What the AAUP Overlooks: DEI Screenings Could Be the New “Collegiality”

Shared governance may not be enough to protect academic freedom.

The nation’s oldest and most respected association of college professors, the AAUP, has officially weighed in on the practice of using DEI criteria in hiring and evaluation. In its statement, the AAUP “rejects the notion that the use of DEI criteria for faculty evaluation is categorically incompatible with academic freedom.” 

The AAUP doesn’t deny that DEI hiring criteria could impinge on academic freedom; it simply denies that they do so “categorically.” To resolve conflicts, the AAUP says, “[a]ny tensions that arise between academic freedom and DEI efforts on campus should be addressed through shared governance and collective bargaining.”

Yet shared governance may not be enough to protect academic freedom. If they do not remain highly attuned to and protective of academic freedom, the faculty structures that share power on campus can pose a real threat to minority-viewpoint colleagues, to say nothing of powerless job applicants.

Consider, for example, when UCLA rejected the candidacy of professor Yoel Inbar after graduate students opposed his hire for an essay he wrote years earlier, ironically one in which he criticized the use of diversity statements as political litmus tests. Professor Inbar’s academic freedom was not protected by shared governance.

According to a recent HxA analysis, a quarter of the tenure-track faculty positions posted in August 2024 for the 2025 academic year required a DEI statement in addition to academic materials. Clearly, some versions of “DEI skills” are relevant to some forms of university teaching, research, and service at institutions with particular student populations, needs, or goals. For instance, it’s understandable for a hiring committee to want to know how a faculty candidate approaches teaching learners from a variety of backgrounds. In diverse institutions, working with diverse individuals is part of the job.

But in practice—as HxA President John Tomasi, the Academic Freedom Alliance, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, the National Association of Scholars, and other commenters have brought to light—the use of DEI statements often amounts to a screening for ideological conformity. Sometimes the screening involves point-by-point rubrics that assess candidates’ stated experiences, attitudes, “understanding,” and even extracurricular activism as they relate to a particular version of DEI. (Not surprisingly, academics are smart enough to game the system if they choose, rendering DEI statements poor measures of a scholar’s actual skills or commitments.)

Notably, there is an instructive precedent for AAUP sounding a note of caution about the creation of a fourth category of assessment beyond the evaluation of research, teaching, and service. In 1999 (and a 2016 update), the AAUP’s Committee A issued a statement about why “collegiality” should not be a separate axis of faculty evaluation. 

Making no mention of shared governance as an answer to “collegiality” tests, Committee A argued that it’s simply too easy for political or expression-based criteria to enter into the picture: “The very real potential for a distinct criterion of ‘collegiality’ to cast a pall of stale uniformity places it in direct tension with the value of faculty diversity in all its contemporary manifestations.” 

Trying too hard to formally enforce ambiguously positive aspirations can rob a faculty of useful dissent, the AAUP warned, noting that “critics of institutional practices or collegial norms, even the occasional malcontent, have all been known to play an invaluable and constructive role in the life of academic departments and institutions.”

Substitute “DEI” for “collegiality/collegial” and the logic of the AAUP’s previous argument still holds, though the affected discussions may be different. In practice, we’ve seen how DEI can become a doctrine to which faculty are required to adhere without question. A deeply-researched investigation for the New York Times Magazine about the University of Michigan this week reported how the taboo can become conspicuous: “On a campus consumed with institutional self-criticism, seemingly the only thing to avoid a true reckoning was D.E.I. itself.”

Some faculty argue that checking on DEI attitudes is simply a matter of human decency. Without a distinct criterion, what’s to prevent a truly unprofessional candidate from making it through? 

In the context of “collegiality,” the AAUP of 2016 had an answer that still makes sense: there are checks in place already, because a “fundamental absence of collegiality will no doubt manifest itself in the dimensions of teaching, scholarship, or, most probably, service” as well as rules of professional conduct and ethics. For all its threats to academic freedom, the AAUP argued, adding “collegiality” as an axis of assessment didn’t add much value. 

If the AAUP wants to defend some uses of DEI statements, it would be helpful to specify which uses of DEI statements are incompatible with academic freedom–where the line is crossed. Until a persuasive version of such a framework is available, defenders of academic freedom must continue to speak out against the use of ideological filters that may quash faculty dissent and academic freedom.