Christopher Rufo writes “We’ve obtained a trove of internal documents that reveal Harvard’s racial favoritism in faculty and administrative hiring. The university’s DEI programs are more than “unconscious bias” training. They are vectors for systematic discrimination against disfavored groups: namely, white men. As one Harvard researcher told us, “endless evidence” suggests that the university continues to discriminate against the supposed oppressor class in hiring and promotions.”
This isn’t limited to Harvard. As the evidence I’ve shared here shows, ASU required its employees to undergo DEI training where they were taught that being white is a problem, that America is a structurally racist country, and that heteronormativity, the belief that mammals reproduce through the union of male and female, is itself a problem. ASU is currently defending its required employee DEI training in court at the cost of hundreds of dollars a billed hour. All while publicly claiming that it has no such training.
Rufo says:
“For years, Harvard’s DEI department has explicitly sought to engineer a more racially “diverse” faculty pool. The university-wide Inclusive Hiring Initiative provided “guidelines and training” for those involved in the hiring process and was explicitly tied to Harvard’s DEI goals. The stated mission of the initiative is to “[i]nstill an understanding of how departments can leverage the selection process” to build “an increasingly diverse workforce.””
I’ve shared here about serving on a hiring committee where a member added a DEI question to our list of interview questions, despite ASU’s public claim that it no longer includes DEI questions in the hiring process. Nothing was done to correct this. The process moved forward with that question serving as a central piece of information used to determine who was and was not qualified. What happens when candidates who were rejected from positions at ASU hire lawyers to investigate the standards the university used to disqualify them, especially if those decisions were based on DEI questions that ASU publicly claimed it no longer used?
Rufo says:
“Harvard deliberately factors race into the hiring process. The university gives committee chairs privileged access to “self-identified demographic data, including gender, race, and ethnicity” and encourages chairs to “use this information to encourage diversity in the applicant pool, long list, and short list.” Harvard admits that some of its hiring programs have explicit “placement goals” for women and minorities—which, despite the university’s denial, function as a soft quota.”
Has ASU relied on similar practices? ASU’s literature says it is all about inclusion, but I have shared evidence here to show that it means some are more included than others. It relies on the ideas of “oppressed” and “marginalized” to decide who should be the most included and given more resources than others. For instance, I have shared here about ASU’s engineering and space programs using DEI language in student selection and hiring.
The conclusion is that America’s universities have relied on racial essentialism in hiring, even while claiming that racism is wrong. What will happen when lawyers get ahold of this information and take these universities to court?