Rules & Policies

Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff
Washington Post

Excerpt: The University of Texas at Austin is laying off dozens of employees who previously worked in diversity, equity and inclusion roles in response to a state law that banned such programs, according to the Texas chapter of the American Association of University Professors.

Employees who had previously worked in DEI roles received layoff notices Tuesday. That came months after the university had reassigned them from those positions to comply with the legislation, which went into effect Jan. 1. The school declined to provide a specific tally of the number of people affected, though the AAUP said 60 is a “conservative estimate.”

Randall Kennedy
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: On a posting for a position as an assistant professor in international and comparative education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, applicants are required to submit a CV, a cover letter, a research statement, three letters of reference, three or more writing samples, and a statement of teaching philosophy that includes a description of their “orientation toward diversity, equity, and inclusion practices.”

At Harvard and elsewhere, hiring for academic jobs increasingly requires these so-called diversity statements, which Harvard’s Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning describes as being “about your commitment to furthering EDIB within the context of institutions of higher education.” By requiring academics to profess — and flaunt — faith in DEI, the proliferation of diversity statements poses a profound challenge to academic freedom.

Ryan Quinn
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: This year began with a seismic event in higher education: Claudine Gay resigned as Harvard University’s first Black president after Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute and leading crusader against diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, publicized plagiarism allegations against her.

Her resignation was followed by high-profile allegations against a former Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who’s married to one of Gay’s most prominent critics, which fueled concerns over a coming “plagiarism war” with the right and left lobbing accusations at scholars on the other team. The war, so far, looks like a one-sided affair. Rufo and conservative media outlets have published multiple accusations of plagiarism and research misconduct, several of which appear serious and have made splashes in major mainstream media outlets.

Conor Friedersdorf
The Atlantic

Excerpt: Roughly a decade after the movement for diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, began to spread in American higher education, a political backlash is here. The Chronicle of Higher Education has tallied 80 bills since 2023 that aim to restrict DEI in some way, by banning DEI offices, mandatory diversity training, faculty diversity statements, and more. Eight have already become law, including in Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, North Dakota, and Utah. The worst of these laws violate academic independence and free speech by attempting to forbid certain ideas in the classroom.

Utah’s Equal Opportunities Initiatives, or H.B. 261, which was signed into law in January, is more promising. It attempts to end the excessive and at times coercive focus on identity in higher education while also trying to protect academic freedom with carve-outs for research and course teaching.

Collin Binkley, Annie Ma and Noreen Nasir
Associated Press

Excerpt: When she started writing her college essay, Hillary Amofa told the story she thought admissions offices wanted to hear. About being the daughter of immigrants from Ghana and growing up in a small apartment in Chicago. About hardship and struggle.

Then she deleted it all. When the Supreme Court ended affirmative action in higher education, it left the college essay as one of few places where race can play a role in admissions decisions. For many students of color, instantly more was riding on the already high-stakes writing assignment. Some say they felt pressure to exploit their hardships as they competed for a spot on campus.

Mark S. James
Academe Blog

Excerpt: Last August, my colleague wrote about how our university’s leadership has embraced a top-down corporate model as the way of running the university, and he proceeded to describe various instances when they have ignored shared governance and threatened academic freedom. This trend has continued unabated.

The most recent example of this is perhaps the most blatant, and it poses the most serious threat to academic freedom and shared governance yet. The administration is now deploying our office of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) to impose a policy that has been rejected by our faculty two times now. But, as Nikole Hannah-Jones recently observed, DEI is now being used against efforts to increase diversity, promote equality, and foster inclusion.