Universities Must Recommit to Excellence and Reject Political Loyalty Oaths
“Mathematics must be open and welcoming to everyone, to those who have traditionally been excluded, and to those holding unpopular viewpoints. Imposing a political litmus test is not the way to achieve excellence in mathematics or in the university.” These words are from an important and inspirational December 2019 opinion piece by Abigail Thompson in Notices of the American Mathematical Society, the world’s most widely read journal for professional mathematicians.
Thompson, who was then a vice president of the American Mathematical Society and the chair of the Department of Mathematics at the University of California, Davis, was writing not in her professional capacity but as an individual to her fellow mathematicians. Her aim was to generate awareness of and resistance to the growing pressure on campuses to screen job candidates for academic positions based on their sociopolitical views. Her essay, which provoked an intense controversy and led to her penning an even more broadly circulated op-ed in the Wall Street Journal titled “The University’s New Loyalty Oath,” is widely considered to be a seminal moment in the pushback from faculty across a range of disciplines against mandatory diversity statements in hiring. Thompson's basic point was that any requirement for job applicants to submit a statement of contributions to diversity or demonstrate commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) inevitably becomes an ideological or political test, violating a long-standing principle of the University of California system: “No political test shall ever be considered in the appointment and promotion of any faculty member or employee.”
To illustrate her point, Thompson focused on UC Berkeley’s influential rubric for scoring diversity statements in faculty hiring, which gave the lowest possible score to those applicants who explicitly stated that they would treat all students the same. As Thompson further pointed out, “UC Berkeley specifies that a statement that ‘describes only activities that are already the expectation of faculty (mentoring, treating all students the same regardless of background, etc)’ (italics Thompson’s) merits a score of 1–2 out of a possible 5 (1 worst and 5 best).” The highest scores would be reserved for those who are invested in learning about identities different from their own (specifically, those related to race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, disability, etc.), who see DEI as a core value, who actively promote DEI through seminars or workshops, and who have “clear knowledge of, experience with, and interest in dimensions of diversity that result from different identities.” In effect, if a job applicant were to say they intend to treat all students equally and that, as a matter of principle, they aim to teach, conduct research, and promote learning without discriminating against anyone, they would receive a failing grade.
By any fair measure, mandatory diversity statements (also known as DEI or EDI statements), when judged according to such a rubric, amount to a political litmus test, not unlike, as Thompson noted, the University of California’s requirement in the 1950s that all faculty sign a statement asserting that “I am not a member of, nor do I support any party or organization that believes in, advocates, or teaches the overthrow of the United States Government, by force or by any illegal or unconstitutional means, that I am not a member of the Communist Party.” As many others have demonstrated, diversity, equity, and inclusion—as advanced within universities and countless other institutions—often come with a whole suite of tenets and assumptions based on an ideology often referred to as Critical Social Justice (or the identity synthesis, or simply “wokeism”). As authors Özlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo write in their book Is Everyone Really Equal?,
A critical approach to social justice refers to specific theoretical perspectives that recognize that society is stratified (i.e. divided and unequal) in significant and far-reaching ways along social group lines that include race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability. Critical social justice recognizes inequality as deeply embedded in the fabric of society (i.e. as structural), and actively seeks to change this.
But as cultural writer Helen Pluckrose rightly notes in her book The Counterweight Handbook, Critical Social Justice is just one of many ethical frameworks for thinking about and approaching social justice and more often than not arrives at overly simplistic conclusions to matters of import—that is, in Critical Social Justice, injustice is believed to be everywhere, always, and positive action must be taken to get people to not only become aware to all the hidden forms of injustice in the world but also to commit to ending it.
The core tenets of Critical Social Justice . . . rest on a belief in largely invisible systems of identity-based power into which everybody has been socialized. This simplistic belief rejects both the complexity of social reality and the individual’s agency to accept or reject bigoted ideas. This makes it different from most other ethical frameworks that oppose prejudice and discrimination. Critical Social Justice theorists and activists apply their “Critical” methods to analyze systems, language, and interactions in society to “uncover” these power systems and make them visible to the rest of us. In their framework, these identity-based power systems include “Whiteness,” “patriarchy,” “colonialism,” “heteronormativity,” and “transphobia.” They are believed to infect all aspects of society and even the most benign everyday interactions. The belief that people are unable to avoid being racist, sexist, or transphobic because they have absorbed bigoted discourses from wider society is a tenet of faith.
As in all matters of faith, there is a right way of thinking and a wrong way of thinking. As Pluckrose further explains, “Following on from its focus on invisible systems of oppressive power and how language often serves those systems, Critical Social Justice demands enforcement of the right ways of thinking and punishment of the wrong ways of thinking.” In the world of DEI statements, candidates typically must pledge allegiance to the core ideas of Critical Social Justice—the right way of thinking—in order to receive high scores.
