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.
[RELATED: LA Community College District Institutes DEIA Confessionals]
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.”
[RELATED: University of Nevada, Reno’s Problematic Push for Federal Hispanic Status]
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.
