Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by City Journal on November 19, 2024. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission.
The Supreme Court in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (SFFA) banned the use of race in admissions in higher education. In the State University of New York system, however, race-conscious methods are alive and well in another domain: faculty hiring.
After the ruling, Chancellor John B. King, Jr. and the SUNY Board of Trustees declared that the Court had “attempted to pull our nation backwards in the journey toward equity and civil rights.” Blacks and Latinos “are still underrepresented across institutions of higher education as students, faculty members, and administrators,” they said, so “better paths and bridges” would be needed to dismantle “roadblocks and barriers.”
In the SUNY system, these “paths and bridges” take the form of three diversity awards and scholarships: Promoting Recruitment, Opportunity, Diversity, Inclusion and Growth (PRODiG+); the Empire State Diversity Honors Scholarship; and the Graduate Diversity Fellowship. The first is a recruiting program designed to induce “over 400 postdoctoral fellows to enter tenure-track faculty positions at State-operated campuses”; the latter two are DEI-focused scholarships for undergraduate and graduate students, respectively.
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SUNY’s PRODiG+ program is explicitly designed to “increas[e] the number and share of excellent diverse faculty committed to advancing the ideals of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).” In practice, “diverse faculty” apparently refers to racial minorities and women. SUNY Cortland’s PRODiG proposal, for example, stated clearly that it intends to “hir[e] a percentage of URM [underrepresented] faculty that equals or surpasses the diversity of our student population.” Cortland’s 2022 program overview clarified further that “underrepresented” groups included “women in STEM disciplines [WSTEM], Hispanic/Latinx, African Americans, Native Americans, and Pacific Islanders.”
One of the school’s PRODiG+ initiatives is called the Diversity Faculty Fellows (DFF) program; it is intended to “attract diverse faculty of promise to [Cortland’s] campus.” These postdoctoral fellowships are effectively employment programs, and university documents reveal that administrators put their thumbs on the scale to benefit minority scholars. For example, officials asked search committees to revisit the qualifications of URM candidates who were not selected for a campus interview “to determine if . . . apparent bias” led to their rejections. Additionally, several SUNY Cortland departments allow DFF searches to be extended or postponed due to “[in]sufficient diversity” in the applicant pool; in the 2019–2020 application cycle, one DFF search was cancelled entirely “due to lack of diversity in the pool.”
These efforts produced the desired demographic effect. In a progress report, SUNY Cortland states that, thanks to PRODiG, “39% of our hires over those two years [2020-2022] resulted in the hire of URM or WSTEM candidates” compared with only 18 percent over the preceding two years.
The program is changing not only the racial composition but also the ideological makeup of SUNY’s faculty, selecting for, in the university system’s words, “faculty committed to advancing the ideals of diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Indeed, all three of SUNY’s system-wide diversity-award programs (PRODiG, the Graduate Diversity Fellowships, and the Empire State Diversity Honors Scholarship) probe applicants’ commitment to equity. For example, SUNY Cortland’s Foundation and Social Advocacy Department asks DFF candidates which “theorists . . . have influenced your scholarship and/or teaching” to better gauge candidates’ “theoretical orientation”; candidates are also asked to provide “definitions of inclusion.”
At SUNY Cortland, department chairs’ commitment to diversity extends beyond hiring faculty. Indeed, they indicate that DEI is foundational to their teaching and scholarship. The history department, for example, believes that “[q]uestions of equity and inequity, inclusion and exclusion, and human-created systems and cultures drive the study of history.” Art history relates that teaching students “how our government, policies, systems, and institutions have all contributed to perpetuating racism and injustice” has “always been an important goal” of the department, hobbled as it is by being “a field that is, to its detriment, overwhelmingly white.” The psychology chair, meantime, sent out a letter “explaining the systematic bias that caused historical figures in Psychology to be disproportionately white and male,” and the literacy department seeks to “leverage multiple theories of literacy as a tool for equity and justice.”
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In the SFFA majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that “Harvard’s admissions process rests on the pernicious stereotype that ‘a black student can usually bring something that a white person cannot offer.’” At SUNY Cortland, however, several department chairs adopted this logic in seeking nonwhite faculty. The psychology chair claims that while the department’s “overwhelmingly white” faculty “work hard,” “minoritized students want to see examples of people who ‘look like them.’” The performing arts department explains that though “it is certainly possible for a white director to stage a play focused on BIPOC issues and characters,” a racial minority “would be much more informed and bring deeper truth to the production” of the department’s plays. The literacy department, meantime, clamored for the hiring of “experts in anti-bias, anti-racist work who” would “transcend the predominantly white female identities of our department.”
