CAFUT Statement: DEI as a Threat to Academic Freedom

Feb 28 2025

The phrase “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) is linked to developments now ubiquitous in academe, as elsewhere: mandatory “DEI statements” by applicants for  academic positions; evaluations of and obligatory reports by scholars on how their work reflects DEI; workshops and “training sessions”, at which attendance is often mandatory; and DEI bureaucracies within academic institutions, often with expansive or ill-defined responsibilities and authority.  Proponents of DEI contend that these linked values are or should be noncontroversial and reflect little more than common decency. [1]  But as understood by their advocates, they entail adoption of contested positions on divisive issues. As the journalist Jonathan Rauch notes, the pursuit of knowledge that is at the heart of the academic enterprise requires the absence of coercion. [2] The DEI movement relies upon various forms of coercion to adopt particular positions on controversial issues and is therefore antipathetic to academic freedom.

Each of the three seemingly innocuous terms is actually loaded. The goals of “diversity” and “inclusion” are construed so as to apply not to the different perspectives or schools of thought of individual scholars but to academically irrelevant demographic characteristics (e.g., race and sex). Most troubling is the means, “equity”, which as the historian Darrin McMahon writes, has gradually challenged the older conception of “equality.” [3] The latter, rooted in Enlightenment and other forms of universalism, posited equal treatment of individuals.  The former, reflecting contemporary identity politics, treats individuals unequally to achieve equality of outcome among various demographic groups. Individuals are to be held to different standards and expectations in hiring and promotion, often justified with reference to alleged past injustice, and their perspectives regarded as more or less valid, by virtue of their happening to fall into a given demographic category.

Many scholars regard the current notion of “equity” as inherently illiberal and undermining meritocracy. But whether one agrees, to officially promote one side of this vigorous ongoing debate inevitably constrains academic freedom. The favoured side, moreover, is promoted by the expanding DEI bureaucracies now found in many academic institutions, generally staffed by non-academics who may have little or no appreciation of the importance of open debate in an academic environment. These bureaucrats often have considerable authority to tell scholars what they may not teach or write, to deprive speakers with unpopular views of platforms, and to respond to student complaints that in some cases are frivolous or malicious. But even when their power to punish is limited, they force academics to go through processes that are so onerous and time-consuming they constitute punishment in themselves.  The predictable result is that academics self-censor, it being safer not to voice anything that could give offence in what becomes an intellectually homogeneous environment rather than an arena for free debate.[4]

Perhaps the most widespread manifestation of the DEI phenomenon is the mandatory DEI statement from applicants for hiring, tenure, or promotion. Randall Kennedy of the Harvard Law School quotes sample questions from Harvard’s Bok Center for Teaching and Learning website such as:

 “How does your research engage with and advance the well-being of socially marginalized communities?”; “Do you know how the following operate in the academy: implicit bias, different forms of privilege, (settler-)colonialism, systemic and interpersonal racism, homophobia, heteropatriarchy, and ableism?”; “How do you account for the power dynamics in the classroom, including your own positionality and authority?”

Many academics have well-founded doubts as to whether some of these phenomena even exist, much less how they are defined and what the appropriate stance towards them may be, particularly in their own teaching and research. And as Kennedy notes, the process “leans heavily and tendentiously toward varieties of academic leftism.” [5] As one academic association has observed, even in the absence of explicit coercion, the clear expectation of certain responses has a chilling effect. [6]

Of course, many responses will be cynically insincere, respondents saying what is expected even if they disbelieve it and refusing to challenge the new orthodoxy or the apparatus enforcing it. [7] Not only is the insincerity objectionable in itself, but when scholars must dissemble their true convictions or couch them in evasive euphemisms, the damage to academic freedom is real. David Rabban of the University of Texas Law School believes that under certain circumstances mandatory DEI statements may theoretically have justifications that outweigh the cost to academic freedom yet concedes that in most such statements that cost outweighs any benefits. [8] However, there is a strong case that such harm is inherent in mandatory statements, and that the inescapably coercive features of the DEI movement make it an unacceptable threat to academic freedom,  with no place at the University of Toronto.

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Prof Jack Cunningham, International Relations, Trinity College

 on behalf of the CAFUT Executive

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[1] DEI Is Not A Threat; It’s A Gift

[2] Universities Are Worth Saving

[3] The Triumph of ‘Equity’ Over ‘Equality’

[4] Universities Are Worth Saving

[5] Mandatory DEI Statements Are Ideological Pledges of Allegiance

[6] Microsoft Word – AFA DEI Statement 081822.docx

[7] Mandatory DEI Statements Are Ideological Pledges of Allegiance

[8] Academic Freedom — Harvard University Press, p. 280.

