The DEI Misinformation Industry
A Case Study of Two Paragraphs About University Hiring
I’m skeptical of many diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) projects in U.S. higher education—not because they don’t promote a laudable goal, but because those projects are unlikely to meet it.
Desegregation never fully occurred in higher education. It was contested and delayed via litigation and mass resistance for decades. Affirmative action, progressively dismantled in courts, could only hope to mitigate those ongoing delays.
DEI programs in higher education are modeled on corporate recruitment and marketing strategies from the late twentieth century forward. Corporations learned that promoting the image—but not necessarily the reality—of diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplaces was good business. In the same way, leaders of the neoliberal university learned that slogans about diversity, equity, and inclusion helped recruit students and burnish institutional reputations—but with only marginal progress toward making universities fully live up to those values.
Despite my skepticism, I also contend that dispelling misinformation about DEI in colleges and universities is vital. Pundits and politicians claim to oppose DEI because it allegedly represents a form of reverse discrimination, sorts students and faculty into permanently divisive groups of “victims” and “oppressors,” and mandates that faculty adhere to ideological litmus tests.
These exaggerations and falsehoods have fueled a historic wave of censorship in higher education and K-12 schools. “DEI” has become a catch-all scare term, providing a convenient and dishonest justification for government bans on teaching materials, learning opportunities, free speech, and critical thought. The misinformation industry that it has inspired does not seek to ensure quality education or meritorious faculty hiring.
A recent op-ed in the Chronicle of Higher Education insists that “diversity hiring” is happening in colleges and universities. This is code for saying that unqualified people are being hired purely based on race, sex, and gender—or, by the same token, that people of color, women, and LGBTQ applicants are inherently unqualified. A New York Post headline this week said that the nation would have its first “DEI president” if Vice President Kamala Harris were elevated to the presidency—meaning that she would only have reached the presidency because of her skin color, not her qualifications.
Misinformation about DEI has become a potent tool not only for censoring academic institutions, but also for revitalizing the bigoted idea that people of color, women, and LGBTQ citizens are fundamentally unqualified for leadership positions.
The Pebbles
Refuting every daily instance of misinformation about DEI and higher education is impossible. A good first step, instead, might be to emphasize how deeply misleading even seemingly simple journalistic accounts of diversity statements—the most common target of that misinformation—can be.
Stephen Jay Gould once said that examining a few pebbles on the beach can tell us a lot about the entire seashore. In that spirit, I’ll focus here on just two paragraphs—one from The Atlantic and one from Reason magazine—to establish a basic index of proliferating misinformation about DEI in universities.
People who argue that DEI is a noxious leftist ideology being unconstitutionally forced on university faculty commonly cite these commentaries from The Atlantic and Reason. Both articles focus on diversity-related initiatives in the University of California system to support sweeping claims about the alleged radicalism of DEI in general. Both of them also rely on a fundamental confusion of two very different hiring scenarios: 1) when job candidates in some universities are required to submit diversity statements with their application portfolios and 2) when applicants to cluster hires who specialize in promoting campus diversity summarize their qualifications for doing so.
In the first case, applicants for faculty positions might object to submitting a diversity statement as part of their application. In the second case, UC campuses in recent years have advertised positions designed to attract candidates committed to promoting institutional diversity as part of their areas of specialization. These cluster hires have become more common in higher education of late. Yet columnists in publications like The Atlantic and Reason have developed a deceptive habit of lumping those different hiring circumstances together under the trope of “mandatory diversity statements.”
“Mandatory”
In July 2023, The Atlantic published “The Hypocrisy of Mandatory Diversity Statements,” by Conor Friedersdorf. He began by detailing a lawsuit against UC-Santa Cruz by John D. Haltigan, a professor of psychology. According to Friedersdorf, “he alleges that its hiring practices violate the First Amendment by imposing an ideological litmus test on prospective hires: To be considered, an applicant must submit a statement detailing their contributions to diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
This suit was dismissed. Haltigan reportedly never applied for a position: according to his attorney, he chose “not to apply because ‘there’s simply no purpose in terms of him applying because of his views on these issues.’”
Friedersdorf cited this lawsuit as evidence of a nefarious, ideologically repressive use of mandatory diversity statements in the UC system—which, he reasoned, indicated “extreme developments” for universities in general. Across a single paragraph, Friedersdorf conflates supplemental diversity statements in conventional faculty hiring with application materials in which job candidates express their commitments to diversity in positions created to promote it:
Perhaps the most extreme developments in the UC system’s use of DEI statements are taking place on the Davis, Santa Cruz, Berkeley, and Riverside campuses, where pilot programs treat mandatory diversity statements not as one factor among many in an overall evaluation of candidates, but as a threshold test. In other words, if a group of academics applied for jobs, their DEI statements would be read and scored, and only applicants with the highest DEI statements would make it to the next round. The others would never be evaluated on their research, teaching, or service. This is a revolutionary change in how to evaluate professors.
