Exposing How Universities Hire Radicals
“The programs thus provide a steady stream of scholars committed to activist disciplines like ‘critical refugee studies’ and ‘queer of color critique.'”
John D. Sailer detailed how universities find ways to hire radicals: fellow-to-faculty model. From City Journal:
Perhaps because it’s so effective, the fellow-to-faculty model exploded throughout American higher education in the early 2010s, as universities around the country began ratcheting up their DEI efforts. The University of Arizona President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program seeks applicants whose research “addresses issues such as race, gender, diversity and inclusion.” The University of Virginia’s Race, Place, and Equity Postdoctoral Fellowship hires postdocs who “address issues of race, justice, and equity.” In the UC system, each individual campus created its own parallel program to fund the hiring of additional PPFP applicants.
A network of universities also coordinate on the model: the Partnership for Faculty Diversity, created by the UC system and the University of Michigan. Members include Carnegie Mellon University, Georgia Tech, and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.
Many universities outside the UC orbit have adopted the model as well. At the University of South Carolina, it’s called the Bridge-to-Faculty; at Ohio State, one such program is simply called Fellow-to-Faculty. A 2021 article in Frontiers in Psychology identified 38 diversity-focused postdoctoral “conversion” programs nationwide, though I found more in my investigation.
The upshot: a small but significant number of faculty across the country have been given side-door jobs based on ideological affinity. The University of Michigan’s Collegiate Fellowship Program, one of two fellowships at the university, has recruited 55 fellows since 2016. The University of Illinois Chicago has recruited 49 Bridge to Faculty Fellows since 2020. Over the last five years, one in 20 tenure-track hires in the UC System were former president’s or chancellor’s postdoctoral fellows.
The programs thus provide a steady stream of scholars committed to activist disciplines like “critical refugee studies” and “queer of color critique.” They raise serious questions about academic freedom, government funding and private philanthropy, and the feasibility of higher education reform. When the dust settles from the battle over DEI, reformers will still have to contend with the way that universities have reshaped their basic mission through the construction of a scholar-activist pipeline.
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Comments
Is it just me, or does this article promise answers that it doesn’t really deliver? Not being a career academic, the distinction between fellow and faculty, whatever that is, seems largely artificial. Moving the question from “where do colleges find all these wacko professors” to “where do colleges find all these wacko fellows” doesn’t seem actually to answer it. It implies an intuitive answer, that “there are a hell of a lot of wacko ex=student scholars,” which seems to address the former question as well as the latter, regardless of their intermediate mode of transport. I’m sure I’m missing something, but it sounds like inside baseball.
It is a bit of inside baseball … the issue is one of who makes the initial decision to hire and whose budget it comes out of. Traditionally, DEPARTMENTS hire faculty after getting admin. budgetary approval. Departments tend to hire based on the needs of the department rather than those of the university or its administrators. These bridge programs allow ADMINISTRATORS to make hiring decisions, initially out of their own budgets. The Fellows have a leg up for permanent jobs because they have evidence they can “teach effectively’ at that particular university. And in any school facing tight budget constraints, which is most of them these days, I’m sure that administrators use their purse strings to make sure their Fellows get hired as in “if you want budget approval, hire one of my Fellows.” Most probably don’t put that in an email but even if they did, disappointed job candidates almost never sue and never get anywhere that level of legal discovery.
Requiring faculty applicants to submit “diversity statements” allows the university to eliminate all the applicants who aren’t radical enough. Berkeley used diversity statements to weed out 76% of the applicants for some biology positions without ever looking at their professional qualifications.
They presumably only considered the most radical 24% of the applicants. That’s how you make sure your faculty is filled with radicals.
Your answer makes more direct sense. You should write the next article.
And the value of higher ed goes down…