In turn, the wrong way of thinking—such as the belief among classical liberals that every person should be treated as a unique individual and “not as a representative of their gender or their ethnic group”—gets punished with low scores. Indeed, the rubric used by UC Berkeley and adopted by any number of other universities inside and outside the UC system made the DEI statements a political test not just for the purposes of checking boxes but also for the purposes of disqualifying candidates based on their answers. As Thompson put it, this is “a political test with teeth.” Indeed, as was subsequently reported, in a pool of 894 applicants to life science positions at UC Berkeley, 680 candidates were eliminated from consideration based solely on their DEI statement—without any consideration given to the strength of their research or teaching. Thompson went on to warn,
The diversity “score” is becoming central in the hiring process. Hiring committees are being urged to start the review process by using officially provided rubrics to score the required diversity statements and to eliminate applicants who don’t achieve a scoring cut-off.
Some might argue that, while the UC Berkeley rubric may have gone too far, there is nothing inherently ideological or political with requiring DEI statements from faculty job candidates in order to advance worthy goals we all share: to ensure that candidates from all backgrounds are given fair consideration for faculty jobs and to make sure lecturers support all students in their teaching and mentoring. However, anti-discrimination laws already require academics to not discriminate against students and fellow faculty based on a range of traits. A mandatory DEI statement, by its very nature, goes beyond this legal requirement by asking job candidates to profess their commitment to certain values—whose meaning and nature lie at the heart of today’s sociopolitical debates—and explain their thinking on how they will promote these values. There is a range of opinions in society and among academics on the proper mission of DEI—and the best way to advance these aims—because, as human beings, we have different ideological beliefs that stem from different moral foundations. This is the very essence of politics. As Thompson stated in her essay, “Politics are a reflection of how you believe society should be organized.”
For anyone who holds that DEI statements can be inserted into the hiring process in a way that is untainted by ideology or contested political views and beliefs, I ask, what if DEI statements were being judged by those looking for a commitment to Christian or Muslim or Marxist tenets instead of ones based on Critical Social Justice? Would such a process be similarly untainted by ideology? Here, I’m reminded of a quote by British economist Joan Robinson: “Ideology is like breath: you never smell your own.” Regardless of the rubric used, those who judge these statements will inevitably do so based on their own ideology and beliefs.
Mandated diversity statements necessarily promote compelled speech. They create an environment where academic applicants must not visibly dissent from the dominant ideological agenda if they want a fair shot at the job, which generates a wider chilling effect. Ultimately, the insertion of DEI considerations into job interviews undermines the most important kind of diversity of all: viewpoint diversity.
Psychologists Wendy Williams and Stephen Ceci have identified the lack of viewpoint diversity in academia on sociopolitical issues as a key factor leading to ideological bias in recent social science research. Scientist Anna Krylov and statistician Jay Tanzman have described various ways in which the infusion of Critical Social Justice has led journals to suppress research findings, concluding: “the politicization of science—the infusion of ideology into the scientific enterprise—threatens the ability of science to serve humanity.” A recent analysis by thirty-nine prominent scientists shows that censorship of science is often driven by other scientists who are motivated by ideological concerns. When papers on one side of the debate are consistently censored or ignored, the scientific record is distorted. In the words of evolutionary psychologist Steve Stewart-Williams, “censoring science blunts our ability to understand the world” and “by blunting our ability to understand the world, we also blunt our ability to make the world a better place.”
Today, mandatory DEI statements are becoming less common for academic recruitment in the United States than they were just a year ago. This is in large part due to the principled pushback initiated by Thompson and countless other academics, both public and private. For example, MIT recently ended the practice, and Harvard no longer mandates DEI statements for tenure-track positions. Notably, UC Berkeley’s public-facing rubric that first drew the attention of Thompson and was widely adopted by universities has apparently since been revised to be less explicitly ideological in its wording, even if the implicit bias remains. This is likely due not only to the sharp criticisms of DEI mandates coming from inside and outside academia but also to the threat of lawsuits that allege civil rights violations and the move by various state legislatures in the United States to ban the practice in public institutions.
Worryingly, however, such statements, usually in the form of requiring “commitment” to equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) are beginning to catch on in the United Kingdom. This trend ignores the fact that aspects of EDI agendas as currently promoted in the United Kingdom—as in the United States or elsewhere in the English-speaking world—are highly contested and go far beyond the requirements of law. An independent report commissioned by the UK government and published in March this year discovered that there were approximately 10,000 jobs dedicated to EDI in the UK public sector—almost twice the number as in any other country—coming at a cost of £557 million a year to the UK taxpayer. The report further found that there was pervasive “misinterpretation or misapplication of equalities legislation,” a “perceived lack of freedom of speech,” and a “censorious environment.”
