The University of Michigan may soon end its considerable investment in diversity, equity, and inclusion—news that has roused faculty activism. Tabbye Chavous, the university’s chief diversity officer, plays a central role in the unfolding drama. A recent New York Times feature heavily scrutinized her work and seems to have catalyzed the Board of Regents’ opposition to DEI. Chavous has denounced the article as sexist.
Chavous’s pushback is no surprise: her vision for higher education hangs in the balance. Documents that I’ve acquired shed light on that vision, giving a behind-the-scenes look at one of the school’s multimillion-dollar DEI programs and showcasing hiring practices spearheaded by Chavous herself.
In 2023, UM created the Michigan Program for Advancing Cultural Transformation (M-PACT), a DEI-focused hiring initiative for biomedical scientists. Chavous serves as co-principal investigator on the project, partially funded by the National Institutes of Health, along with $63.7 million from the university. M-PACT represents a colossal investment in DEI, and through a public-records request, I’ve obtained the university’s proposal for the program.
As its name suggests, M-PACT was designed with the goal of achieving “cultural transformation” on campus. One element of that transformation would be brought about through a personnel-building project, hiring “a critical mass of faculty committed to DEI.” Specifically, the university would hire 30 new scientists with a “demonstrated commitment to DEl,” evidenced by the applicants’ required diversity statement. The program would not only bring in new hires but also “nurtur[e] a cadre of existing senior-level faculty and administrators who will engage in M-PACT trainings to become more effective DEI change agents within their spheres of influence.”
Mandatory diversity statements serve as one of M-PACT’s key ingredients. Though the National Institutes of Health’s Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation (FIRST) program, which doled out a $15.8 million grant for M-PACT, explicitly bars its grant recipients from hiring on the basis of race, its creators reasoned that by heavily weighing diversity statements, universities could achieve their diversity goals indirectly, without raising legal issues.
This is precisely why the university created M-PACT. Indeed, the proposal touts that a “major objective” is to recruit “faculty whose social identities (race, gender, sexual identity, first generation status, ability status, social class, and the intersections of these identities) will lead to diversification of the biomedical and health sciences.”
This is not the first diversity-hiring initiative at the school, and Chavous herself spearheaded its prototype. As the proposal explains, “M-PACT will build on UM’s successful Collegiate Fellows Program, a fellows-to-faculty pipeline designed by [co-investigator] Tabbye Chavous, UM’s new Chief Diversity Officer.”
Launched in 2016, the Collegiate Fellows Program employs a clever administrative maneuver to pack the faculty. Rather than recruiting professors through a normal competitive search process, the program hires postdoctoral fellows, whose applications are reviewed by the National Center for Institutional Diversity, an office that Chavous once ran. Fellows are guaranteed a tenure-track position after up to two years in the program, a sort of side-door into the professoriate.
For the university, the Collegiate Fellows Program stands out as a crowning accomplishment. “[S]ince its inception,” the proposal notes, the “program has successfully recruited 45 new tenure-track faculty with demonstrated commitments to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI),” a group nearly twice the size of the philosophy faculty. The proposal boasts that selecting ideologically aligned candidates also boosts the number of faculty from preferred identity groups. “Experience with the Collegiate Fellows Program indicates that a high percentage of fellows (93%) with demonstrated commitments to DEI come from traditionally minoritized groups,” it states candidly.
The university apparently believes that the fellows initiative’s demographics are a proof of concept for M-PACT. “Of the 45 Collegiate Fellows who have been hired at UM,” the proposal says, “90% identify as persons of color, 65% from traditionally URM racial/ethnic groups (Black, Latinx or Native American) and 70% are women. “ And a “majority . . . also identify with at least one other minoritized identity (LGBTQ+, first generation, person with a disability, low socioeconomic status, or veteran).”
This raises questions about overt discrimination. As my previous reporting shows, many university hiring initiatives that emphasize diversity statements end up slipping into racial preferences behind the scenes. As one recipient from another university of the NIH FIRST program stated in an email I obtained, “I don’t want to hire white men for sure.”
Academics of all political stripes have become critical of requiring applicants to demonstrate their support for diversity. Evaluating scholars for their “commitment to DEI” inevitably veers into an ideological litmus test, given what’s implied by the term “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” M-PACT itself illustrates these ideological connotations; the proposal calls for a “culturally aware” mentoring workshop that draws from both “feminist theories” and “critical race theory.”
Despite growing opposition nationally, UM remains committed to mandatory diversity statements. In her personal statement, Chavous describes how the Collegiate Scholars Program “influenced department and college practices” through the “use of diversity statements in faculty searches.” The university pledged to use the M-PACT program to spread the policy, noting that administrators would “work directly with deans and DEI leads to institutionalize M-PACT best practices as standard procedures and policies within units.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, administrators have rebuked the movement away from diversity statements. As the New York Times feature reported, one committee appointed by the provost’s office argued that doing away with the practice “would be seen as a capitulation to the winds of political expediency.”
The Board of Regents apparently sees things differently. If it looks honestly at programs like the Collegiate Scholars Program and M-PACT, it will have to admit the obvious. Hiring applicants based on their commitment to DEI distorts the university’s research and teaching agenda; it is an underhanded attempt to achieve demographic goals via ideological conformity. Michigan’s leaders should reject this approach.
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