University of Michigan Abandons Mandatory Diversity Statements

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If you were looking for a university to identify as committed to woke ideology you would have quite a few to choose from. But there’s no doubt that the University of Michigan has really tried to put itself at the forefront of this shift. The school has spent more than any other on DEI administrators and programs ($250 million at least) and has more than 500 staffers dedicated to DEI.

UM has also been at the forefront of mandatory diversity statements, a way for schools to ensure that only the most left-wing candidates are considered for jobs. UM has been using these statements to single out the right identities since at least 2016:

Launched in 2016, the Collegiate Fellows Program employs a clever administrative maneuver to pack the faculty. Rather than recruiting professors through a normal competitive search process, the program hires postdoctoral fellows, whose applications are reviewed by the National Center for Institutional Diversity, an office that [UM’s current DEI Chief Tabbye] Chavous once ran. Fellows are guaranteed a tenure-track position after up to two years in the program, a sort of side-door into the professoriate…

“Experience with the Collegiate Fellows Program indicates that a high percentage of fellows (93%) with demonstrated commitments to DEI come from traditionally minoritized groups,” it states candidly…

“Of the 45 Collegiate Fellows who have been hired at UM,”…“90% identify as persons of color, 65% from traditionally URM racial/ethnic groups (Black, Latinx or Native American) and 70% are women.”

It would be illegal to put a note on faculty job listings at UM which read “White males need not apply” but mandatory DEI statements allow DEI administrators to accomplish the same thing.

In the wake of a NY TImes report which revealed all of that spending on DEI has done nothing to improve the climate on campus, there have been rumblings that the school’s regents have had enough. That has UM’s DEI staffers worried about their jobs and promising to fight back.

Thursday the school’s provost announced that mandatory DEI statements would no longer be used in hiring. 

The University of Michigan will no longer require diversity statements as part of faculty hiring, promotion and tenure decisions, the school announced on Thursday, marking a major shift at one of the country’s leading public research institutions.

The new policy, issued by Michigan’s provost, comes as the university’s regents weigh a broader overhaul of its sprawling diversity, equity and inclusion programs, among the most ambitious and well financed in the country. At a public meeting on Thursday afternoon, Michigan’s regents and its president, Santa J. Ono, also announced a major expansion of the school’s signature scholarship program for lower-income students, the Go Blue Guarantee.

Some regents have indicated they are likely to seek cuts to the school’s large D.E.I. bureaucracy to offset the expansion, though those decisions will not be finalized until Michigan formulates its next annual budget.

That announcement was obviously coordinated and seems to be an attempt to move forward on some of the changes the regents were about to make. But the significance of this goes far beyond UM. It was, after all, the school which has been pushing other university to follow its lead on mandatory diversity statements.

The University of Michigan has promoted the statements far beyond its own campuses. Colleges around the country use versions of a scoring rubric for diversity statements devised by the National Center for Institutional Diversity, part of Michigan’s central D.E.I. office, or other hiring practices developed at the university.

John D. Sailer, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute who has written widely about diversity statements, called Michigan’s decision a “watershed moment” in higher education.

There were members of the faculty who didn’t want to see this happen specifically because of the message it would send about DEI in general but the change was made anyway after a survey of the faculty.

…a survey conducted for the committee found that more than half of Michigan faculty members believed diversity statements placed pressure on professors to express specific moral, political and social views.

That mandatory DEI statements are a racial and political litmus test should be obvious to everyone. This should never have been allowed in the first place but of course this is what universities in general (and UM in particular) have become, places focused on leftist political identity and indoctrination.

Putting an end to this one practice at the school leading the charge is significant. Hopefully other universities will take the hint and eradicate this practice.