DOCUMENTS: The University of Michigan’s “anti-racism and racial justice” cluster hire wrapped up last year—recruiting at least 20 new professors.

I’ve acquired the proposals via a record request. They show how U-M aggressively hired social justice activists.

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For a cluster focused on the arts, a proposal declares that the new faculty will teach students to become "change agents," as art should aim to "challenge policies" which "perpetuate white supremacy."

The cluster search in "data justice" was especially aimed at recruiting scholars in critical race studies," decolonization, and racial capitalism.

Adding: "UM needs to show these new faculty that we believe that it is not the job of the oppressed to reform the oppressor..."

Trust in higher ed has crashed over a decade.

Why?

My take: because in that time, universities launched huge ideologically-charged faculty hiring schemes.

But these schemes are legally vulnerable. They came hand-in-hand with overt discrimination.

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I’ve acquired hundreds of documents describing the inner workings of social justice university hiring schemes.

Just in my capacity as an investigative journalist, I’ve found dozens of examples of universities seemingly violating civil rights law—and hiring based on race.

1) “Our aim is specifically to hire a Black, Indigenous, or Latinx faculty member.”

At the University of Colorado Boulder, the Faculty Diversity Action Plan funded special faculty position, if departments could demonstrate how the role would enhance diversity.

Many of the roles created through these programs were overtly ideological, like the one for a German studies professor who examined fairy tales, folklore, and fantasy through a “critical race studies perspectives.”

When @ and I acquired the proposals, we found that many just openly stated the intention to discriminate.

— “Our commitment, should we be successful with this application, is to hire someone from the BIPOC community.”

— “This cluster hire has the goal of doubling our underrepresented faculty in the college.”

— “[This search] emphasizes hiring Black, Indigenous, Asian American, Latinx, and Pacific Islander faculty”

— “We have an urgent and qualified need for BIPOC femme/women of color faculty in an Africana Studies focus who will contribute to the social science division thematic cluster hire in racism and racial inequality.”

Today, I argue that the challenge of higher education reform can be boiled down to one issue: the talent pipeline.

If we rewire the academic talent pipeline, the reform movement will succeed. If not, no other list of policies will suffice.

2/ Universities have long provoked criticism. But acute mistrust is a recent trend. Ten years ago, 57% of Americans had high confidence in higher ed, and only 10% had “little or none.” Today, only 36% have high trust, and 32% have low-to-no confidence.

What changed?

3/ The rise of what I call the “scholar-activist pipeline” helps explain the shift.

Over the past decade, universities—from Columbia to Ohio State to UVA to Texas A&M to CU Boulder—invested aggressively in ideologically-charged hiring schemes, recruiting 100s of new professors.

Accreditors have played a serious and underrated role in ramrodding ideological and discriminatory policies throughout higher ed.

Some examples 🧵

The problem is perhaps worst in the medical sciences, of all places.

Example 1: In 2020, the Liaison Committee for Medical Education found Oregon Health and Science University’s medial school lacking in the area of "faculty diversity."

OHSU responded with a mammoth DEI action plan, which promised “incorporate DEI, anti-racism and social justice core competencies” in performance appraisals.

Also, “consequences” for faculty who didn’t get on board.

Faced with outside pressure, universities continue to circle the wagons in the name of "faculty governance" and autonomy.

But for years, big donors and university administrators have blatantly undercut faculty authority—all to promote sweeping social justice projects.

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Dozens of universities have embraced fellow-to-faculty hiring schemes to promote their social justice goals, as I’ve described before.

Through these programs, an admin-led team hires postdocs who are then given special favor for tenure-track jobs.

Turns out, this is a powerful tool for strong-arming departments.

Multiple professors have told me how deans denied or limited their departments’ funds for regular hiring, while strongly encouraging them to hire through fellow-to-faculty programs.

As huge NIH funding cuts become a real possibility at places like Harvard, it's worth putting the agency's role in perspective.

Put simply, the NIH is biomedical science in the US. Private money will not be able to pick up its tab.

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2/ This year the NIH requested a fiscal year budget of $50 billion, and in years past its been close to that amount.

The top ten medical schools by NIH funding all get more than half a billion dollars annually.

Let’s put that in perspective…

3/ The top philanthropic funder of the medical sciences, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, happens to also be the second largest charity in the country behind the Gates Foundation.

It’s endowment is $27 billion, just a little more than half the NIH’s total budget.