Furman’s DEI Pledges Need to Go

Elite schools are discarding DEI loyalty statements for job applicants. Furman ought to do the same.

Jeffrey Salmon

To maintain and enhance its reputation as a top-tier liberal arts university, Furman needs to continue to recruit and promote a world-class faculty.

Unfortunately, Furman’s hiring policy mandates a diversity, equity, and inclusion loyalty statement that undermines its mission and aspirations.

The good news is that other elite universities are dropping required DEI statements, giving the administration an opportunity to reconsider the current policy and pursue a simple alternative that supports basic principles of academic freedom and opens the school up to hiring the widest range of talents and perspectives.

What is a DEI Loyalty Statement?

It has become common practice in recent years for American colleges and universities to require job applicants to submit statements on how diversity, equity, and inclusion figures into their teaching and shapes their academic work.

Here is an example of such a requirement from a current Furman job posting.

Assistant/Associate Professor of Accounting: • a diversity statement which describes how the candidate's teaching, scholarship, mentoring, and/or service might contribute to a liberal arts college community that includes a commitment to diversity as one of its core values (see https://www.furman.edu/diversity-equity-inclusion/); Contributions might include:

• Intentional strategies to create an environment of inclusion in the classroom, especially for historically marginalized racial/ethnic groups, first-generation students, and students with disabilities.

• Scholarship that relates in some way to improving access among underrepresented groups.

• Supporting academic departments or other organizations in becoming more diverse, equitable, or inclusive.

Furman guides the applicant by explaining what it means by DEI. “At Furman, we embrace meaningful diversity and equality as embodied by both implicit values and explicit practices in all of our endeavors.” And as the above required statement notes, Furman sees new hires as “supporting academic departments or other organizations in becoming more diverse, equitable, or inclusive.” As we will see, there is nothing straight forward about any of this language; the terms are open to wildly different interpretations and are politically charged.

Why Are Elite Schools Abandoning DEI Statements – and why Furman Should do the Same

In 2024 alone, MIT and Harvard abandoned DEI statements for hiring. Major state universities such as Texas, Arizonia, Florida, and North Carolina have done the same. And Bates, a Furman-sized liberal arts college in Maine, recently dropped this requirement as well.

Indeed, as reported by the New York Times, the merit of mandatory diversity statements is now open to wide skepticism by faculty and even the DEI bureaucracy. According to Paulette Granberry Russell president of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education, “while [the statements have] value, I also believe that value is limited.”

This should surprise no one, but it does offer Furman’s administration an excellent opportunity – and rational – to change course.

Let’s consider three compelling reasons why Furman should take that opportunity and drop its DEI requirement.

1.) Mandatory diversity statements are a political litmus test, not a way to discern a candidate’s qualifications to teach at Furman.

The terms diversity, equity, and inclusion carry heavy political baggage, and Furman makes clear precisely what politics the candidate is expected to bring to the table. For Furman, diversity concerns primarily race and gender, as there is only passing mention of viewpoint diversity or, for example, teaching approaches that inspire academic excellence.

Just look for a moment at Furman’s Strategic Diversity Plan. Any job candidate wondering how to approach diversity in his or her essay will discover the four goals of “inclusive excellence” connected to numerous objectives such as “[c]reate and implement innovative policies and practices that are intentional in their efforts to successfully recruit, retain and promote faculty from underrepresented communities.” Too bad if you can’t say you are from an underrepresented community or can’t figure out what community that might be in the context of the Furman campus. The ambiguities here are overwhelming.

Furman provides its definition of diversity:

DIVERSITY is the full range of human differences as experienced by groups and individuals that can be engaged in the service of learning. This includes differences in race, ethnicity, gender, socio-economic status, sexual orientation, citizenship status, disability, religion/spirituality, world view, age and many others.

Job seekers will find this helpful as they will note the overwhelming emphasis on race and gender and the -- at best-- tertiary suggestion that a diversity of thought or political philosophy has any relevance. The attentive candidate would note that while there is a very good statement on freedom of inquiry and expression on the Furman website, there is no comparable strategic plan for its implementation.

By adopting a singular view on the fraught question of diversity, Furman’s administration points the candidate to embrace a specific political position as a gateway to consideration for employment.

The same problems apply to the term “equity.” The term is often understood to imply an equality of outcome, denied to many due to structural racism and colonialism. Others may well understand equity to require an equality of opportunity; the term is fluid beyond belief. Pick either stance and you enter the political arena.

As FIRE notes in its analysis of mandatory diversity statements,

It is almost impossible to divorce DEI statements from political questions around topics like race and gender that are the subject of widespread disagreement. Absent clear, objective, viewpoint-neutral definitions and evaluation criteria, there is a heightened risk that DEI statements will function as a proxy for faculty members’ political beliefs, or that faculty will otherwise lose opportunities for hiring or advancement because they are insufficiently committed to their university’s stance on DEI.

Things get worse when it comes to “inclusion.”

As Carlton College professors Amna Khalid and Jeff Aaron Snyder argue, the values of inclusion and academic freedom are inevitably in conflict. The prime example for Khalid and Snyder is the case of a Hamline University art history professor who was threatened with dismissal for featuring a depiction of the Prophet Muhammad after a complaint by a Muslim student. (Students were offered an optional exercise that did not include the Prophet’s image.) As between academic freedom and inclusion Hamline’s leadership stood firmly on the side of inclusion over academic freedom. “[R]espect for the observant Muslim students in that classroom should have superseded academic freedom” wrote the President and the VP of “inclusive excellent” in his reprimand.

