The Machines They Built
How a university's DEI apparatus sabotaged its own hiring goals
FacultyLeaks.com is an anonymous dispatch from inside higher education. Some identifying details have been changed. The dysfunction has not.
The DEI apparatus that’s a staple throughout higher ed isn’t just legally dubious. It’s also a layer of red tape that can undermine its own goals. A FacultyLeaks.com reader at a large public university recently shared with us an anecdote that illustrates this.
Their social science department needed to hire a professor. The job ad was ready to post. Under normal circumstances, it should have gone live within days.
It didn’t. First it had to clear a DEI review committee run by the college’s new Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, which took about two weeks. Then it went to a second DEI committee, this one created by a newly hired Vice Provost, for another two weeks.
What were they reviewing? Boilerplate stuff — the same equal-opportunity language that appears on every faculty job posting at the university, which had already been approved by legal, already approved by HR. Yet, it took two committees four weeks to rubber-stamp a form that should have been pro forma.
The Window
In this field, timing matters. While this department’s ad sat in a queue for a month, competitors were already scheduling interviews. Three or four strong candidates of color had accepted jobs elsewhere during the delay. The math was simple: a four-week holdup in a fast-moving job market means the best candidates are gone before you’re allowed to even evaluate their CV.
What remained, according to a committee member, was a pool of highly qualified white men and a handful of less-qualified white women — the stronger female candidates, like the candidates of color, were already gone. One went to an Ivy.
The Spreadsheet
So, the committee worked with what remained. Candidates were rated on a simple 1-2-3 scale: top, middle, bottom. The search chair rated most white male candidates as a 3: bottom tier, across the board. In most cases, she was the only committee member who scored them that low.
The rest of the committee saw qualified scholars. She saw the wrong people studying the wrong things — white men whose research didn’t touch on The Current Thing™. Those assessments were then shared with the full department.
The Pitch
When the faculty met to make a decision, she made her pitch: let the search fail. Hire nobody, repost the ad earlier next year, and hope for a more diverse pool. Better to lose a year than hire a white man.
Nobody argued the top candidate was unqualified. By several accounts, he already had a record strong enough for tenure. The question wasn’t whether he was good enough. It was whether he was the right color.
The department overruled her and hired him.
The Chain
But think about what just happened.
The university created two new DEI positions. Those administrators created two new committees. The committees delayed a time-sensitive search by a month. The delay cost them every diverse candidate in the pool. And when the remaining pool was too white, the search chair tried to kill the search entirely.
The machinery built to increase diversity made diversity less likely. When the machinery failed, a human tried to rig what was left.
A committee member reported the search chair’s conduct. Nothing happened.
The Incentive
The search chair wasn’t freelancing. She’d been told this position was earmarked for a candidate of color. She had institutional permission, maybe not a direct order, but something close, to deliver a demographic outcome. When the process made that impossible, she improvised.
The DEI committees were doing what they were created to do: review things. So they reviewed things. Nobody asked whether a month mattered.
This is how institutions eat themselves. You hire administrators to promote diversity. They create committees. The committees create delays. The delays eliminate the candidates you wanted. Then someone on the ground, under pressure to hit a demographic target, tries to fix it by rigging what’s left.
The machine sabotaged its own purpose. But, unlike many of our stories, this one has a happy ending.
The DEI committees have since been dissolved. The white guy who got hired? He’s doing fine.
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