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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