As an example, The College Fix reports a professor hired by the Department of Comparative Studies has researched NASA's Mars rovers and says they're "colonial laboratories."
Associate Editor Matt Lamb says DEI restrictions have to go beyond diversity offices and officers.
Matt Lamb is associate editor with The College Fix.
“A lot of these liberal arts departments are basically safe havens for activists. They even say that they hire ‘scholar activists or activist scholars.’ And so this is where a lot of the DEI stuff lives."
Research by the Manhattan Institute found that focus on activist hires at Ohio State began in earnest in 2021.
The school’s comparative studies program “addresses processes of cultural interaction, with particular attention to the dynamics of knowledge, power, authority, and cultural difference,” according to the department website.
Other notable examples of DEI influence in hiring practices from open records obtained by the Manhattan Institute include:
- A job ad for an archaeologist that emphasized “decolonization, feminist theory, queer theory, critical race theory, and/or Indigenous ontologies.”
- A philosophy department job opening for a professor of “philosophy of race” to explore the “metaphysics of race” and “epistemological significance of race or racism.”
- A faculty hiring committee noting of interest one candidate’s work on “how fatphobia and ableism are institutionalized in public infrastructure through race science, gender oppression, and legacies of colonialism.”
Defending Education, a conservative watchdog group, found OSU’s student registration lists "Race, Ethnicity & Gender Diversity" as a foundation in General Education, which violates the DEI prohibition.
The group wrote a letter asking the Ohio attorney general to open an investigation.
Lamb says it's really going to be up to conservative lawmakers to scour DEI theory that's imbedded in many areas of the school's curricula.
"I would certainly encourage Ohio lawmakers, education officials, university trustees to really ensure that DEI is being rooted out of their university and not just renamed or hidden somewhere else."
