Lawsuit against University of California's DEI statements is dismissed

Behind the lawsuit

Diversity statements – also known as diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI statements – ask candidates seeking a faculty position or promotion to describe how they would contribute to campus diversity.

In his court case, John Haltigan, who has a Ph.D. in developmental psychology, said he would have applied for a position at UC Santa Cruz, but the DEI statement rendered his application useless because he is “committed to color blindness and viewpoint diversity.” The lawsuit argued that the requirement acts as a “functional loyalty oath,” violating his rights under the First Amendment.

The Pacific Legal Foundation, a libertarian group that filed the lawsuit against Dr. Haltigan filed, did not make him available for an interview. But in February after on Substack, he wrote that DEI statements have become “a political litmus test” that has eroded the diversity of thought in academia.

“Public trust in our universities has been severely diminished as a result,” he wrote in the post.

What proponents and critics of DEI statements are saying

Colleges that require DEI statements, including the 10-campus University of California system, champion them partly as a business strategy and partly as a skills assessment to validate a potential employee's commitment to teaching and supporting an increasingly diverse student population. help gauge. They say the statements aim to judge applicants based on their intentions and actions, not their beliefs.

“If someone says, 'I don't want to put any effort into teaching a diverse student population,' that should be something we take into account because we all have to teach extremely diverse students,” says Erwin Chemerinsky, a scholar of the First Amendment. and dean of the Berkeley campus law school, in an interview before the decision.

But opponents say they help enforce an institutional ideology that sends the message that those who aren't on board with a particular view of diversity are not welcome in the academy. They also say the statements are another tool smart people can use to find the right buzzwords, rewarding performative dishonesty.

What's next

The court gave Mr. Haltigan three weeks to amend the complaint. “We will consider all options to defend our client's First Amendment rights,” said Wilson Freeman, an attorney at the Pacific Legal Foundation.

This ruling will hardly settle the debate over the University of California system's DEI requirements for faculty hiring — or the system's diversity and inclusion efforts more broadly — but it debunks what experts are saying for now which was one of the first legal challenges to these university statements.

Some states, including North Dakota, Florida and Texas, have eliminated the requirement or banned them altogether, according to a tracker from The chronicle of higher education. Universities in Arizona were recently banned not to demand them either.