U. Illinois-Chicago Dept. of Art History: Too Many White Scholars is “Ethically Problematic”

U. Illinois-Chicago Dept. of Art History: Too Many White Scholars is “Ethically Problematic”

The University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) Department of Art History still wants to practice race discrimination, regardless of Supreme Court rulings. In 2023, the Department declared that:

“curricular offerings on conventionally marginalized fields such as the arts of African, African-American, African diaspora and Black-Indigenous communities by overwhelmingly white scholars have become ethically problematic. A Bridge to Faculty postdoctoral fellow, who is a Person of Color, will be a major step towards reconciling these conflicts that must be addressed immediately.”

Apparently “decolonization of disciplines” and “balanced art historical coverage” entail more than light-and-kindness curricular reform. UIC’s Art History department states clearly: a white person teaching African Art is “ethically problematic.” A “Person of Color” is needed.

Art History professors at UIC, like so many other college administrators and professors across the country, think race discrimination is a moral imperative. Conveniently for UIC’s Art History Department, and other UIC departments that “urgently need additional faculty of color,” UIC’s Bridge to Faculty program provides ready-to-use discrimination services.

UIC’s Bridge-to-Faculty (B2F) program is a postdoctoral recruitment program that fast-tracks “underrepresented” scholars to faculty positions. Departments apply seeking “Black and Hispanic URM [Under-Represented Minorities] candidates,” with objectives such as “making 50% of all subsequent faculty hires” from groups “racially minoritized and/or women.”

In Illinois, “underrepresented” is defined by legislative act as “African American, Hispanic or Latino, Asian-American, Pacific Islander, American Indian, Alaska Native, or an individual with a disability.” ‘Minoritized,’ meanwhile, is recent academic jargon, used alongside ‘underrepresented,’ and ‘diverse’ to indicate the applicant isn’t white, or sometimes, male.

B2F, for its part, delivers as promised: 100% of the first cohort postdocs, all of which have transitioned to faculty, meet Illinois’s definition of underrepresented status. The state-wide Diversifying Higher Education Faculty in Illinois Program delivers similar demographic results, as do standard hiring practices in some UIC departments. Diversity data by field indicate such outcomes are improbable without, as with B2F, racial favoritism.

Discrimination in hiring has been illegal since the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Yet colleges and universities do so anyway through quota programs – first under the guise of Affirmative Action (AA), and now “diversity” programs like B2F. From New York to California, Minnesota to Texas, colleges use quota programs to “diversify” faculty – meaning they increase the proportion of preferred races and sexes, decreasing the proportion of those who fail to meet their approbation.

Quota programs, the backbone of modern Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), are often half a century old. The Minority Faculty Recruitment Program at UIC, for example, began in 1989. The advent of DEI, however, has given quota programs an ideological charge. Faculty ‘diversity’ programs now constitute the final step in equity “pipelines” running from elementary school to the professoriate. At UIC, the Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity and Engagement, Amalia Pallares, noted “[Bridge-to-Faculty] started as a hiring program, but it’s not only a hiring program… It’s really a program for change.”

Once hired, faculty of color are expected to “guide” and “deepen the profession’s understanding of its own racism” – in other words, spearhead subsequent DEI changes. Desired changes range from “decolonizing our syllabi and explicitly foregrounding antiracism, equity, and social justice” to changing “our by-laws to include DEI-related activities as a prominent criterion in promotion and tenure decisions.”

DEI measures such as adding DEI criteria to promotion and tenure decisions impose political litmus tests on faculty members, and directly abrogate that very academic freedom that Justice Lewis Powell, as he created the legal rationale for “diversity” in Bakke (1978), suggested was diversity’s purpose in higher education. For Justice Powell, race could approximate the diversity of viewpoints in a given classroom. It was to promote the greater good of intellectual diversity that he ruled the use of race in admissions permissible. Reinterpreting ‘diversity’ primarily in terms of race, universities preserved their AA programs—but completely disregarded why Powell gave ‘educational diversity’ as a compelling state interest—to promote academic freedom.

The two main goals of the university, teaching and research (half of UIC’s motto), are improved first and foremost by cultivating diversity of thought. This Powellian diversity could indeed be incorporated into faculty hiring goals. Doing so would improve the educational experience of all students—far more than hiring instructors who “look like” some of them.

Louis Galarowicz is a research fellow at the National Association of Scholars. He previously worked as a public affairs consultant, and is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania.

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