The Berkeley Files: Faculty Applicants Were Ranked on Their Support for DEI Policies and Practices

The Berkeley rubric requires candidates to voice and demonstrate commitments to DEI measures that some may find personally or intellectually problematic. For example, affinity groups have long raised concern that universities are effectively recreating segregated spaces and rolling back on efforts from the 1960s to remove racial and other classifications from university life. That is now considered reactionary by many today, but a candidate could have legitimate non-racist, non-sexist objections to creating programs separating faculty or students by race or gender.

There is an interesting comparison to the Harvard and North Carolina cases before the Supreme Court on affirmative action in college admissions. We are awaiting the opinions in those cases. However, the schools were accused of using different rubrics for interviews with student applicants to conceal the use of race. Asian students were allegedly given lower scores on personality considerations that lowered their admission rates.

The use of such rubrics can create subtle preferences on the basis of ideological or other considerations. That is why the long refusal of Berkeley to turn over these documents is a concern. Harvard and North Carolina were also accused of such delay and obstruction. Here, Berkeley made the decision to obstruct the legitimate document request of FIRE for years as it employed this rubric to select faculty members.