Earlier this fall, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) released a statement on “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Criteria and Faculty Evaluation.” The statement offers the AAUP’s take on “DEI Statements” – the common term for statements that document a professor’s contributions to a more diverse, equitable or inclusive department, institution or society. Within days, Brian Leiter, a well-respected legal scholar with a popular academic blog, called the AAUP a “disgrace,” “now irrelevant to the fight for academic freedom.” As a collective of critical scholars acutely concerned about escalating attacks on academic freedom, the post caught our eye. What could have warranted such searing condemnation? Did the AAUP lack nuance? Overstate the case for DEI statements? Cede faculty power? Enable attacks on university independence, faculty speech and student protest?
The answer to each of these questions is “no.” Far from abandoning academic freedom, the AAUP thoughtfully explained (a) why DEI contributions are intrinsic to faculty merit, (b) why DEI Statements offer a common-sense tool to obtain this merit-based information; and (c) why the use of DEI Statements to credit such contributions need not undercut academic freedom. Our aim here is to defend each claim. Before doing so, however, we first clarify our view of academic freedom.
On Values
Leiter suggests that the AAUP supports DEI Statements because “diversity” aligns with the organization’s values, and that the AAUP is willing to sacrifice academic freedom to further that goal. To press this point, Leiter imagines a fictional university that adopts a MAGA “pro-American” policy that rewards “teaching, research, and service that respond to the needs of Trump’s America and its allies.” Surely the MAGA policy would undercut academic freedom, and since DEI statements and pro-America statements both advance “extramural social goals,” the two policies must stand or fall together.
The force of this logic turns on the assumption that diversity, equity, and inclusion are extramural social goals—that whatever their value, they are external to the university and its mission. We believe this framing mischaracterizes the relationship between DEI and higher education. Rather than sitting beyond the campus gates, DEI is central to the university’s primary mission to pursue truth and knowledge for the common good. In an open, multicultural society, architects of academic freedom cannot be agnostic about whether to embrace inclusion or exclusion, diversity or homogeneity, equality or inequality. By privileging the former over the latter, universities and their constituents are better equipped to engage in the open inquiry and critical evaluation of competing ideas that multiracial democracy demands. In contrast, Leiter’s imaginary MAGA policy positions the university and its faculty as an arm of the state, whose mission is to serve “Trump’s America and its allies.” That envisions the sort of “university” authoritarians and corporate interests would covet—one structured to aid the accumulation of power and wealth, without regard for the common good.
Unfortunately, a real-world example of such capture exists: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ right-wing takeover of New College of Florida. New College’s academic freedom problem isn’t that the institution has right-wing values, or even that its values are “extramural.” It is that the college’s newly espoused values are directly in conflict with the traditional values of a university (and, we emphasize, unilaterally imposed on New College and its faculty by external actors hostile to those traditional values). We should likewise reject, in the name of academic freedom, corporate take-overs that shift priorities away from the common good and usurp the faculty’s authority over hiring and promotion processes. The Koch-led takeover of George Mason University offers a notable example. Transforming universities into tools of an authoritarian or corporate enterprise undermines everything universities should stand for. The same is not true of policies that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion.
A Critical Component of Merit
In our view, fights over DEI Statements are often proxy battles over a deeper question: What should constitute faculty merit—that is, the proper criteria to drive faculty hiring and promotion? Consider the common accusation that DEI Statements impose ideological “litmus tests” that place “a pall of orthodoxy” over the university. Implicit here is the tenuous claim that DEI contributions have nothing to do with faculty merit.
As background, some universities already locate DEI contributions within formal definitions of faculty merit. For example, the ten-campus University of California system mandates that “[c]ontributions in all areas of faculty achievement that promote equal opportunity and diversity should be given due recognition in the academic personnel process, and they should be evaluated and credited in the same way as other faculty achievements.”
Or consider the University of Chicago, a vociferous defender of academic freedom, which includes among its formal criteria “actual and prospective teaching accomplishment of the highest order.” If “teaching . . . of the highest order” means enabling all students to thrive, this might include pedagogical techniques that reduce stereotype threat and other environmental dynamics that unevenly tax students from negatively stereotyped groups. Moving beyond the classroom, “teaching . . . of the highest order” might include efforts to cultivate departmental cultures free from harassment. Our observation is that at many universities, including those that vigorously promote free speech and academic freedom, existing definitions of faculty merit already contain an implicit commitment to DEI.
A different inquiry is whether measures of individual faculty merit should include DEI contributions. We find this an easier question.
Consider again the University of Chicago, whose stated “major functions” include “cultivat[ing in students] the understanding and skills which enable them to engage in the further pursuit of knowledge,” and “training of students for entry into professions which require for their practice a systematic body of specialized knowledge.” Given that pervasive biases can corrupt the most rigorous knowledge production, the University of Chicago is best positioned to realize this core goal when its faculty and students are trained to spot their own biases and build research agendas and academic units free from the same.
Beyond realizing its mission, DEI contributions further the University of Chicago’s legal obligations to create equal learning environments, ensure equal treatment, and avoid policies that produce unjustifiable racial disparities. These legal obligations reflect the broad social consensus that educational institutions cannot discover important new knowledge or buttress the nation’s democratic ideals when biases or harassing environments distort intellectual pursuits and key groups are excluded from the knowledge production process. From this perspective, DEI Statements offer a modest tool to further the decades-long struggle to emancipate higher education from its segregationist and exclusionary past.