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CAFUT Statement:  The Case for Institutional Neutrality

Nov 2024

During an earlier time of heated political controversy, when universities found themselves debating the wisdom of adopting positions on public issues, the University of Chicago issued the 1967 Kalven Report, which has set the terms for subsequent debates about institutional neutrality. A faculty committee led by law professor and First Amendment scholar Henry Kalven argued against institutional statements on matters not directly relevant to the university’s own operations, concluding that “the university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic.”[i]

In fact, there is a strong case that the institution’s taking positions on contentious issues is inimical to the freedom of the individual scholar to do so. Institutional neutrality is necessary to preserve the legitimate interests of the academic, the student, and the university itself.

To be sure, when universities, or their component departments or units, take positions on public issues, endorsement or agreement is not compulsory for individual faculty members. But in perhaps the most resonant defence of individual freedom in the English language, On Liberty, John Stuart Mill noted that the formal strictures of the law are not necessary to inhibit the freedom to inquire and speak. Mill believed that in his day the battle for freedom from legislated curbs on expression had been essentially won. But he feared that an informal social climate of conformity would prove equally oppressive.[ii] The same argument pertains in academe.

Positions by universities and their component units inevitably encourage a certain climate of opinion and create norms. Scholars who find it in their interest to observe those norms, to the degree that they do so, must compromise their own academic freedom, with certain positions, and in some cases entire topics, deemed beyond the pale. Such an atmosphere will be most oppressive to junior scholars, who may conclude that tenure, promotion, and social acceptance by their colleagues all require submission to an officially endorsed orthodoxy. As the Barnard sociologist Jonathan Rieder has observed, scholars who disagree with a university or departmental view on the controversy du jour may conclude they are unwelcome at the institution in question and avoid pursuing any association with it.[iii] The Yale English professor David Bromwich has persuasively concluded that the adoption by universities of official positions on contentious issues “has had a fair trial and been found useful mainly as an instrument of social control and conformity – neither of which qualifies as an educational value.”[iv]

These institutional statements rarely reflect sincere unanimity among the scholars for whom they purport to speak. But they are arguably most dangerous when they do appear to reflect an overwhelming consensus. Nothing could be more harmful to the untrammeled debate central to the academic enterprise than the appearance or the reality of unanimity, with what should be open questions taken to be settled. Today’s consensus often becomes yesterday’s discarded orthodoxy, and it is more harmful for the university rather than the individual scholar to have been discredited. Moreover, for the university to speak with one voice, where many others are bound to differ, can only confirm the critics who charge contemporary academe with intellectual homogeneity and intolerance, permitting only a narrow range of opinions unrepresentative of the wider society.

Students, who can attribute to the university a unique intellectual authority, may be yet more reluctant than faculty to dissent from institutional statements. They will see them as marking the bounds of legitimate, or at least respectable, opinion, which one may not challenge with impunity. The perverse result is to narrow students’ minds where it is one of the university’s core duties to broaden them. And, as Rieder notes, potential students whose views disagree with official university pronouncements, are as likely as potential faculty to keep their distance from a school they conclude will be inhospitable.[v]

The university’s own unique standing in society stems from the understanding that it is a bastion of disinterested knowledge and expertise. While it is understood and generally accepted that individual scholars will participate in the debates of the day, the institution itself is expected to stand above them, providing an arena in which contending views compete on neutral ground. Once the university pronounces on matters of public contention, it risks being seen as merely another actor on the political scene, deserving no particular deference or respect. It thereby forfeits its principal claim to authority with members of its own community, donors, politicians, and the wider citizenry, opening the door to criticisms both well-intentioned and destructive.

It is because institutional neutrality is necessary for the academic freedom of both the teacher and the student, the credible performance of the university’s educational mission, and the retention of its social authority, that prudent academic administrators have adhered to it. We commend their example to our colleagues at the University of Toronto.

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Jack Cunningham, Prof of International Relations, Trinity College, University of Toronto  on behalf of the CAFUT Executive

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[i] Kalven Committee: Report on the University’s Role in Political and Social Action

[ii] The Project Gutenberg eBook of On Liberty, by John Stuart Mill., passim.

[iii] Activist Professors at Columbia and Barnard Are Botching Free Speech

[iv] Reflections on the New Encampment Culture

[v] See note iii, supra.

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To see articles of interest on the topic of Academic Freedom, click below: