The Goldwater Institute is a leading free-market public policy research and litigation organization that is dedicated to empowering all Americans to live freer, happier lives. We accomplish real results for liberty by working in state courts, legislatures, and communities nationwide to advance, defend, and strengthen the freedom guaranteed by the constitutions of the United States and the fifty states.
The following column is by The Goldwater Institute's Senior Communications Manager, Joe Setyon.
It’s an unequivocable victory for college students, faculty, and the constitutions of Arizona and the United States: Arizona’s public universities will no longer force job applicants to pledge allegiance to progressivism.
Earlier this year, a bombshell report sounded the alarm over the use of politically discriminatory “diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) statements” in Arizona higher education, calling on the state’s public university system to eliminate them. These statements required applicants to pledge their support for DEI in order to be hired, and in the case of Northern Arizona University, explicitly pushed applicants to include concepts from critical race theory, such as “intersectionality,” in their statements. But now, after months of sustained public pressure following the release of the report from the Goldwater Institute, where I work, Arizona’s university system is retiring its practice of forcing job applicants to provide diversity statements.
This past month, a former member of the Arizona Board of Regents, Karrin Taylor Robson, and Steven McGuire of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni called on Arizona’s public universities to scrap their use of “diversity statements” as part of their faculty hiring process. At the heart of their case, Robson and McGuire cited findings from the Goldwater investigation that showed that up to 80% of faculty job listings at Arizona’s public universities required job candidates to submit these statements. As the two authors wrote in the pages of the Arizona Republic:
“Arizona’s public universities must stop requiring applicants for faculty positions to demonstrate compliance with institutionally prescribed orthodoxies concerning diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)… As the Goldwater Institute report observes, these statements appear to violate the Arizona State Constitution, which states that ‘no religious or political test or qualification shall ever be required as a condition of admission into any public educational institution of the state, as teacher, student, or pupil.’”
As McGuire documented this past week, Arizona State University has already begun phasing out the DEI statement requirements from its current job postings—for instance removing them from the university’s job listing for the chair of its English department. Other new postings that have gone up in recent days likewise now omit the diversity statement language, which previously appeared in 81% of the school’s faculty job listings. Indeed, as a new memo from the school recently announced more broadly, “ASU employees are not forced to sign diversity statements. They are, however, required to sign a pledge to uphold the U.S. Constitution.”
As scholars have reported, diversity statements have been used to screen out up to 75% of faculty applicants in places like UC Berkeley for not providing politically acceptable (i.e. progressive) responses—further exacerbating the ideological imbalance of these institutions. Unfortunately, such practices had crept to the Grandy Canyon State as well. As the National Association of Scholars’ Jon Sailer has noted, “the diversity strategic plan” at Northern Arizona University, for example, has forced DEI protocols on staff and “deliberately exerts extensive influence on faculty members. ”
The elimination of diversity statement requirements at Arizona’s universities will not singlehandedly correct the intolerance among faculty for dissenting political beliefs, but it will help ensure that viewpoint diversity is no longer actively screened out via the hiring process.
This marks a victory for free speech under the 1st Amendment as well as the integrity of the Arizona State Constitution’s guarantee that no political test may be used to block qualified applicants from employment, including in public higher education. Arizona’s public universities, its faculty, and its students will be better for it.
It is now incumbent on Arizona’s universities, and their public university peers across the country, to extend these protections against DEI mandates to other aspects of campus life. They can start by adopting the Freedom From Indoctrination Act, developed by the Goldwater Institute and Speech First, to prohibit public universities from requiring students to take DEI-related courses or requiring faculty to infuse DEI principles into their curricula.
Such reforms will help restore the true academic freedom of students and faculty and ensure that public universities no longer function as state-funded ideological gatekeepers.
Joe Setyon is the Senior Communications Manager at the Goldwater Institute.