Here, Friedersdorf finesses a series of mischaracterizations into existence. The “pilot program” involved a grant-based initiative at several UC campuses “to help diversify its faculty and rethink leadership opportunities to better reflect the values, priorities, and talent of faculty members who are from underrepresented groups.” Public materials indicate it was not a program to begin using mandatory diversity statements as the sole evaluative factor in academic hiring writ large. “Searches that are not part of the pilot program,” a 2019 press release from the Santa Cruz campus explained, “will continue to be run under existing campus practices, which includes asking candidates to submit a statement about their contributions to diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
This kind of faculty recruitment initiative is substantially different from conventional hiring practices for a dedicated scholar in English, political science, history, classics, sociology, or any other academic field. A university engaged in such an effort could expect to receive a huge number of applications from faculty representing many different academic and administrative areas of expertise, raising the question of how to fairly evaluate their dissimilar backgrounds and proposals.
Basic literacy in university faculty recruitment practices reveals that the “pilot” aspect of this hiring initiative referred to a test period to see if such a large-scale effort would be successful—if they could recruit a sufficient number of candidates and effectively conduct a potentially expansive. As with any hiring cycle, fair and orderly methods for winnowing down the large and diversified pool of applicants would be necessary.
Faculty on various committees per campus (Davis, Santa Cruz, Berkeley, and Riverside) reportedly evaluated a common denominator to make a first round of cuts. They focused on statements from all applicants about their freely chosen professional commitments to promoting institutional diversity. These statements, moreover, were anonymized in hopes of reducing biases (at least in theory) based on the personal identities or prior academic credentials of applicants. Historically, preferential treatment for applicants from elite—and oftentimes exclusionary—colleges and universities has covertly undermined merit-based evaluation of applicant pools.
Evaluating such elements of candidates’ portfolios for DEI cluster hires is not the same thing as evaluating only more typical “diversity statements” that applicants to conventional positions are sometimes required to submit. Rather, the UC committees evaluated candidates’ core statements about promoting diversity across campus for positions specially created to do exactly that.
It would be incredibly odd if a job candidate applied to a position created to advance on-campus diversity yet disapproved of measures to advance on-campus diversity. The most direct analogy would be, say, a professor of military history who did not want a hiring committee to prioritize their statement of professional strengths in military history or a professor of political science who did not want a hiring committee to prioritize their list of academic achievements in political science.
UC campuses not only publicly announced these protocols. As with any faculty recruitment effort, applicants presumably would have been aware of the application review protocols they were signing up for.
If I sat on a hiring committee where this review method was proposed, I would probably object. It’s certainly an outlier in university hiring at large, and probably unusual even in diversity-related cluster hires. But it would be unethical of me to hastily judge and disrespect the self-governance of other institutions. Rather, professional ethics compel me to point out irresponsible misrepresentations of such hiring practices, which undermine the principled work of university communities everywhere.
Indeed, the UC administration stipulated that candidates whose materials moved forward in the hiring process—still a large number of applicants—would be “evaluated on their whole application.” So-called diversity statements would not be used for any other hires in the same way. It would not be a general “threshold test”—the opposite of what Friedersdorf and other columnists reported.
Friedersdorf’s insinuations thus elided crucial explanatory context. Yes, the evaluative committees scored diversity-related rubrics in the first round—again, for a position designed to promote diversity. However, hiring committees of all sorts—not only in universities—routinely “rank” or “score” candidates based on common criteria.
Asking whether a job candidate is “above” or “below the line” in hiring committees is normal, both inside and outside of academia. University committee members typically don’t simply tick off boxes in a rubric. They share and compare their respective rankings, which are often different from one another, to build a consensus before reporting the results of their deliberations to higher levels of administration.
However, there’s another wrinkle to the inaccurate narrative about DEI and the UC system that Friedersdorf promoted. I have already cited a 2019 UC Santa Cruz press release that refutes that narrative. It had been provably specious, for years, by the time he published his June 2023 article.
“50 Percent”
On February 3, 2020, Reason published an article by Robby Soave titled “Berkeley Weeded Out Job Applicants Who Didn’t Propose Specific Plans To Advance Diversity.” It concerns the same faculty hiring initiatives that Friedersdorf included in his article, nearly two years later, to warn of some new radical trend in using diversity statements as litmus tests for faculty applications.