In a recent essay, investigative journalist Hannah Barnes explains how the burgeoning EDI industry in the United Kingdom has played a crucial role in a shift toward intolerance and excess safety in various fields, including publishing, the arts, science, and medicine. Managers often feel powerless to push back against an EDI agenda that encourages empty virtue-signaling and suppression of minority perspectives. Barnes concludes,
In the pursuit of offence-less discourse, we are enabling a creeping censorship that will deny the next generation of academics, politicians, scientists, artists—citizens—the power of free thinking. We do young people, our future leaders, a disservice by infantilising them, by believing they need protecting from difficult ideas and truths. Do we want Britain to be led by those who cannot think openly and critically, who cannot tolerate different views, and who wish to shut down, or even punish, those who disagree with them?
While there are ethical and legal problems with requiring EDI commitments from job candidates in any sector, such requirements are particularly pernicious in the context of academic positions. This is due to the distinctive status of the university as a community whose telos is the pursuit of truth. The concept of academic freedom—the freedom of individual academics to investigate, publish, and teach in accordance with their intellectual convictions—is predicated on the conviction that free inquiry and the pursuit of truth lie at the core of academia. As the famous Kalven report from the University of Chicago put it,
The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic. It is, to go back once again to the classic phrase, a community of scholars. To perform its mission in the society, a university must sustain an extraordinary environment of freedom of inquiry and maintain an independence from political fashions, passions, and pressures. A university, if it is to be true to its faith in intellectual inquiry, must embrace, be hospitable to, and encourage the widest diversity of views within its own community. It is a community but only for the limited, albeit great, purposes of teaching and research. It is not a club, it is not a trade association, it is not a lobby.
The Kalven report recommends that in order to preserve their great and unique mission and to avoid censuring any minority views, universities must as a matter of policy maintain institutional neutrality on the political and social issues of the day.
In the British legal framework, academic freedom is codified as a public interest governance principle to ensure that academic staff have freedom within the law to question and test received wisdom, and to put forward new ideas and controversial or unpopular opinions, without placing themselves in jeopardy of losing their jobs or the privileges they may have at their university.
It is very likely that applicants who exercise their free speech and academic freedom rights to criticize the dominant approaches to EDI as practiced or endorsed by universities (including but not restricted to Critical Social Justice–based approaches) will be disadvantaged in a recruitment process that requires demonstrating commitment to EDI values. A recent draft guidance document from the Office for Students (OfS), the independent public body that regulates higher education in England, makes it clear that universities and other higher education providers
should not require applicants to any academic position to commit (or give evidence of commitment) to values, beliefs or ideas, if that may disadvantage any candidate for exercising their academic freedom within the law.
The guidance includes a similar directive for applicants for academic promotion. The OfS guidance was written in preparation for the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act (HEFOSA), a hugely significant piece of legislation that passed the UK Parliament in May 2023. One of the new Labour government’s earliest decisions in power was to pause the implementation of the HEFOSA. However, the OfS guidance does not depend on the HEFOSA because Section 43 of the Education Act 1986 includes a similar legal duty on universities in England and Wales to uphold free speech.
Thus, universities in England that require applicants to commit to EDI values are very likely violating the existing law (the Education Act 1986), the public interest governance principles that all universities are subject to, the recent OfS guidance, as well as the HEFOSA (should it come into effect). In addition, such requirements may violate the Equality Act 2010, which prohibits direct or indirect discrimination based on a range of protected characteristics, such as age, sex, race, disability, and religion or belief. In the ground-breaking Maya Forstater case, the employment appeal tribunal held in July 2022 that the “gender-critical” belief that biological sex is real, immutable, and important is a protected philosophical belief under the Equality Act. In September 2023, the Sean Corby case established that opposition to Critical Race Theory is a protected philosophical belief under the Equality Act. Many universities’ approach to EDI in respect of sex, gender, and race promote gender-identity belief and Critical Race Theory. It is strongly arguable that a requirement to demonstrate commitment to EDI as understood by these universities will disadvantage gender-critical applicants and those who are opposed to Critical Race Theory.
King’s College London (KCL) had until recently a requirement upon applicants for promotion that they demonstrate their support of the university’s “equality, diversity and inclusion ambitions.” This was recently challenged, and a detailed opinion on the matter was issued by Akua Reindorf KC, a leading barrister and a member of the Equality and Human Rights Commission. The Reindorf opinion concluded that the KCL criterion was likely to be in breach of multiple laws.
