02-03-2020, 05:45 PM
Quote:Berkeley Weeded Out Job Applicants Who Didn't Propose Specific Plans To Advance Diversity
The university's litmus test is a lawsuit waiting to happen.
The University of California has been requiring prospective faculty members to affirm that they support diversity. This was Orwellian in its own right—reminiscent of the university system's 1950s loyalty oaths, which required faculty to attest that they were not members of the Communist Party.
It now appears that at one campus, UC-Berkeley, the diversity initiative goes much further than previously understood. Whether a candidate has proposed a specific, concrete plan to advance diversity is now being used as a litmus test for some positions. No candidate who fails the test can even be considered for employment.
Abigail Thompson, a UC-Davis math professor and department chair, sounded the alarm regarding the modern-day loyalty oaths in a December Wall Street Journal piece. Thompson wrote that increasing diversity is a laudable goal but requiring prospective hires to pledge fealty to the concept seems like forcing them to subscribe "to a particular political ideology."
Sure enough, a report on Berkeley's diversity initiative—recently publicized by Jerry Coyne and John Cochrane—shows that eight different departments affiliated with the life sciences used a diversity rubric to weed out applicants for positions. This was the first step: In one example, of a pool of 894 candidates was narrowed down to 214 based solely on how convincing their plans to spread diversity were.
https://reason.com/2020/02/03/university...-berkeley/
![[Image: Auburn-OID-homepage-feature-1-e1504280579484.png]](http://diversity.auburn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Auburn-OID-homepage-feature-1-e1504280579484.png)