Furman writes that:

Inclusive excellence is a framework designed to support the integration of diversity, equity and inclusion efforts into the core functions and operations of the university while advancing our efforts to obtain educational excellence through The Furman Advantage.

This embrace of vague, warm-hearted, high-sounding words on inclusion does absolutely nothing to confront the tension between “inclusive excellence” and academic freedom.

At a university, you would expect Furman to have a laser-like focus on its core mission, of supporting “lifelong learners through rigorous inquiry, transformative experiences, and deep reflection to lead lives of meaning and consequence.” Instead, the university risks losing out on top talent because candidates are filtered through a political screen.

This is one of the reasons Harvard and MIT abandoned these statements. Harvard argued that the information gathered was too narrow, was confusing to international candidates, and that it would be replaced with a statement focused on an applicant’s “efforts to strengthen academic communities” and a teaching and advising statement about how an applicant will foster a “learning environment in which students are encouraged to ask questions and share their ideas.”

Furman should do the same.

2.) Furman’s required DEI statement is compelled speech and therefore a violation of fundamental free speech rights.

By requiring job candidates to subscribe to a specific understanding of controversial political issues, Furman is effectively engaged in compelled speech for its faculty.

Nearly 80 years ago, in West Virginia State Board of Education et al. v. Barnette et al., the Supreme Court held that “if there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”

As a private institution, Furman is not required to conform to the First Amendment. However, as noted in FIRE’s investigation of DEI and faculty hiring, “[w]hile private universities are not bound by the First Amendment, they generally make commitments to free speech and academic freedom that similarly preclude enforcement of any political, moral or ideological dogma.”

University of Chicago professor of jurisprudence Brian Leiter finds similar problems with required diversity statements. They “would not be objectionable if [they] were only a device for weeding out candidates unwilling to work with a diverse student body,” he notes, but they “go well beyond that, requiring candidates to profess allegiance to a controversial set of moral and political views that have little or no relationship to a faculty member’s pedagogical and scholarly duties.”

In fact, Furman’s administration recognizes this problem.

Ever since Furman’s administration faced negative press for its sorry treatment of scholars Scott Yenor and Mary Eberstadt, Furman has made pledges to uphold free speech all the while assuring us that there was never any cause for concern.

One of these efforts, a Statement on Freedom of Inquiry and Expression, states that, “Furman University unequivocally affirms its commitment to free inquiry and free expression. These core values uphold the foundational belief that diverse views and perspectives deserve to be articulated and heard, free from interference.”

This is an admirable and welcome articulation of the moral basis of the existence of a university. But it stands in direct contradiction with the administration’s ongoing campus hiring policy of mandatory DEI statements.

Forcing candidates for academic positions to take one side of a political debate as a precondition for consideration is compelled speech pure and simple.

3.) The DEI statement requirement damages legitimate initiatives to bring the full scope of available talents to the university.

Based on its stated devotion to free inquiry, Furman has a legitimate interest in having a diverse faculty and student body that fosters a campus culture capable of tackling the full range of ideas and viewpoints. A politically and culturally monochromatic university can embrace free speech all it wants and yet may never have to worry about anyone having to listen to a debate, over, say, abortion, transgenderism, or racial preferences.

Free inquiry and diversity should go hand-in-hand.

But that is not what is happening at Furman. Its bias toward a race and gender-based understanding of diversity to the exclusion of concerns about diverse viewpoints advertises an unserious posture on real diversity. Harvard law professor Randall L. Kennedy makes this point crystal clear.

In addition to exerting pressure towards leftist conformity, the process of eliciting diversity statements abets cynicism. Detractors reasonably suspect that underneath the uncontroversial aspirations for diversity statements — facilitating a more open and welcoming environment for everyone — are controversial goals including the weeding out of candidates who manifest opposition to or show insufficient enthusiasm for the DEI regime.

Worse, as Kennedy points out, one can easily find ghostwriters (or AI?) to assist in preparing acceptable DEI statements, leading to what he calls “ritualized dissembling”.

Applying for that accounting professor position at Furman becomes – to a large extent -- a task of view-fitting.

Kennedy concludes:

By overreaching, by resorting to compulsion, by forcing people to toe a political line, by imposing ideological litmus tests, by incentivizing insincerity, and by creating a circular mode of discourse that is seemingly impervious to self-questioning, the current DEI regime is discrediting itself.

What Furman Should do Instead

Furman needs to demonstrate through actions that it values free expression. An excellent first step would be getting rid of mandatory DEI statements and adopting apolitical hiring policies.

One alternative to its current practice, drawn from a few other universities, would be a straightforward, plain English statement on teaching strategies. For example:

As part of the application, applicants must include a 1-2 page teaching statement which gives a vivid snapshot of your teaching. Use the first person when you write this document to explain your central approach, articulate your impact, and outline specific examples of strategies, assessments and evidence of outcomes from your teaching experience.

Sustaining its place as a leading small liberal arts university will require Furman to abandon its fixation on race, gender, and “inclusive excellence.” Academic excellence and encouraging openness to the landscape of political ideas should become its new fixation.

Jeffrey Salmon ‘72 is the President of the Furman Free Speech Alliance.