Elsewhere, university trustees and regents have played a pivotal role in reform efforts. Four years ago, UNC–Chapel Hill was fully committed to the DEI agenda. The UNC School of Medicine even created and adopted a “Task Force to Integrate Social Justice into the Curriculum.” Its recommendations included requiring that the faculty agree that “specific organs and cells do not belong to specific genders.”
But by early 2023, the UNC Board of Governors banned compelled speech across the entire state’s university system, effectively ending the use of DEI statements in faculty hiring.
In some cases, the simple act of exposure has created serious change. In early 2023, I acquired documents through a public records request showing how Texas Tech’s biology department relied on the DEI statements of their candidates as a major criterion for hiring. I wrote the story for The Wall Street Journal, showing, for example, that one candidate was penalized for not properly explaining the difference between equality and equity. The response was instantaneous.
Texas Tech announced that it was jettisoning diversity statements in hiring. A day later, Governor Greg Abbott released a memo declaring the practice unlawful. Soon, other university systems in Texas followed suit and publicly scrapped the use of diversity statements.
These statements have also been banned throughout the University of Missouri system. And now Arizona, Wisconsin, Florida, and Georgia have seen the practice banned either by law or by university trustees and regents.