Applications for faculty positions typically comprise a CV, copies of 2-5 significant papers you’ve written, 3 letters of recommendation, a research statement,

Applications for faculty positions typically comprise a CV, copies of 2-5 significant papers you’ve written, 3 letters of recommendation, a research statement, and a teaching statement. As I understand it, the DEI statement is supposed to go along with the last two. Much of what is said about DEI statements can also be said about the teaching statement. At R1 universities like MIT, people are hired for tenure track positions based on their past (and future) research, and many teaching statements can be recitations of current hot topics (“flipped classrooms” “active learning” etc). But good ones (with evidence in letters of rec and CV) indicate that the candidate really has practiced what they propose to do in the future. To be clear, at MIT I’m sure a stellar teaching statement won’t get someone hired, but a patently false or over the top “I don’t care” one might give people pause. As I understand, DEI statements are the same. If someone wrote “my philosophy is that we should perpetuate the structures of power and mediocrity created by focusing on wealthy pedigreed individuals rather than ability and potential found by looking in unusual places” that would raise eyebrows. Conversely, if they instead said “I TA’d for an international computational neuroscience summer school that gave opportunity to impoverished students from Africa and Asia”, people might think “That’s cool!” But I think that most academics who are motivated by equity are not interesting in reading a ChatGPT DEI statement. I do think that the conversation around this is really unfortunate. I find little philosophical difference between what people are looking for with DEI statements and what goes into college applications from HS students, but I hear fewer people advocating for getting rid of those essays.