Friday, February 10, 2023

Texas Tech reverses DEI statement requirement after biology dept. featured in WSJ piece

Texas Tech is retracting its diversity statements and hiring practices after a publication addressing this appeared in the Wall St. Journal on February 6, 2023. See WSJHow ‘Diversity’ Policing Fails Science: An open-records request reveals that Texas Tech faculty penalize candidates for heterodox opinions. 

Contrary to the view that standards of intellectual excellence are getting undermined by diversity and inclusion statements and processes, understanding and embracing difference in a highly-diverse world is fully about competence that touches every aspect of life, work, and career. 

The issue here rather is dressed up as an issue of compromising "merit" when it's actually about not wanting to empower our minoritized communities. It further reflects a discomfort among those in power with a de-centering of whiteness and white supremacy that finds expression in anti-DEI  policies and practice that have served us well.

Moreover, they're particularly important in historically white, Eurocentric institutions like Texas Tech, as well as my own institution at the University of Texas at Austin and most others throughout our state and nation. This is a national problem and concern.

Individual merit should also arguably be about negotiating and understanding difference in an enterprise that is fully about educating the next generation that happens to be not only highly diverse, but the most diverse in the history of our country (Fry & Parker, 2018). Particularly in the context of these demographic shifts, why shouldn't diversity be a value or goal? After all,  these are the very students that we need to recruit into higher education institutions.

I hope our colleges and universities stay strong and do not cave in to this ultra-conservative agenda that threatens to take us back to the Jim Crow or— for Mexicans in Texas and the Southwest—the Juan Crowera that endured through the 1950s in our state.

Not a good optic, my college and university friends and colleagues. Not at all a good optic. And potentially, very harmful.

-Angela Valenzuela

Reference

Fry, R. & Parker, K. (NOVEMBER 15, 2018). Early Benchmarks Show ‘Post-Millennials’ on Track to Be Most Diverse, Best-Educated Generation Yet:A demographic portrait of today’s 6- to 21-year-olds, Pew Research Center. 




LUBBOCK, Texas (KCBD) - Texas Tech has announced a review of its hiring policies after diversity and inclusion statements required by the department of biology were featured in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece.


Wall Street Journal opinion story, written by John D. Sailer, said one candidate was flagged for not knowing the difference between “equity” and “equality,” another was flagged for referring to professors with the “he” pronoun. Another was praised for making a “land acknowledgement” during the hiring process, “noting that Native Americans once lived in what is now the United States.”

PDF: Redacted DEI statements from Texas Tech Department of Biology

The TTU biology department had adopted its own diversity, equity and inclusion policy for the hiring process, asking that search committees “require and strongly weight a diversity statement from all candidates.”

The university quickly reversed that policy on Tuesday after the piece ran on Monday, announcing in a written statement:

“Texas Tech University’s faculty hiring practices will always emphasize disciplinary excellence and the ability of candidates to support our priorities in student success, impactful scholarship, and community engagement. Recently, we learned of a department that required a diversity, equity, and inclusion statement in addition to the usual applicant materials as pan of a faculty search. We immediately withdrew this practice and initiated a review of hiring procedures across all colleges and departments. We will withdraw the use of these statements and evaluation rubrics if identified.”

The Wall Street Journal shared these documents, originally published in redacted form after an open records request by the conservative-leaning National Association of Scholars, saying “They confirm what critics of DEI statements have long argued: That they inevitably act as ideological litmus tests.”

The WSJ piece cites an example of one candidate who “mentioned that DEI is not an issue because he respects his students and treats them equally.” The evaluation notes said “This indicates a lack of understanding of equity and inclusion issues.”

We’ll update this story to include any further statements by the Wall Street Journal, National Association of Scholars or Texas Tech.

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