Fixing Discrimination in Faculty Hiring Starts With Data

"Chad M. Topaz's critique of the Faculty Merit Act, drafted by the National Association of Scholars, itself embodies another ill of the academy-the conflation of activism with scholarship. Dispassionate readers will quickly grasp that a "co-founder of the Institute for the Quantitative Study of Inclusion, Diversity and Equity" has programmatic goals of his own-the promotion of the illiberal and discriminatory ideology frequently referred to as "Diversity, Equity and Inclusion" (DEI)."

"But it is one thing to say that colleges and universities should be able to defend themselves against charges of discrimination. It is another thing to say that no data may be collected that will allow the public, policymakers, juries and judges to assess whether or not such discrimination has occurred. We have such data for student admissions, and the outcome of Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023) turned precisely on assessments of that data."

"That said, Topaz offers an able summary of the limits of statistical analysis within the context of his more ideological goals. His material is a reasonable first draft of a legal brief that a college might file should it be sued for discrimination, if and when the Faculty Merit Act provided strong evidence that faculty and administrators had engaged in substantial discrimination by race, sex and ideology in their faculty hiring and promotion practices."

Conflation of activism with scholarship is claimed to afflict academy responses to the Faculty Merit Act, and DEI is depicted as an illiberal, discriminatory ideology. Limits of statistical analysis exist within ideological contexts; such analysis could form the basis of a preliminary legal brief colleges might use to defend against discrimination suits. Colleges should be able to defend themselves, but forbidding data collection would prevent public and judicial assessment of discrimination. Student admissions data informed Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023). Faculty hiring is opaque; the Faculty Merit Act would enable necessary data collection for discrimination claims.

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