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‘Records show how departments used ideological affinity as a tool to recruit minorities’

For the last five years hiring at the University of Colorado Boulder has been primarily focused on selecting scholars based mostly on their skin color and their roots in critical theory, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

The Sunday op-ed, headlined “How DEI Conquered the University of Colorado,” details how the university’s Faculty Diversity Action Plan “ram-rodded its diversity priorities at an impressive scale.”

Citing paperwork obtained through a public records request, the report details how departments including geography, information science, education, Germanic and Slavic languages and literature bent over backward to hire BIPOC and activist scholars.

Co-authors John Sailer, director of higher education policy at the Manhattan Institute, and Louis Galarowicz, a research fellow at the National Association of Scholars, wrote that the “records show how departments used ideological affinity as a tool to recruit minorities.” The two wrote:

…competing for the funds to bring in new faculty, academic departments happily followed administrators’ prompting and boasted about their intent to discriminate. “Our commitment, should we be successful with this application, is to hire someone from the BIPOC community,” wrote faculty and staff at the journalism department. “Our aim is specifically to hire a Black, Indigenous, or Latinx faculty member,” wrote faculty at the geography department.

… Several plans proposed not only single hires but the hiring of multiple professors at once. “This cluster hire,” faculty and staff at the college of engineering and applied science wrote, “has the goal of doubling our underrepresented faculty in the college.” Another cluster hire, faculty at the information science department noted, “emphasizes hiring Black, Indigenous, Asian American, Latinx, and Pacific Islander faculty.” Faculty at the department of ethnic studies wrote: “We have an urgent and qualified need for BIPOC femme/women of color faculty in an Africana Studies focus who will contribute to the social science division thematic cluster hire in racism and racial inequality.”

The op-ed ends by stressing the importance of President Donald Trump’s efforts to end DEI in higher education, and praised his recent executive order banning affirmative action in federal hiring.

“To undo the damage will be a monumental task, and an end to race-based hiring is the necessary first step. The sign of true success will be when universities empower scholars who understand the true purpose of higher education: the pursuit of truth,” Sailer and Galarowicz wrote.

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