.g. department, institution, and/or professional societies.”
DEI has been a contentious issue at Harvard, which only escalated when the institution’s first African American president, Claudine Gay, was forced to step down from leadership in January. In a statement announcing her resignation, Gay claimed she was forced to resign, in part, because she was “subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus.”
Advocates of her removal said the basis for her resignation was widespread backlash over her failure to protect Jewish students during Harvard’s anti-Israel protest, as well as multiple plagiarism scandals.
During a House committee hearing on campus antisemitism, Gay did not directly confirm that calls for the genocide of Jews violated Harvard’s policies against bullying and harassment. Gay’s refusal to do so led to bipartisan calls for removal.
Gay was also embroiled in multiple plagiarism scandals, including evidence that she plagiarized parts of at least eight out of her 17 published academic works.
With her exit, some on the Right claimed victory over what they called Harvard’s effort to achieve diversity that discriminated against non-black individuals.
“The most important point about Claudine Gay’s plagiarism isn’t that she was fired, but that she had the job — the most prestigious job in higher education — after an extremely thin record of accomplishment,” Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) posted on X. “She got her job not through merit, but because she checked a box. In this, she is not an outlier, but a representative of a system of education that rewards mediocrity.”
Vance added, “The real story of Harvard is not Claudine Gay’s firing but this: You are ruled by thousands of people who are just as mediocre. Their power relies on tax advantages from the federal government, a DEI bureaucracy backed by Biden’s Department of Justice, and the implicit consent of millions of Americans.”
Others joined the social media debate over DEI, including Bill Ackman, a prominent American businessman, who launched a social media battle with X owner Elon Musk and Dallas Mavericks minority owner Mark Cuban.
“I was accused of being a racist from the President of the NAACP among others when I posted on @X that I had learned that the Harvard President search process excluded candidates that did not meet the DEI criteria. I didn’t say that former President Gay was hired because she was a black woman. I simply said that I had heard that the search process by its design excluded a large percentage of potential candidates due to the DEI limitations. My statement was not a racist one. It was simply the empirical truth about the Harvard search process that led to Gay’s hiring,” Ackman said following Gay’s resignation.
He went on to defend the impulse behind DEI, saying, “When former President Gay was hired, I knew little about her, but I was instinctually happy for Harvard and the black community. Every minority community likes to see their representatives recognized in important leadership positions.”
Elon Musk responded to the post, deriding any possibility that DEI could be good for the country.
“DEI is just another word for racism. Shame on anyone who uses it,” Musk posted, while later saying, “Discrimination on the basis of race, which DEI does, is literally the definition of racism.”
Cuban jumped into the debate, taking a middle-of-the-road approach.
“DEI does not mean you don’t hire on merit. Of course you hire based on merit. Diversity – means you expand the possible pool of candidates as widely as you can. Once you have identified the candidates, you HIRE THE PERSON YOU BELIEVE IS THE BEST,” he posted in response to Musk.
The DEI mandate had received conflicting feedback from Harvard professors, with some calling it problematic, while others hailing it as a step toward rectifying historical racial inequality.
“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 student newspaper.
Edward Hall, a Harvard philosophy professor and the director of undergraduate studies, argued in favor of DEI statements.
“[B]uilding a diverse community isn’t enough,” he wrote in an op-ed. “The members of that community need to experience it as one to which they genuinely belong, as a single community in which all are included equally, with — crucially — equal standing to have their voices taken up, responded to, and engaged with.”
Other professors, including Danielle Allen, a professor who co-chaired Harvard’s Presidential Task Force on Inclusion and Belonging in 2018, have considered points from people on both sides of the debate.
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After Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) warned during a House hearing that DEI was “a grave danger inherent in assenting to the race-based ideology of the radical Left,” Allen noted there was some truth to Foxx’s concerns.
“While I stand by the goals of inclusion and belonging for college campuses — and consider those goals valuable for America writ large — I agree with Foxx that we have lost our way in pursuing them,” Allen said in a Washington Post op-ed at the time.