Like many others, we are concerned about the common practice of requiring a “diversity statement” (aka DEI statement) as part of the university faculty hiring process. There are myriad reasons for such concern. FIRE, Conor Friedersdorf, Brian Leiter, Komi Frey, and others have eloquently made comprehensive legal and ethical critiques of diversity statements. We won’t rehash those concerns here. But as two faculty members (and HxA Campus Community co-chairs) who wanted to improve practices in our own department, we realized that it was insufficient to put a spotlight on bad ideas; we also needed to propose an alternative. Last fall we did just that, and after some lively exchanges, our faculty voted unanimously that all future faculty job advertisements will no longer require diversity statements and will instead ask candidates to submit a service statement in addition to the usual research and teaching statements. We believe service statements are a progressive, legal, ethical, and constructive alternative to diversity statements for multiple reasons.

1. Service statements align with what’s expected of a successful faculty member. 

At our university (as at most others) the processes of annual merit review, reappointment, promotion, and tenure require faculty to be successful not just in research and teaching but also in service. Such service can take many forms and can be to their department, university, or profession, or society in general. While tenure is rarely (perhaps never) awarded based purely on service, asking prospective faculty about their past and future service activities fits well with expectations for their future success as a professor. In contrast, DEI statements don’t fit these expectations: There is no requirement at our university that faculty contribute to diversity, equity, or inclusion in order to be reappointed, promoted, or awarded tenure. Requiring service statements for hiring and initial employment fits better with the criteria that are subsequently required for continued employment and career advancement.

2. Requiring service statements signals the value of service. 

Our department has an ethos of valuing academic service activities and recognizes that there are often trade-offs between meaningful (and time-consuming) service activities and academic productivity (for example, in terms of grant funding and peer-reviewed publications). Giving applicants an opportunity to highlight the ways in which they have served or would serve is aligned with our department’s values. It signals to candidates that service is important and enables the search committee to factor in this third dimension of scholarly activity when reviewing prospective future colleagues.

3. Service statements allow applicants to discuss DEI if they want to but do not require them to.

These statements offer an opportunity for every applicant to discuss their work on diversity, equity, and inclusion (however defined), but they do not insist that every applicant writes about these things. Some faculty place more value on DEI than others. Some DEI-related service activities are no doubt worth mentioning in an application, but such activities are given no special priority relative to other forms of service within a service statement. If an applicant has done outreach work in low-income communities and wants to mention that in their application, they can. If they have served on a DEI committee and want to include that, they can. If they have served their profession or society in other ways that have nothing to do with DEI, that is equally valued. Service statements also clearly emphasize concrete actions and not political opinions. In these ways, the service statement avoids one of the principal critiques of diversity statements, which is that they effectively constitute a form of compelled speech.

An important nuance of the hiring language that our faculty voted to adopt is a strict page length. Each of the research, teaching, and service statements is restricted to two pages, with a specified margin and font size. That might sound oddly prescriptive, but it has an important fairness implication. A strict page length forces an applicant to choose what to include and what to leave out. So, to the extent that an applicant does want to write about DEI activities in one of their statements, they must do so at the opportunity cost of omitting other information about their accomplishments. This makes it impossible for two candidates to write similarly detailed accounts of themselves, only for one to edge the other out by adding on DEI-related ideas.

How We Achieved Reform

For those readers who might be interested in pursuing a similar policy change (such as introducing service statements in place of diversity statements) in their own departments, some of the details of how we were able to implement this change might be instructive. It was not an entirely smooth process.

The first vote on this initiative was not successful: The proposed policy change was narrowly defeated in a faculty meeting. Opposing comments ranged from constructive to spirited to noncollegial. We attribute this initial failure to two main factors. First, our original document included not only the proposed new language to use in hiring but also a lengthy preamble that laid out nine reasons why we believe diversity statements are illegal, unethical, and undesirable.

We continue to believe this preamble was necessary as a means to present the many serious concerns with diversity statements to our colleagues, some of whom had not previously heard of or engaged with these concerns. But some colleagues seemed to interpret a vote in favor of the proposed new language as an endorsement of the nine concerns we laid out, and not every colleague agreed with all of these. Second, our department’s Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI) Committee organized to oppose our proposal. Most notably, they read out loud a statement from some students on that committee right before the vote. The students’ letter threatened disruption if the policy were to be passed. Having only slowly recovered from a heavy hit to departmental culture and climate as a result of student unrest in 2020, the possibility of more student unrest seemed to dissuade some colleagues from supporting the proposal.

Following the initial defeat, we continued to have one-on-one conversations with individual colleagues to try to understand their concerns. This included discussions with the department chair and chair of the JEDI committee, who together worked on a revised version. There was only one substantive change from our original version. We had included a clause asking applicants to include in their statements an indication of how they would contribute to the department’s strategic imperatives (which form part of our strategic plan for the next few years). In a subtle change, the revised version explicitly asked them to speak to all three strategic imperatives. One of those imperatives refers to justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion, so our interpretation is that the JEDI Committee believed that this would effectively compel all applicants to say something about those topics in their application. But the imperative is broad and refers to “diverse backgrounds, experiences, identities, and ideas,” so a new faculty member could equally contribute to this imperative by, for example, fostering viewpoint diversity.

At a second vote, the policy change passed unanimously with little discussion. There was no student backlash. The JEDI Committee claims partial credit for the change. We are currently completing the first tenure-track faculty search conducted using this new language, and the requirement to address the strategic imperatives was interpreted broadly. Our department has abandoned the requirement for diversity statements, and we now ask for service statements instead. We consider it a small but significant shift of the needle toward a more fair, ethical, legal, and liberal hiring process.