David Turner is a fellow and Assistant Professor of Black Life and Racial Justice at UCLA’s school of public affairs. In his spare time, Turner does community activism, having co-founded the “Police-Free LAUSD Coalition,” a group that calls for wholesale police abolition. Activism also shows up in his scholarship. In an article for Abolition: A Journal of Insurgent Politics, for example, Turner praises Black Lives Matter student activists for the way they reject capitalism and adopt a “Black queer feminist lens.”
Turner’s career trajectory is typical of professors who get their jobs via a fellow-to-faculty program—his came from the University of California’s President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program (PPFP). As I’ve written, the program serves as a side-door into faculty positions. Rather than recruiting professors through competitive searches, fellow-to-faculty programs select postdoctoral fellows who demonstrate a commitment to diversity. They then advance them into tenure-track positions, allowing administrators to push their hiring priorities unburdened by a normal competitive process.
The PPFP’s criteria raise serious questions about academic freedom, and the vast constellation of similarly oriented programs on other campuses implies extensive ideological capture. Some in academia are now ringing the alarm.
Fellow-to-faculty fellows often tout their progressive political activism. Amir Aziz, a fellow at UC Berkeley, describes himself as “an activist-scholar and immigrant with roots in social movements against migrant detention.” Dan Bustillo, a fellow at UC Riverside who studies “trans Latinx activist media,” works with transgender activists and has “led protestor workshops.”
Others embrace positions on the fringes of leftist politics. Katherine Maldonado Fabela, a fellow at UCLA, writes extensively on the need for “dismantling” the “carceral state.” In the wake of Hamas’s massacre of Israelis on October 7, 2023, Nour Joudah, Professor of Asian American Studies at UCLA, posted an icon of a paraglider on Instagram, saying “#Gaza has been pleading with the international community for 17 years to end the Israeli siege. Yesterday, it decided to end it themselves.”
Fellows’ activism shapes their scholarship. A substantial portion of fellows draw from a small cluster of research interests and methodological approaches. These include “critical refugee studies,” “critical prison studies,” “critical indigenous theory,” “decolonial praxis,” “decolonial ecologies,” “queer pláticas methodology,” and “queer of color critique.” To describe their research, some fellows coin creative intersectional neologisms—“indigiqueer youth,” “undocuqueer episteme,” and so on.
Scholars ascribing to the “normative intersectional agenda,” as one professor in the UC system put it to me, make up a substantial proportion of the fellow-to-faculty pool. In the UC system’s 2024 cohort, all 42 scholars in the humanities and social sciences focus on topics related to identity. Thirty-one utilize methodologies like critical theory, decolonial theory, and queer theory, or study topics like mass incarceration, prison abolition, and social justice activism.
Some professors I spoke with were concerned that the fellows were helping to transform entire disciplines, and that the fellow-to-faculty programs pushed a narrow ideology. “It’s a little bit like what happens under an authoritarian party-dominated regime where all of civil society gets subordinated to the party,” a UC professor, who requested anonymity, told me. “Ultimately, they’re all an extension of the same normative political agenda, and that is what’s happening across a lot of the social sciences.”
At UC Riverside, several professors raised this concern directly to Douglas Haynes, the UC system’s Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs and Academic Programs, during a recorded panel discussion on the postdoctoral fellowship program.
“What I wonder about is whether there is an ideological litmus test—whether there are any apolitical people, or political moderates, who are selected,” sociology professor Stephen Brint asked. “There are rules that are written down and there are unwritten rules, and it seems to me that one of the unwritten rules is an ideological litmus test,” philosophy professor John Fisher added.
These scholars seem to agree that hiring on the basis of one’s “commitment to diversity” creates a political test, akin to the anti-Communist loyalty oaths of the McCarthy era. Such overt litmus tests were eventually deemed unconstitutional. Scholars across the political spectrum have argued that diversity statements likewise violate the First Amendment.
Fellow-to-faculty programs are not restricted to the University of California system. As I’ve documented, the model is replicated by universities across the country. For the programs hiring in the social sciences and humanities, the overwhelming majority of participants specialize in issues related to race, sex, and identity. At the University of Chicago, for example, 25 out of the 27 Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellows recruited since 2017 focus their studies on identity or social justice. At the University of South Carolina, Bridge-to-Faculty fellow Patrick Aaron Harris specializes in Shakespeare and “premodern critical race studies.” Kyle Grady, now an assistant professor of English at UC Irvine, also focuses on Shakespeare and critical race studies, applying the methodology in a recent article for Shakespeare Quarterly titled “Othello, Colin Powell, and Post-Racial Anachronisms.”
The emphasis shows up in STEM, too. In 2023, Ohio State’s LEGACY fellowship program required recipients to address “bias and inequity in engineering design,” according to an archived webpage. Georgia Tech’s College of Engineering assesses how its fellowship candidates understand barriers in higher education faced by minorities, per a document I acquired via a records request. One of its current fellows studies “algorithms that support equity in the design of public infrastructure.”
Ideological screening has downstream consequences for our sensemaking institutions. Ultimately, the fellow-to-faculty model pushes conformity across once-distinct academic fields. As the UC professor put it, “it erodes disciplinary boundaries,” flattening all forms of inquiry into a discussion of race and oppression.
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