Weekend reads: Are diversity statements political litmus tests?

A Q&A with Komi Frey on 'politically-charged' conceptions of DEI

Dzmitry Dzemidovich/Getty Images

In recent months, diversity, equity, and inclusion practices have come under fire — the subject of debate, both in the United States and in Canada.

Komi Frey is an academic who has dug into some of the data around this controversy. She was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow at the University of California, Riverside, where her research focused on professors’ views of DEI policies. (She’s now director of faculty outreach at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, but in our conversation below she only represents her own views.)

Frey recently penned an opinion essay for The Chronicle of Higher Education on the University of California’s experimental DEI program — including the use of diversity statements as a screening tool in the hiring process — arguing that the institution’s conception of DEI is “politically-charged,” and ultimately discriminatory.

Lean Out reached out to the University of California for comment, but we did not hear back.

Here, in this edited and condensed interview, Frey outlines the five assumptions that she believes inform UC policy — and why she thinks each should be up for debate.

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TH: DEI has become a big story in recent months — and unfortunately, in the climate that we’re in, quite a polarized one. Your recent essay for The Chronicle of Higher Education argues that diversity statements are political litmus tests, that the practice is discriminatory, and that it needs to end. For readers who may not be familiar, what exactly are they?

KF: A diversity statement is a statement that is typically required of faculty, as well as students, who are applying for admission in universities and colleges, and also applying to be hired. They are statements where applicants are asked to describe the ways in which they have already — and plan to, in the future, promote this [particular] concept of diversity, equity, and inclusion. This concept of trying to eliminate barriers that have historically been in place to prevent the access of historically marginalized groups.

This notion of “historically marginalized groups” — it’s very broad. There has been a focus on racial groups, on women, also sexual orientation, nationality, citizenship status. So, there’s a wide range. But the basic idea is that the university and the college system has not, in the history of our country, been fair when it comes to providing equal opportunities to access higher education. And diversity statements are a way to try to make things more fair, and to ensure that people who are entering academia are committed to making things more fair …

We see more universities adopting them. And then, more universities are also making them required. The next step, even beyond that, is making diversity statements be the initial cut. So, otherwise qualified candidates who don’t have strong diversity statements, on that basis alone are not advancing to the next hiring stage.

The University of California, to my knowledge, is the first university system that has gone to that third level of making them the initial cut. Although some faculty I’ve spoken to across the country have explained that in private hiring committees, and in private hiring sessions, basically it’s unspoken that faculty candidates who don’t have strong diversity statements should not advance. It’s just not a formal policy the way it has been at the University of California.

TH: In your essay, you outline five assumptions that you believe are at play with UC’s use of these diversity statements. Can you walk us through your key points?

KF: I should begin by saying that I’m not saying that each of these assumptions is wrong. I’m saying that each of them should be subject to debate — and I would like to be somebody in an audience, listening to that debate. I think there could be really compelling points on both sides.

The first assumption is that underrepresented minority groups — which include African-Americans, Native Americans, and Hispanics and Latinos — have been more oppressed in California’s history than other racial and ethnic groups.

The next assumption is that oppression is a reason that these groups are not represented in numbers proportionate to their population in California.

The third assumption is that increasing the representation is central to the University of California’s mission.

And the next assumption is that in order to increase representation, race-conscious policies are required. So, things like affirmative action, or unspoken affirmative action, are required.

The fifth assumption is that the University of California reserves the right — even has the obligation, a social obligation — to not hire individuals who do not endorse all of these assumptions.

TH: In your piece, you refer to the American Association of University Professors’ 1915 Declaration of Principles, which states that scholars must remain neutral and not act in the interests of any particular group. You write that “requiring candidates to serve all students equally, in compliance with federal antidiscrimination law, is entirely appropriate; requiring them to grant preferential treatment to specific groups whose underrepresentation is of political concern is not.” Can you unpack that for us?

KF: One thing about diversity, equity, and inclusion is the “equity” component — which is a term that’s very different from equality. Equity is more about addressing historical discrimination by granting special consideration in the present, in the hopes of equalizing outcomes. Whereas equality is treating people equally in the present time … So, it’s just a different conception of how to address historical discrimination.

TH: I want to talk about some of the consequences of this approach to diversity. In Canada, we have just started having a serious conversation about this issue, after a high school principal was humiliated in a DEI training and subsequently committed suicide. In less extreme examples, your essay lists a number of instances where UC’s DEI ethos has resulted in faculty, or potential faculty, being penalized for their speech. One of those instances involved a University of Toronto professor, Yoel Inbar. Can you walk us through what happened there?

KF: Yoel Inbar was a very competitive applicant for a faculty position at the University of California, Los Angeles. From accounts, he was on track to be hired there; things were already in motion. However, what surfaced were some of his statements on podcasts from a few years prior, in which he expressed concerns about diversity, equity, and inclusion statements, and initiatives in general. Graduate students at UCLA discovered those comments and circulated a letter, which basically said exactly what the University of California’s policy was — which is that people who are not committed to DEI should not be at the University of California. That that alone should be grounds for not hiring somebody.

I think this is really sad, because Yoel’s statements probably reflect the average American. [His statements expressed concern] about ideological homogeneity in academia, about conformity culture, groupthink, group polarization, trying to open the Overton Window — those kind of sentiments are widespread in the population.

