University of Michigan Ends Required Diversity Statements?

That's rich. The school currently employs 241 DEI officers and has spent $250 million on the efforts since 2016. Those poor helpless souls going to have to seek alternate employment?

University of Michigan Ends Required Diversity Statements

The school, a bastion of D.E.I., will no longer require the statements in hiring decisions and is considering a broader shift in its policies.

By Nicholas Confessore and Steve Friess, NY Times

Dec. 5, 2024

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.

The new policy on diversity statements effectively overrules a hodgepodge of practices at the university’s undergraduate and graduate schools, most of which began using the statements in hiring in recent years.

“As we pursue this challenging and complex work, we will continuously refine our approach” to D.E.I., the provost, Laurie McCauley, said in a statement.

Michigan’s decision may add momentum to growing efforts to restrict the use of diversity statements, which have proliferated widely in academia in recent years. Schools that employ them typically ask job applicants to discuss how they would advance diversity and equity through their scholarship, teaching or community service. In states like Michigan and California, which ban direct racial preferences in hiring, the statements have been credited with helping public universities hire more diverse faculties.

Critics view them as a form of compelled political speech that are often used to evade legal restrictions on affirmative action. In at least some instances, job candidates have been eliminated from consideration based solely on their diversity statements.

Legislatures in at least nine states have banned them, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education. Last year, public university systems in Missouri, Ohio and Wisconsin all stopped requiring diversity statements. So have the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

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.

“The University of Michigan championed diversity statements,” Mr. Sailer said in an email. But “now, it will represent a milestone in the movement to roll back this misguided practice, a clear victory for academic freedom.”

Some Michigan faculty members attacked the decision as an unwarranted interference in academic affairs. On the social media network Bluesky, Sean Johnson, an assistant professor of astronomy, called the new policy “a cowardly and unjustifiable intrusion into hiring practices and rubrics that should be set by departments according to their needs and missions.”

The decision followed intense internal debates among professors and administrators. A faculty committee appointed by Dr. McCauley to consider diversity statements initially proposed that the university leave their use to the discretion of its colleges and schools, while providing more training.

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“Outright elimination of diversity statements at U-M would send an inaccurate and discouraging signal regarding U-M’s commitment to DEI values,” the committee wrote in July.

But 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.

In late October, the committee came back with a revised report, this one proposing that Michigan cease using stand-alone diversity statements and instead incorporate diversity commitments into job candidates’ teaching and research statements.

Dr. McAuley accepted the first recommendation but rejected the second. The head of Michigan’s Faculty Senate said in an online comment on Thursday that the revised proposals had been produced after regents intervened in the process.

Thomas Braun, a biostatistics professor who led the committee, said he hoped the university would still find a way to allow job applicants to discuss how their work related to diversity in the broad sense, without imposing ideological litmus tests.

“I think all faculty should be able to explain how their own personal experiences inform what they do everyday as a faculty member, and how it fits in the core values and mission of UM,” Mr. Braun said in an email. “If that seems impossible to some individuals, then maybe UM is not the right fit.”

Hours before Thursday’s meeting, several dozen people organized by the school’s Black Student Union staged a protest outside Dr. Ono’s home. The union has criticized Michigan for not moving aggressively enough to diversify its campuses.

Among the marchers was Mirra Battle, a psychology undergraduate who is Black. She carried a sign reading: “Defund DEI!? Not Now, Not Ever.”

“I’m here because the reason I got into the U. of M. was due to D.E.I. projects,” said Ms. Battle, who arrived at Michigan through a pipeline program known as Wolverine Pathways. “That’s most of where my funding is coming from, so I want to make sure future students also have this chance to get into school.”

Regents have said they do not plan to cut programs like Pathways. According to a review conducted last summer, more than half of the school’s overall D.E.I. spending has gone to staff salaries and benefits.

“Diversity and inclusion are amongst our core values,” said Jordan Acker, a Democratic regent. “At the same time, we have to continue to reform programs and bureaucracies that are not working, and it is our obligation as a board to make sure as much taxpayer and tuition dollars go into direct student support as possible.”

At Thursday’s meeting, the school officials warned that universities like Michigan will face a dramatically different political landscape when former President Donald J. Trump returns to the White House next year. Republicans in Washington have floated proposals to tax university endowments, eliminate the Department of Education and punish schools that fail to combat antisemitism on campus.

It is unclear how the new policy on diversity statements will ripple across campus and through Michigan’s diversity programs. Some of Michigan’s most high-profile D.E.I. initiatives rely on diversity statements, including the Collegiate Fellows program and a federally funded biosciences program called M-PACT, through which the university has hired dozens of new faculty in recent years.

The Collegiate Fellows program asks applicants to state how they would advance D.E.I. goals, whether through research into “race, gender, diversity, equity and inclusion,” “significant academic achievement in the face of barriers” or “commitment to allyhood through learning about structural inequities.”

Documents obtained by The New York Times Magazine this year showed that Michigan administrators viewed such statements as an effective way to generate racial diversity in a state where affirmative action is banned. The Collegiate Fellows program, school officials attested on a federal funding request, showed “that a high percentage of fellows” with “demonstrated commitments to D.E.I. are likely to come from traditionally minoritized groups.”