I think it strongly arguable that this requirement, when analysed in its context, amounts to indirect philosophical belief discrimination contrary to ss.10 and 19 of the Equality Act 2010 (“EqA”) against potential applicants who hold gender critical beliefs. . . . It is likely that if KCL persists in imposing the requirement in the next academic year it will find itself in breach of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023 (“HE(FoS)A”), which is expected to come into force during 2024. In the meantime, the requirement may amount to a breach of s.43 of the Education Act.
In reaching this conclusion, Reindorf cited KCL’s ideologically loaded EDI training modules and its close links with external EDI accreditation schemes run by organizations such as Advance HE and Stonewall. These factors are present at virtually all UK universities, and so Reindorf’s analysis should apply widely. Reindorf further suggested that the unlawfulness of the KCL criterion could be resolved by asking applicants to demonstrate a commitment to “service” (or a similar neutral concept) rather than EDI, which would give appropriate leeway for academics to act in a manner consistent with their rights to freedom of expression and academic freedom. (Note: I have been informed that KCL might remove this criterion now—so there's hope!)
The Best Free Speech Practice has recently published an exposure draft of a statement outlining free speech compliance issues with EDI considerations in the recruitment process at English universities. The Committee for Academic Freedom has found that several prominent London universities have mandatory EDI training courses that compel their staff to affirm controversial points of view they may not hold, in violation of OfS guidance. Pianist and musicologist Ian Pace has analyzed how current EDI practices impose a fixed ideological agenda in UK universities and have brought about “a loss of faith in truth, knowledge, expertise and critical thought, the very things upon which universities need most fundamentally to focus.” Sociologist Alice Sullivan and philosopher Judith Suissa have argued that the recent EDI trend in UK higher education “is not only a threat to viewpoint diversity and academic freedom but is also antithetical to serious equalities work that seeks to uphold the rights of all.”
Even if EDI as currently designed and instituted came with no insurmountable ethical or legal problems, it would require serious revision for one important reason: the overwhelming majority of EDI policies and practices undertaken by universities are not evidence-based and, indeed, might very well be doing more harm than good according to EDI’s own terms. As I have written elsewhere, there is little evidence EDI interventions succeed, even by their own standards.
Unfortunately, many EDI actions that are pursued at present have limited value and may even be counterproductive. For example, there is much emphasis on unconscious bias training, despite the fact that such training appears to have limited efficacy for behaviour change. Devine and Ash suggest that the monetary investment in diversity training programmes “has clearly outpaced the available evidence that such programs are effective in achieving their goals”. More generally, many EDI interventions focus on reducing prejudice, but a large-scale meta-analysis found that much existing research effort is ill-suited to providing evidence-based recommendations for such interventions. Another direction pursued enthusiastically by EDI committees is the motivational theory of role models; however, a meta-analysis of the theory of role models observes that “the enthusiasm for role model interventions among educators and the general public continues to run ahead of the research”.
DEI/EDI interventions must be evidence-based and respect academic freedom. There are reasonable actions that universities can take to further the goals of equality and inclusivity, such as creating family-friendly policies and supporting early-career researchers. However, to uphold academic freedom, universities must ensure that current and prospective faculty are not under any pressure to express agreement with sociopolitical causes in words or deeds in order to gain or retain employment or advance in rank or status.
Universities already have a long-standing gold standard for the appointment, retention, and promotion of members of academic staff. As outlined in the famous 1972 report by the University of Chicago’s Committee on the Criteria of Academic Appointment (commonly referred to as the Shils report), the criteria to be applied should
give preference above all to actual and prospective scholarly and scientific accomplishment of the highest order, actual and prospective teaching accomplishment of the highest order, and actual and prospective contribution to the intellectual quality of the University through critical stimulation of others within the University to produce work of the highest quality.
The report further clarifies that assessment of candidates should be solely on the basis of (1) research; (2) teaching and training; (3) contribution to intellectual community; and (4) services. This is the standard to which universities must again commit.
So let us all remember Abigail Thompson’s wise counsel and words for which she was denounced at the time but that remain evergreen and vital—both for the good of the university as a truth-seeking institution and for society at large, which depends on the production of reliable knowledge from universities: “The idea of using a political test as a screen for job applicants should send a shiver down our collective spine. Whatever our views on communism, most of us today are in agreement that the UC loyalty oaths of the 1950s were wrong. . . . Imposing a political litmus test is not the way to achieve excellence in mathematics or in the university. Not in 1950, and not today.”
Abhishek Saha is a professor of mathematics at Queen Mary University of London and a founder member of the London Universities' Council for Academic Freedom.