The Wall Street Journal Monday carried a blockbuster op-ed from John Sailer of the Manhattan Institute and Louis Galarowicz of the National Association of Scholars on rampant (and illegal) race-based hiring at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where as many readers know I was an inmate for a year back in 2013-14. (And I’ll be visiting in April for their annual Conference on World Affairs as a speaker.) Their findings were based on FOIA’d documents from the university.
Sample:
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.”
These findings confirm what a few non-leftist Colorado faculty (there are a few!) I got to know from my time there have been telling me for the last several years. Things were always bad, but lately have been oppressive. (Separately, at another college where a sound senior friend is involved in faculty hiring managed to outfox the DEI-promoted faculty position candidates by making them all answer questions in a session with the college president, who, appalled at how bad they all were, asked: “How do these people make it this far?”)
Today the University of Colorado offered this response:
First, this comes right from the “non-denial denial” tactic of the Nixon White House in the Watergate years. Quite clearly they are terrified of contesting any detail or claim in the WSJ article for fear of aggravating their already perilous legal predicament. Second, looks like they are hoping that “the university is reviewing many programs across the campus” will keep off the lawsuits and Department of Justice investigations. Good luck with that.
Chaser—a sagacious tweet from Megan McArdle:
