In 2020, The National Institutes of Health created its Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation (FIRST) program, designed to dole out $241 million over nine years for DEI-focused faculty hiring. Through the program, public and private institutions across the country—including Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine and Florida State University—have created faculty hiring initiatives.
One key condition for each of these NIH-funded programs: All faculty job candidates must submit a diversity statement. To be hired, they must demonstrate “a strong commitment to promoting diversity and inclusive excellence.”
As I announced in my latest for the Wall Street Journal, I have acquired the rubrics for evaluating diversity statements from two of these hiring programs, at the University of South Carolina and at the University of New Mexico. I have also acquired a similar rubric used by the University of Massachusetts Chan School of Medicine, which has not yet received any NIH-FIRST funds but has explicitly followed the NIH’s model. You can read more about these rubrics at the Wall Street Journal. We are publishing the documents in full below. Simply put, they provide a roadmap for viewpoint discrimination.
The University of South Carolina
The University of New Mexico
The University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School
Photo by 2y.kang on Unsplash
