DEI Statements for Professors . . . and Plumbers 

The latest incarnation of the loyalty oath is the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) statement. Debate over DEI in all its many manifestations has been raging for some years, especially in the academy. Indeed, it has been three years since the Academic Freedom Alliance (AFA), which I helped found, and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression voiced concern over the use of DEI statements in faculty hiring, noting among other things the threat they pose to academic freedom. It seems unnecessary to explain in any detail why it is wrong to require applicants for professorial positions to assent to and express enthusiasm for discriminatory practices that are in some cases not only immoral but blatantly illegal. 

But to be clear—and I will come back to this—it is wrong to require applicants for any positions to do this, not just professorial ones. 

The second Trump administration’s assault on DEI, starting with “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity” on January 21, 2025, has for some reason not yet included an executive order on these mandatory statements, which are common in public as well as private institutions of higher education. But any reader who remains unconvinced that they are intrinsically awful might begin with two articles published in April 2024. One, an op-ed in the Harvard Crimson, was written by the distinguished Harvard Law professor Randall L. Kennedy, a self-described “scholar on the left committed to struggles for social justice,” who earlier helped draft the AFA’s call for an end to required diversity statements. The other, which takes off from Kennedy’s opinion piece, appeared in The Atlantic and comes from the pen of the journalist Conor Friedersdorf. It bears the blunt title “Abolish DEI Statements.” 

Now Louis Galarowicz and Mason Goad, two research fellows at the National Association of Scholars (NAS), on whose board of directors I sit, have put out an excellent white paper: “Ideological Insistence: A Quantitative Study of DEI Statements in American University Job Listings.” The NAS regularly weighs in on DEI matters, and this study follows neatly on one from 2023 by John D. Sailer (now at the Manhattan Institute) titled “Diversity Statement, then Dossier,” which took on the phenomenon of “DEI cluster hiring.” In the new white paper, Galarowicz and Goad report on more than 23,000 job listings—“almost every open position, from deans to janitors”—advertised between October 17 and November 26, 2024 at ninety-eight institutions: eighty-nine public universities across eleven states from Maryland to California, plus the eight Ivies and MIT. This is, they believe, “the largest study to date on DEI statements in American higher education hiring practices.” 

It should be stressed that Galarowicz and Goad present their discoveries with what would appear to be exceptional fairness: no one can doubt that the NAS leans right, but the authors are not looking to “own the libs.” They explain in some detail their “attempt[s] to err on the side of caution,” which have l to the suspicion that they undercounted rather than overcounted and, therefore, that “the true amount of DEI-commitment in American colleges and universities’ job requirements is substantially higher than the numbers we provide here.” 

Some of the things Galarowicz and Goad have uncovered about the use—and non-use—of DEI statements are sobering but not especially surprising. One example: Washington (a reliably blue state) has “the highest state-wide percentage of job postings with diversity statements of the states we sampled,” followed in second place by its southern neighbor, blue Oregon, and followed in third place by its southern neighbor, blue California.  

But other discoveries I, for one, would not have predicted. Take, for example, the contrast between the two most prestigious public universities in California: UC Berkeley and UCLA. At Berkeley, “whose public statements have expressed an extraordinary commitment to DEI even by the standards of American higher education,” 80 percent of the listings surveyed were “DEI positive.” But at UCLA, only one of 189 listings fell into this category. What makes this remarkable, not to say heartening, is that it suggests that “DEI repeal can be swift and total.” After all, just one year ago, UCLA was a proud poster child for the DEI apparatus. 

How did such an about-face happen? Galarowicz and Goad are surely correct that it stems from the intrepid reporting of the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher F. Rufo (see, e.g., a City Journal article from April 2024 written with Luke Rosiak) and Aaron Sibarium of the Washington Free Beacon. 

In the Ivy League, Dartmouth and Princeton present a similar contrast. A full 100 percent (120 out of 120) of Dartmouth’s listings required candidates to demonstrate “a commitment to diversity, inclusion, and cultural awareness through actions, interactions, and communications with others,” whereas the lone DEI-positive one-out-of-190 at Princeton was for the position of Associate Dean for Diversity and Inclusion. Galarowicz and Goad suggest that Princeton’s positive practice may be the result of the work of the AFA, the idea for which Princeton professor Robert P. George and I (then also a Princeton professor) cooked up in March 2020, and which was formally launched in 2021 with George and Keith Whittington (then at Princeton, now at Yale) as key figures. 

