Higher education’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion runs deep. DEI has become big business on campus and lots of people are raking in serious money based on these policies.
According to journalist John D. Sailer, some schools are now using a practice known as cluster hiring to advance this agenda.
He writes at the National Association of Scholars:
Diversity Statement, Then DossierThe term “cluster hiring” is not itself new. DEI cluster hiring appropriates an established form of faculty recruitment that has a long history, especially in the natural sciences, where it meant the coordinated hiring of faculty members in several departments to work on a shared research topic. This older form of cluster hiring made and still makes sense because contemporary scientific research can require the combination of several kinds of expertise.But DEI cluster hiring serves no such purpose. Consider, for example, the following job listings.
- The Ohio State University’s Department of Mathematics is recently saught a professor who will “study issues relevant to educational equity across STEM fields, with a special focus on race and other factors identifying historically marginalized groups.”1
- The University of California, Berkeley’s School of Social Welfare is hiring a professor who “may focus on anti-blackness in the US and the African Diaspora: abolition studies, critical race approaches to data science and mapping, anti-racism and anti-blackness, racial capitalism, trans/queer/feminist theory, and critical disability studies among others.”2
- The University of Michigan’s School of Nursing recently sought “more faculty with expertise in health equity and anti-racism and social justice methodologies.”3
These listings, and hundreds more like them, illustrate a growing trend in higher education. Universities now frequently recruit faculty with professional specialties in race, gender, social justice, and the broad gamut of critical theories. But the above jobs also share another characteristic: they are all a part of cluster hiring initiatives devoted explicitly to diversity, equity, and inclusion.In order to achieve its stated goals, DEI cluster hiring must include a host of additional interventions—in particular, a heavy reliance on diversity statements and a narrow focus on ethnicity or the themes of identity politics. These additional interventions transform cluster hiring into a means to embed DEI further into the fabric of the university, by creating dozens, and sometimes hundreds, of new faculty positions focused solely on diversity, equity, and inclusion.
This is a long article but worth reading in full. Sailer uses real examples of schools using this practice in hiring to ensure that more hires were women and minorities despite having fewer applicants in those categories.
This is reminiscent of what has happened with Affirmative Action. When higher education likes a policy, they find a way to implement it.
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