MIT No Longer Asks Faculty Applicants to Make DEI Pledges: ‘They Don’t Work’

MIT is the first elite school to discontinue the practice of requiring applicants to submit a DEI statement.

A view of the campus of Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., on July 8, 2020. Maddie Meyer/Getty Images

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) will no longer require those seeking faculty posts to submit a statement about their commitment to the cause of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), the first elite school to backtrack on the practice that’s becoming commonplace.

“Requests for a statement on diversity will no longer be part of applications for any faculty positions at MIT,” a spokesperson for the institution told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement.

The change was made at the direction of MIT President Sally Kornbluth and backed by the institution’s provost, chancellor, vice equity and inclusion chief, and all six academic deans, the spokesperson noted.

Ms. Kornbluth, who became MIT’s president only a year ago, said she is committed to fostering an inclusive environment at her school but emphasized that such inclusivity cannot be achieved through coercion at the expense of freedom of expression.

“My goals are to tap into the full scope of human talent, to bring the very best to MIT, and to make sure they thrive once here,” she said in a provided statement. “We can build an inclusive environment in many ways, but compelled statements impinge on freedom of expression, and they don’t work.”

Over recent years, mandatory DEI statements have become increasingly common in academic job applications, especially those from prestigious institutions. In a 2021 study involving 999 university faculty job postings, the American Enterprise Institute found that 19 percent require diversity statements, with “elite” schools being 21 percent more likely to require DEI statements than “non-elite” ones.

One of the world’s top universities, MIT receives job applications from top talents across the globe. However, even applicants in cutting-edge scientific fields were not exempt from the requirement to display their ideological commitments.

A December 2023 faculty job posting for MIT’s aeronautics and astronautics department, for example, told candidates to provide “a statement regarding their views on diversity, inclusion, and belonging, including past and current contributions as well as their vision and plans for the future in these areas.”

MIT’s Past DEI Controversy

MIT’s decision to end the use of DEI pledges in employment marks a step away from its prior alignment with DEI activism, a stance that has drawn criticism from the science-and-engineering-focused institution.

In 2021, MIT’s Earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences department invited Dorian Abbot, a geophysicist at the University of Chicago, to give a lecture about the climate on exoplanets, or planets that orbit stars other than the sun of our solar system. However, the institution abruptly canceled the talk after a group of graduate students took issue with his skepticism of the DEI movement in academia.

Mr. Abbot became the target of activists at MIT as well as at his own school after he expressed doubts about DEI’s obsession with race. He argued in an op-ed that once-competitive German universities never fully recovered from the Nazi years, during which their employment policies focused on race instead of merit.

“We should view this as a warning of the consequences of viewing group membership as more important than merit, and correct our course before it is too late,” he wrote.

The cancellation was lambasted by scholars from both within and outside the MIT community. MIT Free Speech Alliance, an alumni group dedicated to promoting academic freedom, said MIT has never acknowledged that it was wrong to cancel Mr. Abbot’s exoplanet lecture because some activists didn’t like his opinions on DEI.

“No one in the MIT administration or faculty has publicly acknowledged that cancelling Dr. Abbot was a mistake. MIT has not apologized, either to Dr. Abbot or to the MIT community,” the Alliance said on its website, warning that cancellations like this could happen again because “no one has been held accountable for staining MIT’s reputation.”

“MIT has never repudiated the de facto policy it established with the Abbot Cancellation—that a minority group of graduate students can define what is acceptable for MIT and impose their values on the Institute,” it argued. “There is no reason to believe that MIT learned the lesson that it should not suppress speech some people don’t like.”