Even liberal professors oppose DEI mandates; colleges find pledges threaten free speech

Half of professors at top universities oppose mandatory faculty pledges to promote diversity, equity and inclusion despite strong liberal biases in their departments, a recent survey shows.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression conducted a three-month survey of 6,269 faculty members at 55 universities, including Harvard, Stanford, Ohio State and Texas A&M. Fifty percent of respondents said requiring academics to sign a written commitment to racial diversity as a condition of hiring was “never/rarely justifiable,” and 52% said the same for promotion and tenure.

Another 34% said it was “often/always justifiable,” and 16% said it was “sometimes justifiable” to require such pledges for hiring. Schools adopted the policy after the Black Lives Matter racial justice protests in 2014.

Among tenured and nontenured survey participants, 35% of self-described liberals, 85% of conservatives and 59% of moderates opposed DEI pledges for hiring.

“It should surprise no one that conservative faculty are opposed to mandatory DEI pledges, but even a substantial bloc of liberal faculty are opposed to the practice as well,” said Nathan Honeycutt, FIRE’s manager of polling and analytics. “Given how divisive they are, it’s likely these pledges persist in part due to self-censorship among faculty, who fear expressing opposition openly.”

Mr. Honeycutt said “very few” conservatives teach at universities.

In the survey, 71% of professors told the Philadelphia-based free speech group that a liberal would be a “very” or “somewhat” positive addition to their department. Twenty percent said the same about a conservative.

Some colleges have abandoned DEI commitments over the past year, bolstering a debate about campus free speech.

The public University of Michigan announced this month that it would no longer solicit “diversity statements” in faculty hiring, promotions and tenure decisions. The university cited a faculty committee’s findings that such pledges threaten free speech and dissenting viewpoints.

Among 274 professors at the Ann Arbor campus who responded to the FIRE survey, 47% opposed DEI hiring pledges, 18% said they were “sometimes justifiable” and 35% supported them. The state flagship school has more than 8,000 faculty members.

“You cannot question DEI, cannot reason against DEI, or speak about anything related to DEI (unless you constantly virtue signal and support it unquestionably),” one anonymous University of Michigan professor wrote in the survey. “DEI is the McCarthyism of the current times.”

Some academics interviewed by The Washington Times said the report confirms that political winds have shifted against DEI in faculty lounges.

“I think even scholars left of center see how the DEI statements can force people to conform their thought,” said Josh Blackman, a constitutional law professor at South Texas College of Law in Houston.

Others said the survey likely undercounted DEI proponents because only 5.57% of 112,510 eligible professors participated.

They said Republican-led efforts to ban DEI training, offices and pledges in states such as Florida and Texas have forced many advocates of minority hiring initiatives underground.

“Some believe if they are too vocal that people can find out who they are and target them for reprisals, especially in a state like Florida,” said Omekongo Dibinga, a professor of intercultural communications affiliated with the Antiracist Research & Policy Center at American University. “No one wants to be a hashtag.”

Lawyer Ilya Shapiro, a libertarian constitutional law scholar at the Manhattan Institute, said abandoning mandatory diversity pledges doesn’t stop hiring committees from requesting them.

“Faculties are self-reinforcing because departments hire their own members, and there’s no external check on that,” Mr. Shapiro said. “They can still continue discriminating based on viewpoints and preventing, ironically, a diversity of thought.”

Mr. Shapiro resigned from Georgetown University Law Center in June 2022 after refusing to undergo racial sensitivity training. In January 2022, he posted on social media a prediction that the Biden administration would nominate “a lesser Black woman” to the Supreme Court.

In the FIRE survey, 40% of 105 participating faculty at private Georgetown, which employs more than 3,000 professors, opposed DEI pledges in hiring, 36% supported them and 24% said they were “sometimes justifiable.”

Nationwide, 87% of surveyed professors expressed difficulty having an “open and honest conversation” on campus about any hot-button political issue. Conservatives voiced the greatest fear of being “canceled” for their opinions.

Seven in 10 professors reported struggling to openly discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That increased to nearly 90% of respondents from Columbia, Stanford and Rutgers, where anti-Israel student demonstrations surged over the past year.

The next-hardest issues they flagged were racial inequality (51%), transgender rights (49%), affirmative action (47%) and the recent presidential election (41%).

“There is nothing wrong with college professors to want to be careful and precise about what they say on hot-button issues,” said Gail Heriot, a University of San Diego law professor and independent commissioner on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. “But what we’re seeing today seems quite unhealthy.”

Overall, two-thirds of respondents supported institutional neutrality on social and political issues at their schools.

Politically, 47% of conservative faculty and 19% of liberal faculty reported feeling unable to voice their opinions because of how others might react.

Such findings confirm years of research showing liberal bias among faculty and students at elite universities, conservative campus activists say.

“That this is happening at elite institutions of higher learning is even more alarming,” said Spencer Brown, chief communications officer at Young America’s Foundation, a network of conservative college students. “Colleges and universities ought to be the places where expression is the most unbridled.”

Fourteen percent of surveyed faculty members reported being disciplined or threatened with discipline for expressing unpopular opinions in their teachings, research, academic discussions or off-campus comments.

“Everything happens through gossip and collusion,” said an anonymous Columbia professor.