Documents reveal that the University of Colorado Boulder used a special funding program to prioritize racial diversity in faculty hiring, potentially violating merit-based hiring practices. The program, known as the Faculty Diversity Action Plan, encouraged departments to select candidates based on race and often favored scholar-activists. This raises concerns about ideological discrimination and the impact on academic freedom.
President Trump’s executive order “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity ” reaffirms what has been true since the Civil Rights Act of 1964: Discrimination in hiring isn’t allowed. The order will deter universities from violating the law. Its ripple effects could also help reverse a related trend: ideological discrimination, which has reshaped the very meaning of higher education.
At the University of Colorado, Boulder, administrators, department heads and professors worked in tandem to advance racial preferences in hiring, documents acquired through a public-records request reveal. In the process, they recruited faculty who pushed the university’s research agenda in a more ideological direction, often with the aim of better recruiting minorities. \In a hiring proposal that the National Association of Scholars acquired, faculty and staff of the university’s program for writing and rhetoric argued that recruiting a “BIPOC” professor—the acronym stands for “black, indigenous and people of color”—was vital to the department’s “curricular and programmatic goals.” Faculty at the department of Germanic and Slavic languages and literatures, proposing to hire a German-studies professor, touted the racial diversity of the department’s preferred candidate and explained how she could revise courses on fairy tales, folklore, and fantasy to incorporate “critical race studies perspectives.” Both of these scholars, and many more, were hired through the university’s Faculty Diversity Action Plan, a special funding program for diversity-focused faculty hiring, which ran until 2023, when it was restructured and renamed. Created in 2020, the program played a significant role in dictating whom the university hired. In a 2022 faculty meeting, the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences was asked how many professors were hired through the program since it began. He estimated that around 90% were either hired through the program or were spousal hires. The records acquired—the Faculty Diversity Action Plan proposals that resulted in successful hires—reveal the ambition of the diversity, equity and inclusion movement. Through the program, the university brazenly prompted departments to select faculty based on race. In many cases, this went hand in hand with a declared preference for hiring scholar-activists
Diversity Equity Inclusion Ideological Discrimination Hiring Practices Faculty Recruitment University Of Colorado Boulder Merit-Based Opportunity
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