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Two scholars successfully convinced their peers to use service statements instead of DEI statements in one CU Boulder department 

The growing ubiquity of diversity, equity, and inclusion criteria in decisions related to hiring and promotion in academia has not been without controversy, with many critics focusing on the legality or absurdity of such measures, as well as arguing DEI requirements serve as ideological litmus tests.

However, Professors Matthew Burgess and Peter Newton recently proposed a constructive alternative when trying to combat such policies. Enter the “service statement.”

A key practical difference between a diversity statement and a service statement is that “service is much broader than anything related to DEI,” Newton told The College Fix in a Zoom interview in late July.

“That includes working as a reviewer or editor for a journal, or serving on a curriculum committee or hiring committee in a university department, or [engaging in] public outreach or public speaking,” he said.

Both Burgess and Newton helped lead a successful effort at CU Boulder last fall to get their peers in the Department of Environmental Studies to scrap plans to impose mandatory DEI statements on faculty job applicants and instead use service statements.

The two, in a May piece for Heterodox Academy, called on scholars nationwide to follow suit.

“We believe service statements are a progressive, legal, ethical, and constructive alternative to diversity statements for multiple reasons,” they wrote.

Burgess, who has since taken a position in the University of Wyoming’s Department of Economics, said service is harder to pigeonhole than DEI statements, providing examples of outreach he does related to political polarization. It also leaves the door open for those who engage in more typical DEI work to write about those activities if they wish, Burgess told The Fix in a July telephone interview.

Other options Newton suggested for activities one could discuss in a service statement include working with local high school students or speaking at a science cafe. For newly minted PhDs, Newton added, even talking about aspirations of future service could be acceptable.

The only major restriction on what types of service might qualify as appropriate for a service statement, Burgess noted, is that the service discussed should still be relevant to one’s institution, department, community, or profession. Although he said he is a supporter of Habitat for Humanity, volunteering with the organization probably would be irrelevant, as would pure political activism.

In their Heterodox Academy piece, the two scholars wrote about their experience at CU Boulder successfully convincing the school’s environmental studies department to revise hiring policies to require a service statement from future job candidates instead of a more standard diversity statement.

When asked about what led to the development of the idea for service statements, Newton said, “I think it was spurred by members of our JEDI committee as it’s called in our department…drafting a document to outline best practices for hiring or inclusive hiring.”

According to Newton, the document from JEDI – which stands for Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion – covered “all sorts of things in terms of the composition of a search committee and how to conduct interviews, as well as whether and how to ask candidates to submit a diversity statement or DEI statement.”

“Matt [Burgess] and I, and I believe at least some other faculty in our department, had some concerns about whether [such a requirement] was either necessary or useful or desirable,” Newton said.

Burgess added they also shared “many of the concerns that have been aired nationally about using DEI statements in hiring.”

These concerns, he said, included the possibility that DEI statements violate the First Amendment of the US Constitution and Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, have their origins in attempts to skirt California anti-discrimination laws, and disadvantage international applicants and those from less privileged backgrounds unfamiliar with the prevailing DEI ideology embraced by many American academic institutions.

Burgess and Newton provided greater detail regarding these concerns in an early proposal circulated within their department, as did Burgess in an article he wrote for The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Subsequent discussions surrounding the document from their department’s JEDI committee, Newton said, led him and Burgess to begin discussions about what an alternative to a DEI statement might look like.

“Obviously one alternative would be to ask nothing and just to stick to what we used to do, which was ask for a research statement and a teaching statement,” Newton said.

“That, I think, we thought might be seen as a little regressive and there are, I think, useful things…that can come out in DEI statements,” he added.

“Service is part of faculty positions,” said Burgess, “and it’s great if people are doing service or are doing, you know, teaching or are even doing research in ways that build better pipelines for people from disadvantaged backgrounds…[or] are trying to explore evidence-based methods for reaching people better across a broad range of backgrounds and preparations.”

Additionally, as discussed in their blog post, service statements align more with what is expected of faculty in CU Boulder’s Department of Environmental Studies upon being hired.

“So basically, our argument was, you know, here’s a way that we can keep all the parts that are good and non-controversial about DEI statements, but carve out the parts that are…controversial if not, as I would argue, illegal,” Burgess said.

However, as noted in their blog post, their initial attempt to institute service statements in CU Boulder’s Department of Environmental Studies failed partly due to concerns that the adoption of a service statement requirement constituted an endorsement of several critiques of DEI statements included in Burgess and Newton’s initial proposal and partly due to alleged threats of disruption by student activists.

Following the initial defeat, however, Newton and Burgess wrote that they revised the proposal by adding a clause “asking applicants to include in their statements an indication of how they would contribute to the department’s strategic imperatives.”

“In a subtle change,” they wrote, “the revised version explicitly asked them to speak to all three strategic imperatives. One of those imperatives refers to justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion.” They noted it “is broad and refers to ‘diverse backgrounds, experiences, identities, and ideas,’ so a new faculty member could equally contribute to this imperative by, for example, fostering viewpoint diversity.”

“At a second vote,” they wrote, “the policy change passed unanimously with little discussion.”

This second — successful — vote, Newton said, took place in 2023.

When asked by The Fix whether it is possible that service statements could be abused or distorted in a way that unofficially favors more standard forms of DEI activities over other types of service, both Burgess and Newton noted CU Boulder’s Department of Environmental Studies only conducted one search so far under the new policy.

However, Burgess added, “It was my strong impression that the department did its best to apply this new policy conscientiously in the way that it was intended to be applied. It was certainly not applied in a way that was intended to be a fig leaf for the old policy.”

MORE: DEI statement mandatory for Bates College earth science faculty applicants

IMAGE: Teerasan Phutthigorn / Shutterstock

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