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At University of Colorado, DEI and Illegal Hiring Practices Went Hand in
Hand
John Sexton 5:10 PM | January 27, 2025

AP Photo/Brennan Linsley
Yesterday a pair of authors co-wrote an opinion piece at the Wall Street Journal describing how the University of Colorado's focus on DEI led to
hiring practices that were blatantly illegal. The Civil Rights Act of
1964 made hiring people based on race out of bounds but the school's
Faculty Diversity Action Plan pushed hiring authorities to do it anyway
and they were happy to go along with it.

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 university’s framing should have immediately raised legal red legal flags. Long before Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023), Title
VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned race-based discrimination,
which President Trump’s executive order reaffirms. Consultants often
remind universities that they can’t base hiring decisions on race.

Yet, competing for the funds to bring in new faculty, academic
departments happily followed administrators’ prompting and boasted about their intent to discriminate. “Our commitment, should we be successful
with this application, is to hire someone from the BIPOC community,”
wrote faculty and staff at the journalism department. “Our aim is specifically to hire a Black, Indigenous, or Latinx faculty member,”
wrote faculty at the geography department.

The authors note that while the school was expressing concern about
systemic racism it was carrying out a program of systemic
discrimination. One of the co-authors, John Sailer from the Manhattan
Institute posted a thread where you can actually see some of the
communications gathered through an FOIA request.




Not coincidentally, many of the minority candidates being selected for
these jobs also happened to be DEI focused themselves. These illegal
hiring practices were in service of the goal of making the school not
just more diverse but more woke.


How widespread did efforts like this become after 2020? Your guess is as
good as mine but I'd bet it was not just this one school. Many
universities have probably been packing schools with woke progressives
by breaking employment law, either openly (as above) or more covertly.


Matt Yglesias says much the same.

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