Universities Increasingly Require Loyalty Oaths To “Diversity, Equity and Inculsion” To Be Hired
“commitment to merit as the basis for hiring and tenure continues to erode as they increasingly demand adherence to progressive ideology”
Commitment to leftist ideology is rapidly replacing expertise and becoming mandatory in hiring practices.
From National Review:
The New Loyalty Oaths
American universities’ commitment to merit as the basis for hiring and tenure continues to erode as they increasingly demand adherence to progressive ideology.
The sciences are far from immune to this trend. As reported by Manhattan Institute fellow Heather Mac Donald in City Journal, earlier this month University of Texas astronomer John Kormendy withdrew an article from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences after a draft “drew sharp criticism for threatening the conduct of ‘inclusive’ science.” His book on the same topic has been placed on indefinite hold. Kormendy’s fully peer-reviewed work describes a sophisticated model he developed “to reduce the role of individual subjectivity in scientific hiring and tenure decisions” by predicting scientists’ long-term research impact from early publications. Though he didn’t intend for his model to replace a holistic approach to hiring or granting tenure, as Mac Donald explains, his offense was to focus on the merit of the candidates’ work rather than their race or gender.
Kormendy’s experience is becoming typical. Last month, the American Geophysical Union, the world’s largest society devoted to the study of earth and space, declined to name a winner of its most prestigious award solely because all of the rigorously vetted final nominees were white men. In September, MIT abruptly rescinded its invitation to University of Chicago geophysics professor Dorian Abbot to deliver a talk in its prestigious lecture series. Abbot’s offense was an essay for Newsweek that defended the importance of merit in academic evaluations and expressed the view that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) “violates the ethical and legal principle of equal treatment.”
This trend, which is most pervasive in the humanities, includes Europe. For example, Italian physicist Alessandro Strumia was fired from Europe’s particle-physics consortium, CERN, for observing that, because of inclusion efforts, women were being hired with thinner research records than those of men. Even a visiting dance professor at Oberlin College alleges that she lost out on a permanent position after being told “we can’t just hire another white woman from the Midwest with a husband.”
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Comments
I wonder if you could fight that as a violation of the Religious Test Clause in Article VI?
Doubtful. The religious test clause applies only to federal political positions, not private employment. Keep in mind that “official state religions” persevered in many states well after ratification of the federal constitution, and were considered perfectly constitutional.
I would submit that many faculty position ARE “federal political positions,” ESPECIALLY in the sciences.
When asked to sign a Diversity oath or to give a statement of how fervently you support DEI, the solution is to lie, lie, and lie. You have no responsibility to be truthful when they are asking political questions. As with any interview, there are right answers and wrong answers to every question they might ask. Always give them the “right” answers that they want; the truth has nothing to do with it.
If they require a “diversity statement,” find what their own statements are on their website and social media. Rephrase their own crap and feed it back to them. The point is to give them a statement that they will rank highly. Just like with their questions, give them what they want. The truth is irrelevant.
And then they wonder why the Chinese are going to bury us…
I wish university students would drop out and find something better to do.
Or maybe protest for the right things.