President Trump’s new executive order, “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity,” has doubtless already sent America’s college administrators scrambling. The order unequivocally declares that “race- and sex-based preferences,” often doled out under the guise of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) mandates, “can violate the civil-rights laws of this Nation.” It calls on federal agencies to compile lists of institutions—including universities “with endowments over 1 billion dollars”—for potential compliance investigations.
Certain Ivy League universities can doubtless expect federal scrutiny. But according to documents I’ve acquired through public records requests, Vice President J. D. Vance’s alma mater, the Ohio State University, could also warrant a place on that list.
These internal emails reveal that OSU administrators screened faculty candidate pools for racial and gender diversity, granting approval for slates of finalists partly on the basis of those finalists’ collective “diversity.” The paper trail, which includes messages between search committee chairs and Ohio State deans, is devastating.
First, some background. In a previous piece for the Wall Street Journal, I unpacked hundreds of pages of “diversity recruitment reports” created by Ohio State faculty search committees. One report, on the university’s search for a French and Francophone Studies scholar “with a specialization in Black France,” admitted that the search committee practiced racial discrimination: “The Search committee members were keenly aware of the need to prioritize the hiring of a visible minority especially given the nature of the job description,” the report stated, and “thus selected a pool of 12 candidates for initial Zoom interviews that reflected this exigency.” After conducting those interviews, the search committee confirmed the priority: “In our deliberations to select finalists, the importance of bringing Black scholars to campus was deemed to be essential. We thus chose three Black candidates, two of who [sic] are of Caribbean descent and one from Senegal.”
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, of course, prohibits most forms of racial discrimination in hiring. One might therefore expect administrators to have flagged the search committee’s report for exposing the university to legal trouble. Instead, as this new batch of emails confirms, administrators enthusiastically approved of the committee’s work.
According to these records, Dana Renga, divisional dean of arts and humanities, reviewed the eight-page French and Francophone Studies search report. That report included eyebrow-raising passages, such as the admission that the committee had collectively “decided . . . that diversity was just as important as perceived merit as we made our selections.” Renga, in an email to the search committee chair, merely flagged that the report failed to note whether two members of the search committee had taken Ohio State’s mandatory “Searching for Inclusive Excellence” training. After the committee fixed its error, Renga emailed Korie Little Edwards, interim associate dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion: “I read earlier and noticed that not all training dates were included. Now that they are looks great [sic] and an exciting slate of campus visit finalists.” Edwards’s response? “I approve this slate.”
This confirms that at least some Ohio State search committees reviewed prospective faculty members’ applications with the knowledge that multiple administrators would scrutinize their proposed finalists’ demographics. Renga, in another instance, had written to Edwards regarding finalists for a Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies role, noting the “diverse process, pool, and finalist list.” Remarkably, Edwards once again responded: “I approve this slate of candidates.”
This policy almost certainly induced members of university search committees to select finalists based on candidates’ race and sex. According to these emails, another search committee, looking for a professor of indigenous studies, emphasized in an email to Regna that it was “incredibly fortunate to have found three fantastic Native women scholars/candidates who all identify as Native (with tribal affiliations).” Renga responded that she was “also pleased with this diversity report and support their campus visit finalist list based upon recruitment and diversity of finalists.” Edwards once again added: “I approve.”
When Ohio State delivered these records, a spokesperson noted that the university had updated its hiring policy to ensure decisions would be made without regard to race, sex, or other demographic categories. But the university’s leadership, including its new president, Ted Carter, would be wise to review closely the university’s hiring practices to ensure that they don’t place the university in legal jeopardy. In 2023, when a University of Washington search committee re-ranked candidates on the basis of race—moving a white candidate from first place to third—the university’s civil rights investigation office conducted a review and found a violation of UW’s nondiscrimination policy.
Ohio citizens should ask why a dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion was involved in OSU’s faculty hiring process at all. Unlike Texas and Florida, Ohio has not banned DEI in its state universities. While OSU may have officially abandoned its policy of vetting prospective faculty members’ race and sex, the university continues to employ 201 DEI officers. That may soon change, though, as Ohio legislators have revived a higher education reform bill that would ban DEI offices.
With Trump’s new executive order, Ohio State administrators will doubtless feel legal pressure to prove they are not discriminating in faculty hiring. But they should address a more fundamental question: should scholarly ability take a backseat to a narrowly construed notion of diversity? Ohioans would surely say no. If that’s not enough for the university to change course, however, a federal investigation may do the trick.
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