American colleges and universities are headed for a long-overdue reckoning about their stealth use of DEI in hiring and enrollment.
The smirking, sneering elitist institutions of higher education believe that no one is going to call them out for their "workarounds" of federal law. They believe that they're smarter than the Department of Justice lawyers charged with ferreting out DEI from universities, who are ready to bring down the hammer on schools that have consistently undermined the law.
The most common ways schools are circumventing the DEI ban involve simply changing the name of their DEI programs and initiatives. This involves altering the names of DEI offices, websites, and programs to avoid explicit DEI language while still potentially pursuing similar goals. Other strategies include merging DEI offices into broader departments or shifting focus to student support services with a broader scope.
Aren't they clever? The ethics of such subterfuge are questionable, but accepted because, as we all know, the ends justify the means.
Instead of working to win an election and make changes to the law as they do in every other democratic society in the world, the elite institutions are taking a shortcut. It will cost them when they're exposed by Department of Justice prosecutors empowered to suss out these lawbreakers.
One example of tomfoolery: The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Northeastern University "lost at least four employees, including the executive director, in its newly rechristened Office of Belonging and Engagement, and eliminated the position of associate director of belonging and engagement in its College of Science."
They're lucky not to lose any federal grant money — yet.
A Department of Justice memo from late July spurred the most recent enforcement efforts. "The nine-page memo, signed by Attorney General Pamela Bondi, lists several hiring practices that constitute illegal discrimination—many of them ubiquitous in higher education," reports City Journal.
The DoJ issued some helpful guidance for colleges to use to avoid penalties for violating the law. The guidance is specific, leaving little wiggle room for universities to maneuver.
It’s an open secret that universities have long engaged in preferential treatment. The examples are endless. One faculty job rubric that I acquired from UT San Antonio, for instance, listed “female/URM” (underrepresented minority) as a scoring category. Similarly, in an email that I acquired from Northern Illinois University, a computer science professor passed along the department’s search committee evaluation rubric, which scored applicants on their “Diversity” and awarded points for those who were “non-male or non-cauca[s]ian.”
Another practice that the memo deems illegal is “diverse slate” policies, whereby employers mandate “demographic representation” in job candidate pools. As I reported last month, university deans and diversity officers around the country routinely conduct “diversity checks” and threaten to delay or cancel searches with insufficiently diverse applicant pools, shortlists, or finalist slates. The practice gives administrators, including diversity officers, extensive power in faculty hiring.
Perhaps most significantly, the DOJ memo points to the use of “unlawful proxies." These are supposedly neutral hiring or admission criteria that, in practice, “function as substitutes for explicit consideration of race, sex, or other protected characteristics.” One example most of us may have heard of is requiring "diversity statements" from potential faculty members. These statements give an advantage to applicants who “discuss experiences intrinsically tied to protected characteristics.”
Universities across the country have required such statements of faculty candidates. In an email exchange from the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign that I acquired, one professor on a search committee asked a human resources officer to “unmask” job candidates’ demographic information so that he could identify people “who are or might be eligible” for a special fellowship. While the HR officer said that she wasn’t allowed to divulge individual information, a diversity officer chimed in with a helpful workaround: “One tool that [the department] can use in the future is the diversity statement (contributions to diversity statement). By reviewing those, they might be able to get some of the information they are looking for.”
Other such "proxy" DEI advantages reward candidates for their “cultural competence,” “lived experience,” or “cross-cultural skills.” They used to call this sort of thing a "racket": "an illegal or dishonest scheme." Synonyms are "swindle," "scam," and "rip-off."
That just about covers it.
