John D. Sailer How Universities Get Away With Hiring Radicals Fellow-to-faculty programs have seeded academia with activists.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/universities-fellow-to-faculty-programs-activists
In the days after the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, Jemma Decristo, a UC Davis professor, took to social media to express support for the violent energies that had erupted in the Middle East. “HELL YEAH,” Decristo wrote on X, responding to a report that protesters had set fire to the Israeli embassy in Jordan. Reposting news of protests at the United States embassy in Lebanon, Decristo added, “[fire icon] to the US embassy. US out of everywhere. US GO HOME. US GO HOME.”
One of her posts roused national attention: “One group of ppl we have easy access to in the US is all these zionist journalists who spread propaganda & misinformation,” Decristo wrote. “they have houses w addresses, kids in school. they can fear their bosses, but they should fear us more.” She concluded with a series of icons: a knife, an axe, and three blood drops.
Shortly afterward, the university launched an investigation into Decristo’s comments, and in April of 2024, the StandWithUs Center for Legal Justice filed a lawsuit against the university for its inaction on anti-Semitism, putting the professor’s threats atop a list of examples in a press release. As of this writing, UC Davis has not disciplined Decristo.
Following Decristo’s comments, UC Davis chancellor Gary May said in a statement that calls for violence were inconsistent with the university’s commitment to “equity and justice.” Ironically, Decristo’s employment at UC Davis came about precisely because of the University of California’s purported commitment to social justice. Decristo, once described by UC Davis as a “scholar-artist-activist,” was recruited through the President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program (PPFP), which fast-tracks scholars showing a “commitment to diversity” into permanent faculty roles.
A growing number of like-minded activists are following Decristo’s path. For years, universities, federal agencies, and private foundations have worked to create well-funded career pathways for scholar-activists in higher education. The network includes undergraduate fellowships, graduate school funding, special hiring initiatives, and even administrator development programs. This constellation of “pipeline programs” is intended to hire more minorities; in practice, it heavily favors academics who view their scholarship as an extension of their political agenda.
The programs also raise legal questions. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination in hiring. After President Trump’s executive order “ending illegal discrimination and restoring merit-based opportunity,” many universities will likely reassess their pipeline programs to avoid federal scrutiny.
The universities with the most influential programs, though, have framed them as race-neutral, selecting scholars based on their commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. So far, this has helped universities avoid legal scrutiny. But many scholars have argued that the commitment loophole has made university hiring more ideological—in a way that could still violate the First Amendment.
Over the next several weeks, I’ll be publishing stories on the pipeline model and what it means for the future of the American university. The series is based on thousands of pages of documents acquired through public records requests and interviews with more than a dozen scholars. It explores what is perhaps the most popular and effective kind of pipeline program, responsible for Decristo’s professorship at UC Davis: the fellow-to-faculty model.
Usually, a postdoctoral fellowship is just a small step in a scholar’s career. After a fellowship ends, former postdocs apply to competitive positions on the open market. The diversity-focused fellow-to-faculty model modifies this pathway. First, the programs’ administrators select fellows with special attention to how they contribute to diversity. Fellows are then heavily favored for—often guaranteed—tenure-track positions, bypassing a competitive search. It’s a side-door into the faculty lounge.
The UC system’s PPFP, which the university recently declared the “largest and most influential academic pipeline program of its kind in the nation,” serves as a blueprint. Launched in 1984, it’s the oldest such program. By now, some former fellows have held academic posts for decades, including Mark Lawson, the program’s director.
At its inception, PPFP awarded postdocs only to women and minorities. In 1996, when California voters banned affirmative action, identity-based criteria became unambiguously illegal, forcing the program to evolve.
Now, the UC system seeks demographic diversity by proxy. A grant proposal obtained by a public records request describes how PPFP assesses “a candidate’s demonstrated contributions to diversity and equal opportunity,” rather than using race or sex. This “innovative holistic selection process,” the proposal carefully points out, is “compliant with the current legal environment in California.”
PPFP also spearheaded the practice of “converting” its postdocs into tenure-track faculty positions. The system established a hiring incentive, promising UC campuses cash for hiring former fellows. It also offered a search waiver, so departments would not have to conduct a national search to make their hires.
Abigail Thompson, a professor of mathematics at UC Davis, was herself a President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley in 1986. She is now critical of the program. In 2019, she published a short piece in Notices of the American Mathematical Society, arguing against the use of mandatory diversity statements in faculty hiring. “In reality it’s a political test, and it’s a political test with teeth,” Thompson wrote. The piece provoked controversy among academics.
When I spoke with Thompson, she pointed out how the program gives administrators an especially convenient tool for advancing their hiring priorities. “This is such a clever idea, really,” Thompson said. “No one pays close attention to how these postdocs are hired.”
Perhaps because it’s so effective, the fellow-to-faculty model exploded throughout American higher education in the early 2010s, as universities around the country began ratcheting up their DEI efforts. The University of Arizona President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program seeks applicants whose research “addresses issues such as race, gender, diversity and inclusion.” The University of Virginia’s Race, Place, and Equity Postdoctoral Fellowship hires postdocs who “address issues of race, justice, and equity.” In the UC system, each individual campus created its own parallel program to fund the hiring of additional PPFP applicants.
A network of universities also coordinate on the model: the Partnership for Faculty Diversity, created by the UC system and the University of Michigan. Members include Carnegie Mellon University, Georgia Tech, and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.
Many universities outside the UC orbit have adopted the model as well. At the University of South Carolina, it’s called the Bridge-to-Faculty; at Ohio State, one such program is simply called Fellow-to-Faculty. A 2021 article in Frontiers in Psychology identified 38 diversity-focused postdoctoral “conversion” programs nationwide, though I found more in my investigation.
The upshot: a small but significant number of faculty across the country have been given side-door jobs based on ideological affinity. The University of Michigan’s Collegiate Fellowship Program, one of two fellowships at the university, has recruited 55 fellows since 2016. The University of Illinois Chicago has recruited 49 Bridge to Faculty Fellows since 2020. Over the last five years, one in 20 tenure-track hires in the UC System were former president’s or chancellor’s postdoctoral fellows.
The programs thus provide a steady stream of scholars committed to activist disciplines like “critical refugee studies” and “queer of color critique.” They raise serious questions about academic freedom, government funding and private philanthropy, and the feasibility of higher education reform. When the dust settles from the battle over DEI, reformers will still have to contend with the way that universities have reshaped their basic mission through the construction of a scholar-activist pipeline.
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