GIVE EMERGENCE A CHANCE.

Academic job application dossiers, oversized already, have recently become more bloated with requests for things like statements of teaching philosophy or some sort of reflection on diversity, inclusion, and equity.  Those latter have become so tainted as calls for professing one's fealty to the Church of Intersectionality that some states are barring the things.  "The University of Wisconsin will no longer require diversity, equity and inclusion statements from job applicants, UW System President Jay Rothman announced Thursday."  Mr Rothman acknowledged how those statements might have taken on creedal forms.  “But when some people believe mandatory diversity statement in employment applications are political litmus tests, then we are not being inclusive.”

Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy sees the same problem.

At Harvard and elsewhere, hiring for academic jobs increasingly requires these so-called diversity statements, which Harvard’s Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning describes as being “about your commitment to furthering EDIB within the context of institutions of higher education.”

By requiring academics to profess — and flaunt — faith in DEI, the proliferation of diversity statements poses a profound challenge to academic freedom.

A closer look at the Bok Center’s page on diversity statements illustrates how.

For the purpose of showcasing attentiveness to DEI, the Center suggests answering questions such as: “How does your research engage with and advance the well-being of socially marginalized communities?”; “Do you know how the following operate in the academy: implicit bias, different forms of privilege, (settler-)colonialism, systemic and interpersonal racism, homophobia, heteropatriarchy, and ableism?”; “How do you account for the power dynamics in the classroom, including your own positionality and authority?”; “How do you design course assessments with EDIB in mind?”; and “How have you engaged in or led EDIB campus initiatives or programming?”

The Bok Center’s how-to page mirrors the expectation that 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.

Playing ball entails affirming that the DEI bureaucracy is a good thing and asking no questions that challenge it, all the while making sure to use in one’s attestations the easy-to-parody DEI lingo. 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.

In addition to exerting pressure towards leftist conformity, the process of eliciting diversity statements abets cynicism. Detractors reasonably suspect that underneath the uncontroversial aspirations for diversity statements — facilitating a more open and welcoming environment for everyone — are controversial goals including the weeding out of candidates who manifest opposition to or show insufficient enthusiasm for the DEI regime.

Well, yeah, try applying to seminary and having reservations about trans-substantiation.

Perhaps, though, as Suzanne Penuel from the English faculty of a branch campus of South Carolina suggests, the problem is the excessively structured prompts and rubrics Harvard relies upon.

I wasn’t thrilled that we asked candidates for standalone statements on DEI. It’s already hard to apply for academic jobs, what with the CV, the sometimes pages-long cover letter, the buggy human resources forms, and the letters of recommendation from people nobody wants to bother yet again. (Applying for jobs at public institutions often requires more paperwork than at private ones, with some community college job applications feeling like jobs in themselves.) It hardly seemed inclusive to make applicants jump through another hoop only to be rejected in the end, as most of them would be. Plus, it would mean more work for the committee. But in the end, the committee decided the possible benefits outweighed the drawbacks and asked for the statements.

That decision I’d found annoying at first turned out surprisingly well. Why? Because candidates for professorships have lookalike transcripts with strings of identical grades. Their recommenders heap on the praise. Their CVs are perfectly polished, and their letters sound like they’ve been workshopped by a committee of Ph.Ds., because they have. Not so the diversity statements. Maybe because they’re newish, they were one of the few places where we could see the individual human beings behind the formulaic professional applications.

So, what did the candidates say in their diversity statements? All kinds of things. They were less generic than statements of teaching philosophy. Teaching philosophies always seem to involve student-centered pedagogy and flipped classrooms. These are laudable and no doubt sincere goals, but after the umpteenth time one sees a version of “My teaching relies on student-centered learning,” it loses some rhetorical impact. (I sometimes find myself imagining other versions when fatigue weakens my morals: My teaching relies mostly on caffeine alternated with Benadryl. I envision my courses as mutual nonaggression pacts—I won’t challenge students and they won’t give me bad course evaluations. I flipped the classroom by deciding never to come to campus again.)

The DEI statements, in contrast, weren’t predictable. I’d thought they’d mostly focus on race, with a side of gender. That wasn’t always the case. One candidate said he made sure the textbook was free. Another mentioned online office hours for students who couldn’t be on campus. Some had widened the range of perspectives in their readings to include more primary texts by women. One mentioned making the attendance policy more flexible for students who were sick. Others wrote that African-American history and European-American history were inseparable. They were generally modest in their aims. Progressives might have found that modesty disappointing, and others might have found it realistic.

It could be, dear reader, that her column is inadvertently calling attention to what is wrong with open-access universities.  But I digress.  A search committee can get a pretty good idea what sort of job market papers will be in the packets, simply by looking at the leading journals.  There's enough experience with those teaching philosophy statements that the formulaic will crowd out the innovative; and a suitably malevolent member of a search committee can probably find more than a few downloaded from somewhere.

Until the diversity statements become common enough that the templates will be out there to borrow from, the authors are more on their own, and that's probably a good thing.  A few years ago (recall, I've been pensioned off for ten years) the powers that be at Northern Illinois asked us to ask at the job meetings what experience the postulants had working with diverse populations.  That's a fair question: Chicagoland and the State Line are seriously polyglot places, and Northern Illinois doesn't have to work hard to curate a sufficiently diverse entering class.

Best answer?  One of our applicants mentioned experience tutoring student athletes.  I won't name the institution or the team.  I bet there's more coaching, and a more formulaic (and boring) set of answers these days.