Fortunately, the scholar-activist pipeline offers more than a diagnosis: it gives us a case study and model for reform. Read about it here.

RT @JohnDSailer: NEW: Universities across the U.S. have embraced diversity checkpoints in faculty hiring. Administrators monitor the demog….

Cc @HarmeetKDhillon.

RT @jessesingal: Yeah this is not good.

RT @darelmass: @JohnDSailer is exposing standard operating procedure in American academia to the world. The larger question, however, is h….

If there’s one key lesson here, it’s that the desire for power, not ideology alone, gave rise to the social-justice university. More than likely, power will also prove its undoing. Read the full report here.

Specifically, they give administrators, many pursuing an ideological agenda, the ability to delay, halt, and redirect departments in their most important decision-making capacities.

This policy reveals something more subtle about the DEI era. These overbearing, often clever policies have not just sanctioned a legally tenuous obsession with race. They also confer power.

By threatening to shut down or indefinitely postpone searches, diversity checks create an incentive for departments to adopt additional DEI litmus tests for hiring—including the use of diversity statements and DEI criteria for evaluating candidates, as shown in UIUC emails.

Heavily redacted emails from UIUC show several administrators poring over proposed finalists, at times voicing their concerns. “I will talk with the Associate Deans about this as well before the search moves forward.”

Emails show how these policies have played out in practice. At Ohio State, dean Dana Regna wrote that she supported one finalist list “based upon recruitment and diversity of finalists.” Another: “I definitely approve! What a diverse process, pool, and finalist list.”

For searches that didn’t pass muster, Gorman’s plan proposed adding the highest-scoring minority candidates dropped from consideration back to the shortlist and finalist slate. “I suppose we could each pitch our favorites,” she adds parenthetically.

Other documents—acquired via records requests—show that this is no outlier. At UT Austin, Gorman proposed a detailed diversity plan for her search committee, which outlined a rigorous process for monitoring diversity, which could involve canceling searches outright.

This process has been codified in university policy. As I reported last week, a Cornell hiring initiative mandated four diversity checkpoints, virtually ensuring that the committee would give preference to certain racial minorities, raising serious legal questions.

At Ohio State, dean Susan Olesik told a committee that “diversity of the candidates" has to be as high a priority as scholarship. “If the slate of candidates that you bring forward are not diverse, I will ask you to simply keep searching,” she said.

At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), the Human Resources director would send weekly “diversity of the pool reports,” which would continue up to the selection of finalists. If the makeup was deemed “insufficient,” more administrators would get involved.

In one email—acquired via a records request—UT Austin professor Carma Gorman asked diversity-dean John Yancey whether her search committee’s pool was sufficiently diverse to advance. The dean said yes, but if the numbers dropped “then things don’t look good anymore.”

NEW: Universities across the U.S. have embraced diversity checkpoints in faculty hiring. Administrators monitor the demographics of applicants throughout the process, with consequences for searches that don't "pass muster"—according to a trove of records I've obtained. 🧵

RT @sfmcguire79: Reminder that the University of Chicago hired this person through a special DEI post-doc program.

So often, the answer is very, very simple: the Mellon Foundation is footing the bill.

RT @JohnDSailer: Peña is a self-professed radical who boasts of how she wants to dismantle the university from within & lays out an overtly….