MIT Scraps Diversity Statements in Faculty-Hiring Process after Discovering ‘They Don’t Work’
MIT campus in Cambridge, Mass.
MIT will no longer require diversity statements in its faculty-hiring process, making it the first elite university to abandon the practice.
The decision was made by MIT president Sally Kornbluth, with support from the school’s provost and six academic deans, a spokesperson told National Review on Sunday afternoon.
“My goals are to tap into the full scope of human talent, to bring the very best to MIT, and to make sure they thrive once here,” Kornbluth said in a statement provided to NR. “We can build an inclusive environment in many ways, but compelled statements impinge on freedom of expression, and they don’t work.”
Higher-education writer and researcher John Sailer first reported Kornbluth’s statement for UnHerd on Sunday. MIT previously required diversity statements across its academic disciplines, including its nuclear-science and engineering department.
The campus climate at MIT and Korbluth herself came under intense scrutiny when she testified before Congress last year and struggled to say definitively if calls for genocide against Jews violated campus policies. She testified alongside former University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill and former Harvard University president Claudine Gay about the explosion of campus antisemitism following Hamas’s civilian massacre in Israel.
During her testimony, Kornbluth said she does not believe “speech codes” work to promote an environment of free expression on campus.
Magill resigned shortly after she gave similar testimony to Kornbluth’s regarding campus antisemitism. Similarly, Claudine Gay resigned in disgrace after her congressional testimony on antisemitism and a plagiarism scandal that implicated much of Gay’s academic output.
House lawmakers on the Education and Workforce Committee are now investigating antisemitism at MIT and other elite colleges and universities. Anti-Israel tent encampments have sprouted at numerous college campuses over the past few weeks as Israel continues its war effort against Hamas.
Required diversity statements have received significant criticism for making prospective faculty members pledge allegiance to diversity, equity, and inclusion ideology. These statements appear to violate principles of academic freedom and intellectual diversity in higher education by mandating adherence to progressive orthodoxy.
MIT’s past guidance on diversity statements in faculty applications explicitly emphasized their value in showing an applicant’s understanding of DEI and track record in working to advance DEI on campus. DEI statements should portray how much the professor cares about academic inclusion for various identity groups, MIT’s guidance advised prospective applicants.
It remains to be seen whether other elite universities will follow MIT and reverse their commitment to diversity statements.
Elite universities across the country have incorporated sprawling DEI bureaucracies into student life and administrative hierarchies, particularly during the peak of the Black Lives Matter movement and its resulting unrest in summer 2020. Red states have pursued bans of DEI bureaucracies from college campuses because of their tendency to promote left-wing ideology and enforce academic conformity.
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