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Erin Shaw
Free The Inquiry, Heterodox Academy, Substack
Excerpt: Although requests for DEI statements in faculty hiring may be well-intentioned, they can actually undermine open inquiry by setting up ideological filters that exclude those who don’t share – or are unwilling to pretend they share – specific political opinions and worldviews.
But how common is the practice of asking for DEI statements in faculty hiring, and what patterns exist among such requests? At the top level, we found that 22.3%, or over one out of every five, of the 10,000 faculty job advertisements analyzed requested some kind of DEI-related material as a part of the application process. In other words, about one out of every five faculty members hired within the last year probably had to espouse a particular set of political views to have a chance of landing the jobs they sought.
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I recently listened to Ross Douthat’s interview with the philosopher Jennifer Frey. She is a serious thinker and an unusually courageous academic entrepreneur. What she built at the University of Tulsa before it was dismantled is exactly the sort of thing more universities should be attempting. Yet almost every argument she offered for the humanities is, I think, completely unpersuasive to anyone not already on our side of the table.
This report presents findings from a national survey of 1,959 law school faculty at 192 American Bar Association (ABA) approved law schools in the United States, conducted by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). As one of the largest surveys of law faculty on free expression and professional norms, the data reveal a profession that strongly endorses free speech principles while struggling to live them out in practice.
I just returned from the University of Wyoming, where I debated the President of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) Todd Wolfson over the need for colleges and universities to maintain institutional neutrality. The debate was organized by the Steamboat Institute and was live-streamed.
The formal question presented for debate was: “Is institutional neutrality necessary to preserve the university as a forum for open inquiry rather than an actor in political disputes?” I spoke in favor of institutional neutrality while Wolfson argued against it as a necessary component to higher education.
