Earlier this month a Harvard Law School professor named Randall Kennedy called for the end of mandatory DEI statements, saying they made him “wince” and that they discredited the current “DEI regime.”
Candidates for academic positions at Harvard should not be asked to support ideological commitments. Imagine the howl of protest that would (or should) erupt if a school at Harvard asked a candidate for a faculty position to submit a statement of their orientation towards capitalism, or patriotism, or Making America Great Again with a clear expectation of allegiance? Such pressure constitutes an encroachment upon the intellectual freedom that ought to be part of the enjoyment of academic life…
By overreaching, by resorting to compulsion, by forcing people to toe a political line, by imposing ideological litmus tests, by incentivizing insincerity, and by creating a circular mode of…
