Have the Poison Ivies finally realized how deep the rot of their radical-progressive enforcement of DEI runs? After months of anti-Semitic intimidation campaigns and "occupations," at least one of these schools may have taken a genuine step toward reform. Yesterday, Harvard's largest faculty group dumped its requirement of a DEI pledge from all applicants, and replaced it with a commitment to openness and diversity of viewpoints from finalists.

Is this really change? It may be a step in the right direction, but if so, it's a very small step:

Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences will stop requiring a diversity, inclusion, and belonging statement as part of its faculty hiring process, Dean of Faculty Affairs and Planning Nina Zipser announced in a Monday morning email.

Zipser wrote that she and FAS Dean Hopi E. Hoekstra “made this change in response to feedback from numerous faculty members” who expressed concern that existing requirements were “too narrow in the information they attempted to gather” and potentially confusing for international candidates.

The need to supply a pledge has not ended, however. The pledge has changed, and the question remains how much it has changed in practice. The new formula, now only required of finalists, sounds ambiguous enough to drive a DEI truck through its gaps, if desired:

Instead, the FAS — the University’s largest faculty — will require a service statement about an applicant’s “efforts to strengthen academic communities” and a teaching and advising statement about how an applicant will foster a “learning environment in which students are encouraged to ask questions and share their ideas.”

While the FAS previously required all candidates to submit a statement describing their “efforts to encourage diversity, inclusion, and belonging, including past, current, and anticipated future contributions in these areas,” the two new statements will only be required from candidates who are finalists in the search process.

Hmph. In one reading of this pledge, the first statement requirement seems entirely benign to the point of superfluousness. Even the most rigid of DEI martinets would argue that they want an open "learning environment," while they exclude all other points of view as "white supremacy" or some other crime against humanity. They define "open learning environment" in terms of immutable characteristic groupings, not points of view.  

The second required statement looks more pernicious. It practically copies the DEI model, even while watering down the 'pledge' aspects of the prior requirement. The new required statement certainly sounds like a pledge-lite to support DEI policies by 'proving' one's bona fides in their execution elsewhere. "Diversity, inclusion, and belonging" are the three substitute words that DEI advocates use in Texas and Florida to get around legislation forbidding DEI in state universities and colleges these days. 

So these changes won't necessarily prevent Harvard from ensuring that only the DEI-obedient enter its faculty salons. It does, however, take the edge off of the DEI Party Pledges that schools have required and enforced for the last couple of decades, especially in their education departments. It's more possible now for a DEI-resistant applicant to get into consideration for a post at Harvard, although it doesn't appear to make their actual hiring much more likely. 

So is this progress? John Sailer calls this "an incremental but real move away" from DEI in his Free Press column this morning:

Now, prominent faculty members are calling on the entire university to follow FAS’s lead. “It’s a cause for celebration that FAS has replaced the requirement for DEI statements with a requirement for ‘service statements,’ i.e., how candidates will contribute to their department, their university, and their professional community,” Jeffrey Flier, the former dean of Harvard Medical School, told me in an email. “The next step should be for this to be extended across all schools of the university.”

Members of the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard—led in part by Flier, and Steven Pinker—have now proposed a resolution urging the university as a whole to stop using diversity statements. These overdue changes have arrived because professors simply do not like the idea of being tested for their commitment to a cause unrelated to their academic work. The FAS’s decision gives them all the more permission to say that out loud. Expect others to follow Harvard’s lead.

I suspect they will, only because they will shortly realize that this is only barely incremental. This formula still allows Harvard and others to pick out DEI allies from the applicant pool, and allows DEI allies to signal their membership in the movement in the application process. It doesn't address the larger issue, which is why schools are focusing on this at all. Shouldn't they focus instead on academic rigor, excellence in instruction, and depth of understanding in their specific disciplines? Didn't the Claudine Gay humiliation teach Harvard anything about obsessing over DEI?

This does represent progress, although also incremental, in one way. It demonstrates that the Poison Ivies did get embarrassed over the Gay scandal and the anti-Semitic riots, both based on Academia's Marxist indoctrination of an utterly idiotic oppressor/oppressed model that explains the whole world to DEI fanatics. John Fetterman's disposal of his Harvard hood at Yeshiva University may have been the final straw in tolerating the humiliation and realizing that a sop had to be thrown to critics to get them to back down. But a sop this is, and not much more, and a sop it will remain until universities and colleges stop making DEI a priority at all, especially in faculty hiring.