Soave works hard, rhetorically speaking, throughout the article to obscure the fact that UC Berkeley created the advertised positions in question to proactively advance diversity on campus. He admits no difference between mandatory supplemental statements about diversity and application materials for a job devoted to promoting diversity. “Think about what this means,” he wrote. “The foremost job qualification is a sufficient commitment to spreading diversity.” This “foremost job qualification” only sounds scary until you realize that those positions were announced to recruit university faculty dedicated to this mission in their areas of expertise, not force them to commit to an ideology with which they disagreed.
Thus, when Friedersdorf continued to obscure this large distinction in his June 2023 article, it had not become the radical general trend that he claimed to warn about almost two years later. It never concerned faculty hires in general at all.
Back in 2020, moreover, Soave’s article had already cemented this easily recycled narrative of ideological litmus tests in universities with distortions of statistical evidence. The paragraph below provides an apt case study of how, in just a few sentences, to turn innocuous numbers into alleged proof of nefarious plots:
Sure enough, a report on Berkeley’s diversity initiative—recently publicized by [biologist] Jerry Coyne and [economist] John Cochrane—shows that eight different departments affiliated with the life sciences used a diversity rubric to weed out applicants for positions. This was the first step: In one example a pool of 894 candidates was narrowed down to 214 based solely on how convincing their plans to spread diversity were.
The numbers that Soave cites here only sound alarming because he omits any mention of their proper context. He hyperlinks to the publicly available UC Berkeley Advancing Faculty Diversity grant program—the source of these statistics. The relevant background story from that source is anodyne: several different committees evaluated candidates’ anonymized proposals to enhance campus diversity (again, that was the whole point of the job call) and thereby reduced a formidable number of applications—nearly nine hundred—down to still more than two hundred candidates.
Omitting this explanatory context allows Soave to insinuate some ideological conspiracy among review committees. That insinuation—that hundreds of applicants were denied any orderly evaluation of relevant material simply because they didn’t “say the right things” in diversity statements—is deceptive, as demonstrated via the hyperlink that the paragraph contains.
Dishonesty with numbers continues throughout Soave’s article. For example, he cites other misleading reports that state “more than 50 percent of the applicants were eliminated solely because of their diversity statements.” Here, too, Soave links to a 2020 letter from the UC Davis vice chancellor explaining the methods and results of this hiring search. The letter explains where the severe-sounding “50 percent” language. Several different committees reviewed a large number of applications for these positions—too much for one committee. Some committees decided that fewer than 50 percent of the candidates they reviewed should move forward. This means that other committees decided more than 50 percent of the candidates assigned to them should move forward. There was no uniform 50 percent cut-off for ideological reasons.
In sum, at the time of Soave’s 2020 article, the UC system was not using diversity statements as general threshold tests for job applicants beyond new positions created specifically to promote on-campus diversity. That was still true as Friedersdorf claimed, in 2023, to report some radical new regime of ideological “threshold tests” for faculty candidates.
Neither Friedersdorf’s nor Soave’s insinuations to this effect were ever slated to become true. Remember, the faculty recruitment effort on UC campuses was a “pilot program.” The administrations in question refined their practices based on a trial run, which is common in such circumstances. They decided it would be better to evaluate additional materials, not only candidates’ statements about promoting campus diversity, in the first rounds of review for any future searches. If anything, the dominant trend now is not only to eliminate diversity statements, but also to censor and dismantle anything on university campuses that could be conceived as diversity-related.
Misinformation works by taking facts, anecdotes, or statistics out of their original context, distorting their meaning to support exaggerated, if not false, narratives. Focusing on only two paragraphs, one each from Friedersdorf’s and Soave’s respective articles, shows us how thick such patterns of distortions have become in ongoing commentaries about DEI.
Even skeptics of many DEI protocols (myself included) should be concerned at how wildly misrepresentations of those practices are being used to manufacture pretexts for a historic spike in state censorship of academic freedom.
The Shoreline
The DEI misinformation industry not only disseminates distortions and falsehoods about DEI in university hiring. It also badly misinforms the public about how university hiring processes operate.
Misrepresentations in one article provide grist for other articles. Friedersdorf’s 2023 article recycled Soave’s basic misleading narrative from 2020. In September of 2023, moreover, Michael Powell published a New York Times article based largely on the same dubious conceits in Friedersdorf’s commentary only months before.
Insist on context in debates over political statements and diversity measures in higher ed. Misinformants promote “glittering generalities”—anecdotes, stats, key terms out of context—to obscure provable strategies, intentions, and ordinary practices. They keep us focused on miscellaneous data points at the expense of context. Arguing one thing while leaving others unsaid is part of a classic strategy.
Hold sources of misinformation about DEI in universities accountable for misrepresenting anecdotes, statistics, and key terms. Notice when they twist language and evidence into ideological tools. Insist on the explanatory power of context—larger patterns, motivations, accurate information—as frames for healthier public debates over the best ways to promote full desegregation in higher education.