John Sexton writes at HotAir.com about an interesting revelation at a flagship American public university.
[A] pair of authors co-wrote an opinion piece at the Wall Street Journal describing how the University of Colorado’s focus on DEI led to hiring practices that were blatantly illegal. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 made hiring people based on race out of bounds but the school’s Faculty Diversity Action Plan pushed hiring authorities to do it anyway and they were happy to go along with it.
In a hiring proposal that the National Association of Scholars acquired, faculty and staff of the university’s program for writing and rhetoric argued that recruiting a “BIPOC” professor—the acronym stands for “black, indigenous and people of color”—was vital to the department’s “curricular and programmatic goals.” Faculty at the department of Germanic and Slavic languages and literatures, proposing to hire a German-studies professor, touted the racial diversity of the department’s preferred candidate and explained how she could revise courses on fairy tales, folklore, and fantasy to incorporate “critical race studies perspectives.”
Both of these scholars, and many more, were hired through the university’s Faculty Diversity Action Plan, a special funding program for diversity-focused faculty hiring, which ran until 2023, when it was restructured and renamed. Created in 2020, the program played a significant role in dictating whom the university hired. In a 2022 faculty meeting, the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences was asked how many professors were hired through the program since it began. He estimated that around 90% were either hired through the program or were spousal hires…
The university’s framing should have immediately raised legal red legal flags. Long before Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023), Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned race-based discrimination, which President Trump’s executive order reaffirms. Consultants often remind universities that they can’t base hiring decisions on race.Yet, competing for the funds to bring in new faculty, academic departments happily followed administrators’ prompting and boasted about their intent to discriminate.