To exclude people who have views that are pretty representative has a consequence of making the university even less in touch with the American population. You’re more insulated from criticism. And these are college students who are going to be graduating, and going into the world, and have to be able to interact with more than just their very progressive political enclave that they’ve been exposed to in college.

It’s not what college is about. You’re supposed to be exposed to people who have different views. Even maybe especially people who have views that conflict with your fundamental values, the things you hold most sacred.

For a lot of people, DEI is what they hold most sacred, the same way that somebody who is religiously orthodox holds their religious beliefs to be extremely sacred. But secular public research universities are not religious institutions.

TH: There is a backlash against DEI gaining force in the U.S. and some of it truly can be ugly. [Among the pro-DEI set] there is a view out there — I certainly have encountered it myself during my own criticisms of DEI — that the impulse to reject politically-charged DEI initiatives represents an unwillingness of the dominant culture to cede way for minorities, to “make space” as it might be expressed. That it’s a kind of clinging to the past that is, at best, antiquated, and, at worst, racist. How do you think through that criticism?

KF: On any given issue, there will be people who you could describe as bad actors. People who are more extreme, or who have ulterior motives, or who are unconsciously driven by biases, prejudices, and desire to discriminate. That’s the case on any given political issue.

I think it’s really hard. Because there are people from historically marginalized groups who are more likely to report feeling prejudice and discrimination on campuses. That’s real. People who are very vocally anti-DEI sometimes shrug off those students’ and faculty’s concerns as being unfounded, or call them things like snowflakes. I think that response is counterproductive and it’s also inaccurate. There are differences in how students of colour perceive the climate.

I think the question that I go back to is: Well, what do we do about these differences? What do we do about group differences in the experience of college? What do we do about group disparities, and outcomes, and representation? And that’s a very difficult topic. It’s a very difficult discussion to have.

I would like to see both sides — the pro-DEI and anti-DEI — be open to recognizing the valid points that each other have.

So, the pro-DEI people, I believe, are trying to create an environment where historically marginalized groups feel more welcome than they have in the past. And there still are differences in the feelings of welcome. They are trying to improve the outcomes of these groups, and there are still group disparities.

The people who are anti-DEI, they want to be free to discuss controversial topics that might tend to be disproportionately offensive toward groups that are historically marginalized. Freedom of inquiry sometimes requires being offensive — and some empirical findings are offensive. We need to be open to having that discussion.

I would like both sides to abandon the negative labels, abandon the most malicious attributions of motives for the other side, and just proceed with the most charitable interpretation of the other side’s arguments. I think that’s a place where we can proceed from, and actually have more constructive dialogue than we currently see.

TH: I want to touch briefly on media coverage of this issue. With the exception of people like Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic — who has been on the Lean Out podcast — and Michael Powell, formerly of The New York Times, now also at The Atlantic, who was on the podcast earlier this month, mainstream media has tended, generally, to skew more towards the view that I just articulated. We saw an example of that recently, with reporter Jesse Singal posting an internal memo from The Washington Post about what it characterizes as “growing criticism of corporate and academic efforts to diversify their staffs and student bodies.” They noted that most recently, Claudine Gay’s resignation at Harvard had been “heralded as a victory for DEI detractors.” One of the questions that the Post wanted to address in future coverage was: “How do we show the impact DEI has had on our country and what dismantling it could mean?” You have studied this extensively. For one academic paper I looked at, you interviewed one hundred faculty members. What do you make of this framing of the issue, as someone who has looked at it quite closely?

KF: For my dissertation research, I interviewed 55 faculty and my former PhD advisor, he interviewed the other 50. I think DEI is inherently a very complicated issue. And it’s inherently complicated because group disparities are prevalent and very difficult to reduce.

The Claudine Gay example is really sad to me, because — and I’m speaking on behalf of myself, and not on behalf of FIRE, or any university I ever graduated from — Claudine Gay, from what I can tell, is somebody who probably was a beneficiary of affirmative action, in the sense that she’s a Black woman who is very pro-DEI in her scholarship. She had a vision for Harvard that is very social justice-oriented, which resonated with the direction that Harvard wants to go. She, as many have pointed out, has fewer publications than many people at Harvard, certainly fewer than any previous president at Harvard.

So there’s ample reason for people who are very anti-DEI to say, “This is an affirmative action hire gone wrong.” The reason I’m sad about this is because it calls into question the merits of all students of colour and faculty of colour, especially Black students and Black faculty. And there’s plenty of evidence that feeling like you’re the beneficiary of affirmative action is very stigmatizing.

It can create anxiety and distress that is sometimes not warranted, but it is understandable that people make negative associations. If there’s a policy that explicitly says that we’re going to prioritize you on the basis of your race, then it makes sense that people will question your merit, because they know that you have been accepted for reasons other than your merit.

This is really sad. Because if you want to diversify the academy, or any other sector of American society, you want people to be assumed to be equals. That’s the whole idea behind DEI, right? That we’ve become a more pluralistic society, a more pluralistic academy.

But if there’s, say, equal representation in different groups, yet the historically dominant groups are inherently suspicious of the groups that historically marginalized — and the historically marginalized groups are internalizing feelings of inadequacy — that’s not a good dynamic going forward.

You’re just going to reproduce, if not overt segregation, very subtle forms of segregation on the basis of people wanting to congregate among those that they can relate to better. So, what you get is an academy where students huddle together on the basis of their race … It reproduces a lot of the historical racial animus that we have in this country.