The left fails to mention that they consider this a feature, not a bug.
John Sailer writes at the Wall Street Journal:
How DEI Becomes DiscriminationIn Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023), the Supreme Court held that colleges and universities couldn’t engage in racial discrimination in the name of diversity. The 45-year-old dispensation from civil-rights law that the court effectively overturned had never applied to employment decisions. But its end ought to provoke institutions to scale back “diversity, equity and inclusion” initiatives more broadly. Some appear to be doing so: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard said recently they would no longer require “diversity statements” from prospective hires.Yet there is evidence that many universities have engaged in outright racial preferences under the aegis of DEI. Hundreds of documents that I acquired through public-records requests provide a rare paper trail of universities closely scrutinizing the race of faculty job applicants. The practice not only appears widespread; it is encouraged and funded by the federal government.At Vanderbilt University Medical Center, a large hiring initiative targets specific racial groups—promising to hire 18 to 20 scientists “who are Black, Latinx, American Indian, and Pacific Islander.” Discussing a related University of New Mexico program, one professor quipped in an email, “I don’t want to hire white men for sure.”Both initiatives are supported by the National Institutes of Health through its Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation program, or First. The program gives grants for DEI-focused “cluster hiring” at universities and medical schools, promising eventually to spend about a quarter-billion dollars.A key requirement is that recipient institutions heavily value diversity statements while selecting faculty. The creators of the program reasoned that by heavily weighing commitment to DEI, they could prompt schools to hire more minorities but without direct racial preferences. That’s the rationale behind DEI-focused “cluster hiring,” an increasingly common practice in academia. The documents—which include emails, grant proposals, progress reports and hiring records—suggest that many NIH First grant recipients restrict hiring on the basis of race or “underrepresented” status, violating NIH’s stated policies and possibly civil-rights law.
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