Ohio State University’s dean of natural and mathematical sciences, Susan Olesik, told a faculty search committee in 2022 that job candidates’ “diversity” must be valued on par with those candidates’ scholarship, according to a video I’ve obtained.
“I wanted to make some clarification points on the rules of the road here, with respect to your search,” Olesik said in the video, created in the fall of 2022. “And that is that diversity of the candidates has to be as high of a priority as the scholarship.”
Olesik, who has been dean since 2020, indicated that she would enforce the directive. “The diversity of our students, undergrad students in particular, is increasing quickly,” she said, adding that the demographics of the faculty needed to mirror those of OSU students more closely. “With respect to making sure that we hold ourselves to that,” she concluded, “if the slate of candidates that you bring forward are not diverse, I will ask you to simply keep searching.”
When asked about Olesik’s remarks, Benjamin Johnson, OSU’s assistant vice president of media and public relations, responded that the video was “outdated,” was related to “recruiting, not hiring,” and “does not reflect Ohio State’s current hiring practices or guidance.” He maintains that the university was following federal regulations that “required federal contractors, like Ohio State, to make efforts to recruit a diverse pool of candidates.”
Olesik’s comments are nevertheless the latest revelation about Ohio State’s large-scale diversity push. Last month, I reported that OSU’s dean of arts and humanities, Dana Regna, had reviewed and approved a search-committee report in 2022 that touted the committee’s discriminatory recruiting process. Members of the committee explained that they felt compelled to recruit a “visible minority” and boasted of having deliberately only “chose[n] three Black candidates” as finalists. Echoing Olesik’s directive, the committee explained that it “decided . . . that diversity was just as important as perceived merit as we made our selections.”
This emphasis on diversity reflects what seems to have been a widespread policy at Ohio State. In another document I acquired, a search committee for a professor of experimental astrophysics noted how, following the instructions of the university’s diversity trainings, “the DEI statement was given equal weight to the research and teaching statements.” Again, this was for a position in experimental astrophysics.
After I reported on that document, a university spokesman told me that Ohio State had updated its hiring guidelines in 2023 to prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, sex, and other demographic categories. That might be true, but the administrators who enforced what appears to be a widespread discriminatory regime remain in place. If Ohio lawmakers want to ensure compliance, they should pass a recently introduced state bill that would end diversity offices in public universities.
Photo by Megan Jelinger/Getty Images
