DEFINING EXCELLENCE DOWN.

It's in the strategic plan, colleagues.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will soon require all faculty members to submit a diversity statement to be considered for tenure or promotion.

Andreas C. Cangellaris, UIUC’s provost, announced the change this week, saying that in order to meet the goals of its current strategic plan, the university must “catalyze innovation and discovery, find novel and proactive ways to educate students from all walks of life, and develop ever-deeper connections with the public we serve.”

All of that requires that UIUC “recognize and support a wider range of contributions to the excellence of our institution,” Cangellaris added.

That article was dated April 1 of this year, but the jargony language and the "wider range of contributions to excellence" is precisely more evidence of the continuing special-educationization of higher education. Put the idea in the same box with feminist nutrition and indigenous climatology.

William Bernhard, executive vice provost for academic affairs, said UIUC began working to update its tenure and promotion policy more than two years ago, to better align it with the strategic plan. The policy update also carves out a clear place for DEI contributions in the tenure and promotion process, he said, as individual faculty members or departments had long been “squeezing” this work into the service criterion of their faculty reviews.

The provost’s office describes the new DEI requirement as a one-page-maximum personal statement detailing “specific individual and/or collaborative activities aimed at supporting diversity, equity, and inclusion, as well as access.” Candidates should “include a discussion of the context, importance, and impact of their contributions along with their future plans for contributions. The candidate may choose to organize the statement by topic, activity, domain (e.g., research, teaching, and service), or in another manner.”

Whoop! There it is. Rather than recognize that Urbana are in the same business as the Ivies, they see as the way forward increased efforts in access-assessment-remediation-retention.  I doubt very much that the Scottish Enlightenment or classical political economy or the antiquities merit mention in any inventory of "diverse perspectives in courses departmentwide."  That indigenous cosmology, though.

Our universities are being run into ridiculousness by terminally stupid people.