How ‘Diversity’ Policing Fails Science
“An open-records request reveals that Texas Tech faculty penalize candidates for heterodox opinions.” The author writes that “these documents—published in redacted form by the National Association of Scholars—are the first evaluations of prospective faculty DEI contributions to be made publicly available. They confirm what critics of DEI statements have long argued: That they inevitably act as ideological litmus tests.”
The DEI requirements cited are almost hard to believe, from understanding and articulating the difference between equality and equity (even Bernie had a hard time—see 8:06-9:03), to land acknowledgements.
“DEI connotes a set of highly contestable social and political views. Requiring faculty to catalog their commitment to those views necessarily blackballs anybody who dissents from an orthodoxy that has nothing to do with scientific competence…. diversity statements function as political litmus tests, but it’s worse than that. Heavily valuing DEI while selecting cell biologists, virologists and immunologists constitutes a massive failure of priority. This is an issue of academic freedom, and it is a degradation of higher education.”
