University of Michigan Ends Required Diversity Statements

U.S.|University of Michigan Ends Required Diversity Statements

The University of Michigan will no longer require diversity statements as part of faculty hiring, promotion and tenure decisions, the school announced on Thursday, marking a major shift at one of the country’s leading public research institutions.

The new policy, issued by Michigan’s provost, comes as the university’s regents weigh a broader overhaul of its sprawling diversity, equity and inclusion programs, among the most ambitious and well financed in the country. The policy effectively overrules a hodgepodge of practices at the university’s varied undergraduate and graduate schools, most of which began using diversity statements in hiring in recent years.

“As we pursue this challenging and complex work, we will continuously refine our approach” to D.E.I., the provost, Laurie McCauley, said in a statement.

Michigan’s decision may add momentum to growing efforts to restrict the use of diversity statements, which have proliferated widely in academia in recent years. Schools that employ them typically ask job applicants to discuss how they would advance diversity and equity through their scholarship, teaching or community service. In states like Michigan and California, which ban direct racial preferences in hiring, diversity statements have been credited with helping public universities hire more diverse faculties.

Critics view them as a form of compelled political speech that are often used to evade legal restrictions on affirmative action. In at least some instances, job candidates have been eliminated from consideration based solely on their diversity statements.

Legislatures in at least nine states have banned them, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education. Last year, public university systems in Missouri, Ohio and Wisconsin all stopped requiring diversity statements. So have the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. A 2022 survey by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a free-speech advocacy group that opposes diversity statements, found that professors at four-year colleges in the United States were evenly split on their use.