Against ‘Diversity Statements’
20th October 2021
In January 2019, I wrote about an emerging trend in higher education: The requirement that applicants for faculty positions submit, along with statements about teaching and research, “diversity statements.” In such statements, applicants demonstrate their commitment to drawing in students, staff, and faculty from under-represented groups, meaning oppressed groups. They prove their commitment to helping members of those groups feel welcome on campus and to removing arbitrary barriers to their success in class or at work. What was emerging then is more established now.
Later in 2019, Abigail Thompson, a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Davis, asserted that several campuses on the vast University of California campus were using diversity statements as a screening tool. “Hiring committees,” she wrote, “are being urged to start the review process by using officially provided rubrics to score the required diversity statements and to eliminate applicants who don’t achieve a scoring cut-off.”