Campus Free Speech

Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott | From the February 2024 issue

Yoel Inbar must not be allowed to teach psychology at UCLA—or so a student petition informed the California university's administration this past July.

Inbar is an eminent, influential, and highly cited researcher with a Ph.D. in social psychology from Cornell University. There is no question that he is qualified. Anyone worth their salt doing work on political polarization knows Inbar's name. Inbar also jumped through all the hoops UCLA put up for the job, including submitting a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) statement, which is currently all the rage in colleges and universities. He even shares the politics of the majority of the psychology department. But on his podcast, Inbar had expressed relatively mild concerns over the ideological pressures that DEI statements impose and wondered aloud whether they do harm to diversity of thought.

As a result of this petition—signed by only 66 students—UCLA did not hire Inbar. And he's not the only academic this has happened to. Far from it.

Since 2014, an unprecedented number of college professors have been targeted, punished, or fired for what they said, published, or taught. Meanwhile, colleges and universities are becoming even less ideologically diverse than they already were. Professors around the country are reporting their speech chilled in an increasingly homogenous environment.

While you might expect universities to respond to this issue by making efforts to mitigate groupthink, the opposite has occurred. Over the past several years universities across the country have decided that it's time to add DEI statements as part of the hiring and review process.

And while some argue that DEI statements are not litmus tests, we think that defies common sense and the evidence in front of us. Take this statement from Vassar College's Office of the Dean of the Faculty:

All department and program hiring for tenure-track and multi-year faculty positions are requesting all candidates to submit a diversity statement. This statement should provide the candidate's unique perspective on their past and present contributions to and future aspirations for promoting diversity, inclusion, and social justice in their professional career. The purpose of the diversity statement is to help departments and programs identify candidates who have professional experience, intellectual commitments, and/or willingness to engage in activities that could help the College contribute to its mission in these areas.

Even if you completely agree with the importance of DEI, there really isn't any reason to ask a potential physics professor, for example, to discuss their prior, past, and future "intellectual commitments" to "social justice." That is, unless you're looking to test their political outlook as a condition for their employment. The purpose of DEI statements is obvious, and professors themselves know it.

In 2022, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) conducted a survey of 1,491 university professors to gauge their attitudes toward free expression on campus. About 50 percent said they believed DEI statements are political litmus tests that violate academic freedom. Ideological minorities on campus agree at even higher rates than that: 56 percent of moderates and 90 percent of conservatives.

That may not surprise you, given the ubiquity of DEI statements and the prevalence of social justice ideology on campus and elsewhere. What may shock you is that in another study, about 23 percent of tenured or tenure-track professors said that they saw DEI statements as ideological tests and that their use in this way is appropriate.

Let that sink in: Twenty-three percent of surveyed university professors had no problem admitting they endorsed behavior that was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. In its seminal 1967 decision in Keyishian v. Board of Regents, the Court held that academic freedom is "a special concern of the First Amendment, which does not tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom." They extended this protection even to speech that was arguably "treasonable," "seditious," or "advocat[ing] the overthrow of government by force."

In the past, the Supreme Court has struck down far narrower litmus tests than this expansive review of candidates' "commitment to social justice." We have little doubt that the kind of DEI statements being unleashed on potential faculty members right now would be found unconstitutional as well. But a 2022 report by the American Association of University Professors found that 46 percent of large institutions surveyed already use DEI criteria in their tenure standards. An additional 36 percent are considering doing the same. In universities across the country, unconstitutionality seems to be of little concern.

One common defense of DEI statements is the claim that there are any number of valid answers to that prompt, and the applicant just needs to........

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