University Of Colorado Faculty Taught Racial Discrimination Is Wrong While Racially Discriminating
Faculty and administrators at the University of Colorado Boulder sought to hire based on race – at the same time, they were taught that discriminating based on race was abhorrent.
Scholars John Sailer of the Manhattan Institute and Louis Galarowicz of the National Association of Scholars published a report in The Wall Street Journal detailing the extent to which diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) took over CU Boulder.
The authors detail how faculty and staff for various departments explicitly said they wanted to hire new professors based on race and published supporting documents on the National Association of Scholars’ website. For example, faculty and staff at CU Boulder’s writing and rhetoric program wrote that they wanted to recruit a BIPOC (black, Indigenous, and people of color) professor, arguing such a hire was important to achieve the department’s “curricular and programmatic goals.” Faculty at the school’s Germanic and Slavic languages and literatures department also sought to hire someone based on race, saying their preferred candidate “could revise courses … to incorporate ‘critical race studies perspectives.’”
When hiring new faculty, an application form asked departments: “How will this hire increase the number of underrepresented faculty members in the unit (e.g., US Faculty of Color, women in disciplines where underrepresented)?”
This mentality informed many hiring decisions, the authors found. Faculty and staff at the journalism department wrote that a “successful” hiring would include “someone from the BIPOC community.” The geography department stated explicitly: “Our aim is specifically to hire a Black, Indigenous, or Latinx faculty member.”
The university also sought “cluster hires” – hiring multiple professors at once – but only from certain racial groups. The College of Engineering and Applied Science said in documents obtained by Sailer and Galarowicz that its goal was to double “our underrepresented faculty in the college.” Faculty at the science department stated their goal was to emphasize “hiring Black, Indigenous, Asian American, Latinx, and Pacific Islander faculty.” The ethnic studies department faculty wrote they “have an urgent and qualified need for BIPOC femme/women of color faculty in an Africana Studies focus who will contribute to the social science division thematic cluster hire in racism and racial inequality.”
“The proposals are remarkable for their candor,” Sailer and Galarowicz wrote. “It’s also absurd that while referring to the specter of systemic racism, they propose systemic discrimination.”
Matt Burgess, a professor at the University of Wyoming who previously worked at CU Boulder until last year, posted on X that while these discriminating hiring practices were going on, faculty “were constantly being told in trainings that racial discrimination in hiring was one of the worst things we could do.” He added that faculty “had to report [hiring discrimination] if we saw it, and it would be punished harshly.”
Burgess noted that at the same time, this was being taught, “the Provost was running a faculty hiring program with impunity whose explicit purpose was to racially discriminate.”
As one of his first acts as president, Donald Trump signed an executive order restating that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits hiring based on race.
CU Boulder did not respond to a Daily Wire Inquiry prior to press time.