John D. Sailer Michigan’s Radical Faculty Program The university’s Collegiate Fellows initiative hires left-wing extremists as professors.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/michigans-radical-faculty-program
At the University of Michigan (UM), professor Jessica Kenyatta Walker specializes in “critical food studies” and helped develop “in-class activities” on the “racialization of food in the United States.” Professor Adi Saleem’s recent book, Queer Jews, Queer Muslims: Race, Religion, and Representation, focuses on “triangulating the Jewish-Muslim dyad with a third variable: queerness.” Jennifer Dominique Jones, meantime, teaches courses in “Black Queer Histories” and “Black Intimacies.”
These scholars share more than an affinity for critical theory: each was hired through the university’s Collegiate Fellows Program. Established in 2016, the CFP hires postdoctoral fellows who show a “commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.” The fellows are guaranteed a tenure-track position after two years, bypassing the rigors of a normal competitive job search.
Michigan has previously touted CFP as a success. But after the New York Times published a critical feature on the university’s DEI bureaucracy, UM quietly removed its web directory of faculty hired through program. That directory, accessible through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, lists a total of 44 faculty members. (The UM faculty claim the program has now recruited 55 scholars.) A close look at these scholars and their areas of research demonstrates the perils of screening faculty for their commitment to “diversity.”
Unsurprisingly, CFP administrators heavily favored scholars who conduct their research through the lens of race and gender. Former fellow Rovel Sequiera, now an assistant professor of women’s and gender studies, specializes in “global feminist, queer, and trans studies.” Jonathan Cho-Polizzi, assistant professor of Germanic languages and literature, lists “Activism & Radical Diversity” as an area of interest. Margo Mahan, assistant professor of sociology, focuses on the “racial and nativist origins of US domestic violence law.”
Last month, after news broke that the UM Board of Regents may vote to restructure the university’s DEI office, a group of faculty quickly circulated a petition opposing such a move. The letter spotlights the Collegiate Fellows Program, noting how it “has diversified the faculty by hiring 55 scholars from a range of backgrounds whose research, teaching, and other scholarly commitments contribute to diversity and equal opportunity in higher education and beyond.”
But the program seems to have “diversified the faculty” by way of viewpoint conformity. Of the 31 former CFP scholars now teaching at UM in non-STEM disciplines, all but one specialize in issues of identity—race, racism, gender, sexuality, and so on. Fourteen of those employ what can broadly be described as critical theory, including “critical race theory,” “critical translation studies,” “critical food studies,” “queer of color critique,” and “trans of color epistemologies.”
For years, defenders of academic freedom have argued that requiring prospective faculty to demonstrate their commitment to DEI functions as an ideological litmus test. The Collegiate Fellows Program lends credence to that argument. Consider, for example, former collegiate fellow Andrea Bolivar’s book manuscript, “We Are a Fantasy”: Trans Latina Ways of Knowing, Being, and Loving, which “centers sex working trans Latinas’ epistemologies and ontologies” and “demonstrates how sex working trans Latina ways of being and knowing not only defy racist-cisgenderism more broadly, but also offer potentialities beyond transnormativity and normative Latinidad.”
The themes of these scholars’ research inevitably filter down to students. Former collegiate fellows have taught courses in subjects such as Women of Color Feminist Filmmaking, Queer of Color Literature and Culture, and Black Feminist Thought and Practice. In the latter’s syllabus, former fellow SaraEllen Strongman asks, “How have Black women pushed back against and attempted to reshape traditional, Eurocentric, ‘white feminist’ politics? How have Black Feminist responses to racism diverged from and challenged mainstream and Black masculinist political scripts?”
Of course, professors should be allowed to espouse controversial views and to teach controversial classes. But there’s no reason that the University of Michigan should give hiring preference to scholar-activists. To ensure academic freedom, the UM Board of Regents needs to scrap the Collegiate Fellows Program—and all DEI litmus tests.
Comments are closed.