Many of our colleagues might disagree with this assessment. That is a conversation worthy of robust debate. But the existence of contestation does not, standing alone, constitute an academic freedom problem.
Every dominant aspect of university life is predicated on some set of contested beliefs about how universities ought to function. Faculty routinely disagree about the proper weighting of research, teaching and service in personnel decisions. Some argue that teaching is less important than research, and others the reverse. Still others may question whether “service” should be a component of faculty merit at all. Yet rarely (if ever?) does the cry go up that a university’s decision to credit teaching contributions or require “teaching statements” threatens academic freedom. To suggest that the controversy over DEI is different because DEI is an “ideology” or promotes certain “values” strikes us as both lazy and conclusory.
A Common-Sense Tool to Measure Merit
Assume that a department has determined, through a majority faculty vote, that personnel decisions should incorporate each candidate’s DEI contributions, on the reasoning that such contributions promote the department’s pursuit of knowledge, cultivate an equal learning and working environment, and help meet legal obligations. Now that department needs a mechanism to obtain information about each candidate’s relevant contributions. What is it to do? A natural step is to invite candidates to describe explicitly what they’ve done, and what they intend to do, to further these ends. That is the DEI Statement.
Requiring faculty members to self-report their achievements on merit-based criteria is not new. From an academic freedom perspective, there is no obvious reason why DEI Statements present concerns that would not attach to Research Statements or Teaching Statements. These statement requirements are ubiquitous and rarely provoke controversy – nor, in our view, should they. An individual faculty member might believe that their time is too valuable to waste on undergraduate teaching: what else are grad students for? But should we take seriously the claim that requiring the professor to submit a Teaching Statement violates their academic freedom? Or that the university’s policy of requiring such statements places a “pall of orthodoxy” over the university? We doubt it.
One response might be that outliers aside, no one disputes that professors must be competent in teaching, whereas a sizable contingent disputes whether professors ought to create classrooms unburdened by race- and sex-based biases. For the outlier who believes that teaching should never contribute to promotion decisions, the “consensus” acceptance of teaching statements arguably creates a greater academic freedom concern than does a DEI Statement requirement, which is subject to open debate.
Another response might be that DEI Statements are superfluous because a generic teaching or research statement (like the University of Chicago’s) ought to be enough. At some institutions, it might be. But to answer that question with specificity, one needs to know whether the relevant academic unit credits all faculty members, evenly, for their DEI work. If an institution identifies a gap between what it says matters and what gets counted in high stakes assessments, this calls for a shift in practice—perhaps via a DEI Statement. In this instance, the statement offers a commonsense tool to ensure that professors are rewarded for doing what their institution says they should do. As one university puts it: “[DEI] Statements provide information necessary to appropriately credit the often invisible work that faculty do to promote an equitable learning and working environment . . . it is not about penalizing faculty who do not promote [DEI] but rather providing a mechanism by which those who do such work can be credited.”
Our Academic Freedom Concerns
We recognize that it’s easy to defend policies we like. One recurrent danger on campus is ceding faculty power to outside actors with interests that conflict with the university’s core mission – which might occur even for good reasons. Suppose, for example, that the University of Chicago’s Board of Trustees determined that climate change posed an existential threat, and mandated that every department incentivize faculty scholarship that addressed the climate crisis. Assume further that most faculty members approved of this decision. If this policy were to be challenged, we could imagine faculty closing ranks in support of the policy, even though the Board of Trustees had imposed it without faculty input.
The AAUP’s defense of DEI Statements, though, does not fall into this trap. To the contrary, the AAUP emphasizes that faculty should have a primary role in determining whether and how DEI statements are employed: “This collective faculty responsibility includes deciding whether to adopt the use of DEI statements, what issues faculty members will be asked to address in such statements, and how such statements will be used in faculty evaluation.”
Like the AAUP, we are concerned about the outsized power Boards of Trustees hold over academic governance. We believe the way forward is to democratize our universities—a process that requires shifting power from largely unaccountable Boards (or donors) to the faculty and other core campus constituencies. We recognize that academic freedom concerns arise when university administrators unilaterally impose requirements on individual faculty or departments—whether that be a mandatory DEI Statement or an updated “Time, Place, and Manner Policy”—without meaningful faculty input.
The primacy of faculty power is exactly what right-wing legislators undercut, however, when they prohibit universities or departments from inviting or requiring DEI statements. The same goes for Boards of Trustees or university presidents who usurp faculty power by placing global bans on DEI Statements at the departmental level. These unilateral actions undermine academic freedom because they erode faculty power to engage in institutional decisions of direct concern to the faculty. And as we emphasize, such bans also compromise the university’s ability to create the institutional environment most conducive to the pursuit of knowledge and truth for the common good. We find it worrisome that entities that claim to protect academic freedom—FIRE is a notable example—have supported such laws, and by extension, attacks on DEI and multiracial democracy writ large.
Academic freedom is indeed a precious value, and one central to higher education in a complex society. But DEI Statements do not pose an academic freedom problem in and of themselves. The AAUP’s statement properly recognizes both the substantive value of DEI statements, and the process value of allowing institutions of higher education to make their own decisions about whether and how to require them.
