The DEI-lemma

Considerable differences in DEI statement requirements exist by discipline and academic rank.

In a prior post for Free the Inquiry, I showed regional differences in requiring submission of DEI statements by applicants as part of the hiring process. The analysis showed a notable relationship between the politics of a state and whether job ads for full-time professorships in that state requested a DEI statement as part of their application process.

As a follow-up, I wanted to see what emerges if we expand the dataset to include all faculty positions, not just full-time professorships. Would including job ads for non-tenure-track positions (e.g., lecturers or adjunct professors) change the picture?

I gathered job ads from HigherEdJobs.com for relevant jobs in the U.S. posted during August 2024. In total, there were 5,005 jobs from all 50 states and Washington, D.C., covering 966 institutions. Of those, 1,907 were for full-time professorship positions (used in the original analysis) and 3,098 were for non-tenure track positions.

Each job description was sent to GPT4o-mini through OpenAI’s API to code for whether a DEI statement was requested (either as a standalone document or as part of a cover letter, teaching statement, etc.). 

As reported previously, 24.5% (467) of the job ads for full-time professorships requested DEI statements. 

Interestingly, however, only 7.9% (246) of the lecturer/adjunct positions called for DEI statements to be submitted as either a standalone document or as part of another required document (such as cover letter or teaching statement).

Perhaps this isn’t a complete picture. One could imagine that some academic disciplines are more reliant on lecturers/adjunct positions and are also independently less likely to request DEI statements as a whole. 

Considering this possibility, I coded for 32 distinct academic disciplines within the data, by once again leveraging GPT4o-mini. I selected the top 20 disciplines (by frequency of total job postings), because each of them had at least 50 job postings in the dataset. I wanted to avoid disciplines with smaller numbers of postings as these could be more easily skewed as a function of the institution posting it. 

This trimming of the data left me with 4,821 ads (96.3% of the original). Of those, 1,841 were for full-time professorships (96.5% of the original), and 2,980 adjunct/lecturer positions (96.2% of the original). The 20 disciplines are shown in this table:

I then looked at job postings across different academic fields to see how often they asked for statements about diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). I compared professorship positions to adjunct/lecturer positions. 

This comparison showed a clear difference between these job types. Professorship positions were much more likely to ask for DEI statements than adjunct/lecturer roles (p < .001, d = 1.451). This pattern was consistent across almost all academic fields we studied, as you can see in the graph below.

Perhaps the biggest criticism of DEI statements in hiring is that, in practice, they serve as little more than political litmus tests. One would think that if DEI statements were being used for more than assessing the political beliefs of prospective career-long coworkers, we would see parity between the rates at which different jobs request them. 

But we see considerable divergence between the points. If the pursuit of DEI goals is utterly central to the proper function of the university, why should there be any difference in DEI statement requirements between the types of faculty positions? We would expect little or no difference, especially given that non-tenure-track faculty at many institutions more frequently interact with students than their tenure-track and tenured colleagues. Is this an issue of inconsistently applied values, or reflective of the reality that non-tenure-track positions are treated as relatively disposable and inconsequential?

Also interesting to note is the considerable variability between disciplines in how often DEI statements are requested. With the caveat that these data still only represent a small fraction of the jobs that will be posted over the coming year, the percentage of full-time professorship job ads requesting a DEI statement ranged from 0% (in Sports and Recreation disciplines) up to 63.2% (in Environmental Sciences).

While the use of DEI statements in hiring remains controversial, the wide variation in requirements suggests wide variation in their underlying rationale. Former Segal Center research fellow Azim Shariff has emphasized the importance of universities and colleges being crystal clear about their reasons for promoting DEI. The data that I’ve just discussed suggest that there is, in fact, little agreement about their importance, value, and appropriateness in academic faculty hiring.