There is, I believe, hope for Dartmouth. Its president since 2023, Sian Beilock, may be the most sensible president in the Ivy League: Dartmouth was the first Ivy to announce, in early 2024, that it would be reinstating the requirement that prospective undergraduates submit SAT or ACT scores, and Beilock’s unwillingness to tolerate anti-Semitism on campus has been refreshing. Furthermore, come July 1, Dartmouth will have a new provost, the mathematical biologist Santiago Schnell, who in my estimation is unlikely to have patience for DEI overreach.  

As for Princeton, there is a cautionary tale behind the statistics: DEI lurks everywhere, not just in statements. However pleasing it is that Princeton “appear[s] to be quietly stepping away from the use of diversity statements,” it would be very wrong to believe even for a second that the institution is unfriendly to DEI. The Princeton Alumni Weekly reports that “[t]he University insists that its commitment to DEI remains unwavering,” and articles from recent years by the alumni journalists Abigail Anthony and Stuart Taylor, Jr.—the latter writing just a few months ago—make clear the tremendous power that words like “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion” have on campus. Furthermore, this past April, Rufo and Ryan Thorpe damningly described Princeton’s “entrenched . . . system of racial discrimination and segregation”: DEI has “expanded dramatically” under the leadership of longtime president Christopher Eisgruber, with moves that go well beyond faculty hiring—for example, “call[ing] on departments to award contracts based not on quality or cost, but on race.” 

Supplier contracts bring me to plumbers. As already noted, “Ideological Insistence” records information about job postings for blue-collar and lower-level white-collar positions as well as for professors and deans, and Galarowicz and Goad’s graphs differentiate between the use of DEI statements for faculty and for “staff.” What the authors do not do, however, is comment on different types of staff. This is unfortunate since the sociopolitical views of a large number of essentially invisible staff members—office assistants, dining hall workers, and plumbers—are likely to be quite different, in aggregate, from the views of those at the front of the house: professors and academic administrators. 

Back in 2018, my American Enterprise Institute colleague Samuel J. Abrams published an op-ed in the New York Times that made a big splash. It was already well known that the professoriate leans well to the left, but what Abrams did is examine the political inclinations of “a nationally representative sample of roughly 900 ‘student-facing’ administrators—those whose work concerns the quality and character of a student’s experience on campus.” His conclusion: “It appears that a fairly liberal student body is being taught by a very liberal professoriate—and socialized by an incredibly liberal group of administrators” (emphasis his). 

But student-facing administrators are often wannabe academics. They are, more likely than not, registered Democrats with a certain sense of entitlement who either believe wholeheartedly in DEI or at least won’t speak up against its depredations. 

What, however, about non-student-facing workers? In my many years at Princeton, I regularly joked with a good number of such workers about the incomprehensible rhetoric of my faculty colleagues and about what we now call (with Rob Henderson) their luxury beliefs. They thought professors—including me, to be sure—were ridiculous creatures. And often they were right. 

Suppose, for instance, that you are a “plumber/journeyman” or a “radiation safety specialist” in or around Ithaca. A job opens up at Cornell. Naturally, you’re excited. But then you notice that the “first required qualification” (!) for the one is “Experience in and/or demonstrated commitment to supporting diversity, equity, access, inclusion, and wellbeing” and for the other, “ability to cultivate and develop inclusive and equitable working relationships.” What are you to think? And more to the point, what do you do? 

In the light of “Ideological Insistence,” I believe a follow-up study to Abrams’s on student-facing administrators is called for. It is only thanks to the work behind the scenes of office assistants, dining hall workers, and plumbers that universities and other elite organizations can and do operate relatively smoothly on a day-to-day basis. It would be good to know more about what exactly such people—who cannot, after all, claim that their academic freedom is being violated—think about DEI, about diversity statements, and about the state of affairs at the institutions where (if I may steal a phrase from DEI-happy academic jargon) they are the ones who perform what truly is invisible labor. 

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