Cortland and the entire SUNY system would do well to abandon these discriminatory practices. Instead, it should apply the spirit of SFFA, which calls for a color-blind admissions process, to faculty hiring. Institutions of higher education are supposed to be havens for knowledge and learning—regardless of race. New York’s public universities are falling short of that ideal.
Here’s an analysis and response to the argument presented in the critique of SUNY’s diversity hiring practices and their alignment with the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (SFFA):
Claim: SUNY’s diversity programs contravene the spirit of the SFFA decision.
The SFFA decision specifically addressed race-conscious admissions in higher education, not hiring practices or faculty diversity initiatives. Extending its application to hiring misinterprets the scope of the ruling, which centers on admissions policies and their impact on students.
Faculty hiring and admissions serve different purposes. Admissions decisions aim to balance opportunity for students, while diversity in hiring seeks to provide varied perspectives, mentorship, and representation within academia. The SFFA ruling does not legally bind hiring practices in the same way.
Claim: Diversity hiring prioritizes race over merit, undermining fairness.
The argument conflates the pursuit of diversity with the absence of merit. Programs like PRODiG+ aim to increase the number of underrepresented faculty who meet high standards of academic and professional excellence, as evidenced by SUNY’s emphasis on “excellent diverse faculty.”
Merely broadening the applicant pool or reviewing potential bias in selection processes does not imply the exclusion of merit-based evaluation. In fact, these practices seek to ensure fairness by addressing historical and systemic inequities that might otherwise preclude qualified candidates from consideration.
Claim: Revisiting qualifications and extending searches for diverse candidates demonstrates bias.
Revisiting applications and extending searches are tools to counter potential biases in traditional hiring processes. These practices ensure that qualified candidates who may have been overlooked are given fair consideration.
This approach aligns with the legal principle of affirmative action in employment, as it fosters equal opportunity rather than automatically selecting candidates based on race or gender alone.
Claim: Programs change the ideological composition of faculty by prioritizing DEI commitments.
Higher education institutions have a responsibility to prepare students for a diverse and interconnected world. Faculty who are committed to DEI are equipped to address a broader range of experiences and perspectives, enriching the learning environment.
Asking candidates about their theoretical orientations or definitions of inclusion is a standard practice in academia to evaluate their teaching philosophy and scholarly approach. It does not inherently limit ideological diversity but ensures alignment with institutional values.
Claim: Departments are overly focused on race and diversity in their disciplines.
Academic disciplines evolve to reflect societal changes and address historical gaps in scholarship. The emphasis on equity in fields like history, psychology, and art history reflects an effort to provide a more inclusive and accurate understanding of the world.
These practices do not marginalize other perspectives but instead seek to broaden the scope of inquiry and better prepare students for complex, multicultural contexts.
Claim: Representation efforts perpetuate stereotypes.
The critique misinterprets representation as reducing individuals to their racial identity. In reality, representation fosters inclusivity and provides role models for students, addressing the tangible benefits of diverse faculties in terms of mentorship, academic success, and a sense of belonging.
Far from being a “pernicious stereotype,” the belief that diverse faculty can offer unique insights recognizes the value of lived experience alongside academic expertise.
Claim: A color-blind approach is the ideal for academia.
The notion of color-blindness fails to acknowledge the systemic barriers that have historically excluded underrepresented groups from academia. Actively addressing these inequities is not discriminatory; it is restorative.
Pretending race does not matter when it clearly influences access, opportunity, and outcomes undermines the broader mission of equity in higher education.
Conclusion:
The critique of SUNY’s diversity programs reflects a misunderstanding of their purpose and legal basis. These initiatives address historical and ongoing inequities while upholding merit and academic excellence. Abandoning diversity efforts under the guise of color-blindness risks perpetuating systemic inequalities and undermines the transformative potential of higher education. Instead, these programs should be viewed as essential tools to advance equity, inclusion, and representation in academia.
The SUNY Cortland “Literacy Department”? The department at that university that teaches remedial reading?
They are not fooling us. Literacy is not the same as literature. So much pretending at academics these days. So much money spent for so little result. The DEI hiring restrictions will make it even duller.
Reading this whole article (as well as David Quinn’s ‘insightful’ comment above), I like how you explained the goals and reasons for this policy. That said, the final paragraph you wrote (that they’d do well to “abandon these discriminatory practices”) doesn’t really follow from what you laid out above. In what way is it discriminatory? Is it not a good thing to ensure the demographics of faculty members matches the demographics of our country as a whole? Thanks. – Josh