Yesterday a pair of authors co-wrote an opinion piece at the Wall Street Journal describing how the University of Colorado's focus on DEI led to hiring practices that were blatantly illegal. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 made hiring people based on race out of bounds but the school's Faculty Diversity Action Plan pushed hiring authorities to do it anyway and they were happy to go along with it.
In a hiring proposal that the National Association of Scholars acquired, faculty and staff of the university’s program for writing and rhetoric argued that recruiting a “BIPOC” professor—the acronym stands for “black, indigenous and people of color”—was vital to the department’s “curricular and programmatic goals.” Faculty at the department of Germanic and Slavic languages and literatures, proposing to hire a German-studies professor, touted the racial diversity of the department’s preferred candidate and explained how she could revise courses on fairy tales, folklore, and fantasy to incorporate “critical race studies perspectives.”
Both of these scholars, and many more, were hired through the university’s Faculty Diversity Action Plan, a special funding program for diversity-focused faculty hiring, which ran until 2023, when it was restructured and renamed. Created in 2020, the program played a significant role in dictating whom the university hired. In a 2022 faculty meeting, the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences was asked how many professors were hired through the program since it began. He estimated that around 90% were either hired through the program or were spousal hires...
The university’s framing should have immediately raised legal red legal flags. Long before Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023), Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned race-based discrimination, which President Trump’s executive order reaffirms. Consultants often remind universities that they can’t base hiring decisions on race.
Yet, competing for the funds to bring in new faculty, academic departments happily followed administrators’ prompting and boasted about their intent to discriminate. “Our commitment, should we be successful with this application, is to hire someone from the BIPOC community,” wrote faculty and staff at the journalism department. “Our aim is specifically to hire a Black, Indigenous, or Latinx faculty member,” wrote faculty at the geography department.
The authors note that while the school was expressing concern about systemic racism it was carrying out a program of systemic discrimination. One of the co-authors, John Sailer from the Manhattan Institute posted a thread where you can actually see some of the communications gathered through an FOIA request.
We acquired the approved/successful proposals for the university's large-scale diversity hiring program. Here are a few examples:
— John Sailer (@JohnDSailer) January 26, 2025
The College of Engineering & Applied Sciences said its cluster hire had “the goal of doubling our underrepresented faculty in the college.” pic.twitter.com/B5768vByO9
Another example:
— John Sailer (@JohnDSailer) January 26, 2025
The Department of Journalism told the admin in its proposal that “Our commitment, should we be successful with this application, is to hire someone from the BIPOC community…” pic.twitter.com/EXGefhOdrx
These are just a few examples, the list goes on and on.
— John Sailer (@JohnDSailer) January 26, 2025
The College of Media, Communications, and Information’s cluster hire, meanwhile, emphasized "hiring Black, Indigenous, Asian American, Latinx, and Pacific Islander faculty…”
But also note the disciplinary focus... pic.twitter.com/Ad5IB5NR0H
Not coincidentally, many of the minority candidates being selected for these jobs also happened to be DEI focused themselves. These illegal hiring practices were in service of the goal of making the school not just more diverse but more woke.
As we argue in the @WSJopinion, racial preferences went hand-in-hand with ideological preferences.
— John Sailer (@JohnDSailer) January 26, 2025
Notice that this proposal to hire a German studies scholar touts how she's both a woman of color and has an expertise in “anti-racist pedagogy” and “decolonizing German Studies.” pic.twitter.com/cpuKiJcaGi
How widespread did efforts like this become after 2020? Your guess is as good as mine but I'd bet it was not just this one school. Many universities have probably been packing schools with woke progressives by breaking employment law, either openly (as above) or more covertly.
It's gonna turn out a ton of people were just straightforwardly breaking the law. Makes it much harder to argue against the anti-DEI push https://t.co/e6RSzESgFV
— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) January 26, 2025
Matt Yglesias says much the same.
Very strong suspicion that many universities and progressive nonprofits have a lot of legal exposure around hiring over the past ten years https://t.co/167EQgzojy
— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) January 26, 2025
This has been an open secret.
This is a widespread practice in higher ed but usually less overt. For example, I have seen the most qualified candidates removed from application pools for “failing to address our diversity needs.” I saw a Jewish candidate removed from the pile just for being Jewish. https://t.co/5ukGRe5HZ1
— Max Abrahms (@MaxAbrahms) January 27, 2025
Everyone understood that this was going on, in private business as well as universities. Acquaintances would just outright say "We're looking to hire a woman of color/queer person/etc for this position". I never figured out how to politely ask why they were confessing a crime to… https://t.co/ayEKvPRwmY
— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) January 27, 2025
They had a choice between following the law and bowing to their most ridiculous cultural revolutionaries. They chose the latter, they broke the law, and now there’s a sheriff in town that’s going to make them pay the price for it. https://t.co/jyD1dqfKSM
— Inez Stepman ⚪️🔴⚪️ (@InezFeltscher) January 27, 2025
What should happen now, ideally, is a widespread investigation of universities that received public funds to find out who else has been doing this. Then people should be fired and perhaps prosecuted. I think we all know that if college administrators were blatantly planning to hire white faculty there would be some kind of federal consent decree in place very quickly.
Preserve your documents, public universities. Some actual social justice may be coming your way.
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