Philanthropy Roundtable recently met with John Sailer, senior fellow and director of university policy at the National Association of Scholars, to discuss his groundbreaking investigative research and reporting on the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) agenda in higher education.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Your research started when you looked into mandated diversity statements used in faculty hiring at major public universities. Tell us about your research and its impact.
Sailer: My job is pretty simple. It’s to show what higher education activists, scholars and administrators are up to in their world, and a primary tool has been public records requests. It’s fun, it’s an art and it requires creative problem solving plus lots of research, along with a deep understanding of universities and how they operate. My approach has yielded really interesting, and in some ways troubling, stories about what universities are doing.
Texas Tech University is a great example. Around 2020, their Department of Biology passed a DEI resolution requiring faculty job applicants to submit a diversity statement to demonstrate how they will contribute to inclusion and equity. The university also required the department to create a separate presentation on the diversity contributions of each candidate under consideration for a job. This meant documentation existed. I made a public records request for those presentations, and what I found I eventually published in The Wall Street Journal.
One scientist got a low score for not understanding “the difference between equity and equality, even on re-direct,” which was said to represent “a rather superficial understanding of DEI more generally.” One was given a “red flag” for ostensibly committing micro aggressions, while another was dinged for repeatedly using the pronoun “he” when referring to professors.
On the other hand, one was rewarded for giving a “land acknowledgment” at the beginning of their job talk, acknowledging that the United States exists on stolen land. This was the first time the public had ever really seen actual evaluations of diversity statements. The result was very swift and a true game changer.
Q: What was the immediate impact and outcome of your investigative research?
Sailer: The day the article was published, the university announced that it would no longer allow diversity statements. Shortly thereafter, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott sent a letter to the public universities in his state saying that hiring on the basis of anything other than merit was unlawful. Within a month, multiple university systems in Texas ended the practice of diversity statements. By June of 2023, the state legislature took action and banned the practice statewide. So, it was a pretty massive change.
Q: What other stories have you uncovered?
Sailer: Around the time that I published the Texas Tech story, I got a tip from a professor at Ohio State University. He said that every department and every search committee in the College of Arts and Sciences was required to submit an in-depth diversity recruitment report. Approval of these reports was required in order to proceed with finalist job interviews. I made a request for the records and what I got was actually more remarkable than even the Texas Tech documents.
One job candidate was praised for their contribution to diversity in part, according to the report, because they were married to an immigrant in Texas in the age of Trump. Another person’s diversity contributions were praised for being “a first-generation fat, queer scholar of color.” The DEI statements were given a weight of about one-third of the overall points in evaluating the candidates, right alongside their research and teaching ability.
Q: You’ve traced some of the stories to the federal government as well, through the National Institutes of Health. Can you explain that?
Sailer: There’s a quarter billion-dollar NIH grant program called Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation. The program gave $10 million to $20 million grants to universities for faculty hiring that’s focused on DEI. The key requirements are that the universities who received the grant require and heavily weigh diversity statements when they select the funded faculty.
So, I ended up going to a lot of universities and requesting the rubric that they use to evaluate diversity. Some of them didn’t give me the rubric or said they didn’t have one. But there were two that did: The University of South Carolina and the University of New Mexico. Both rubrics were the same and they give low scores to anyone who says in their diversity statement that they prefer to treat everyone the same. It also gives a low score for things like expressing skepticism about racially segregated affinity groups and focusing exclusively on diversity of thought.
In later reporting, I found evidence that this program had been a cover for overt racial preferences that would almost certainly be unlawful. When the NIH FIRST program was created, the director of the program essentially said this is not a racial preferences program—that it would be unlawful. Using diversity statements was essentially a way around that. But what’s interesting is that the documents that I uncovered, starting about a year ago, showed that as faculty at these institutions discussed candidates, they very clearly eliminated certain people from contention on the basis of skin color.
One hiring document from the University of New Mexico said that “candidate No. 42” was eliminated from consideration because they did not fit with the mission of the NIH. I thought that was funny. I requested all emails in reference to the candidate, and what did I find? This candidate was a South Asian man. One director of this program asked whether this person counts as an underrepresented minority. They were told no. The other two candidates on the list of finalists were both women. And so they took him off the list, noting that the math department where they were hiring was “really low on women.” It’s a clear-cut case of both racial and gender discrimination.
Q: What are some of the biggest takeaways from your investigative research?
Sailer: I’ve gleaned two broad lessons from my time reporting on higher education. One is that legitimate scoops move the needle more than anything else. If you cut through the noise and actually show people what’s happened with hard-fought research, it changes the conversation and gives you a seat at the table to talk about what reforms are needed. The other is that universities are such closed systems that many of their policies are simply indefensible. When I show what’s going on, when I show how these policies play out in practice, it is very difficult for scholars and administrators to actually defend them, or at least to defend them in a way that appears to be in good faith.
Q: You’ve emphasized a different kind of diversity—viewpoint diversity—among faculty. Why?
Sailer: Faculty hiring for the last decade, and especially for the last five years, has involved a high degree of ideological discrimination and has encouraged heterodox thinkers, or outsiders, to simply skip out of the job market altogether. This is the key problem in higher education right now.
