Not long ago, I took a look at the University of California, Berkeley, rubric for assessing faculty hires on diversity, equity and inclusion. This arose when someone asked me what, in the process of teaching an engineering subdiscipline, they could possibly say to assuage the student interviewers who care nothing about the teaching or the discipline, but only about DEI.

What part of thermo had anything to do with DEI? Beats me was the best response I could give, since I’m disinclined to string together meaningless incoherent phrases that students seem to find appealing and persuasive, ignoring that they are total gibberish.

Unlike my interlocutor, Yoel Inbar had an answer to the question. His answer was that DEI has little to do with his teaching or research. The kids were not impressed by his honesty or clarity.

Yoel Inbar, an associate professor at the University of Toronto, was up for a job at the University of California at Los Angeles. But the psychology department there decided not to proceed after more than 60 graduate students in the department signed an open letter urging the university not to hire him.

At issue, the students wrote, were Inbar’s comments on his podcast expressing skepticism about the use of diversity statements in hiring, as well as about other efforts intended to make the academy more inclusive.

Since silence would make the students complicit, a group letter was their reaction to Inbar’s almost certain hiring.

In the letter, which circulated on Twitter, the students wrote that Inbar’s hiring “would threaten ongoing efforts to protect and uplift individuals of marginalized backgrounds” and that Inbar “prioritizes advocating for those he classifies as political minorities in academia” over fostering inclusivity. In a meeting with graduate students, the letter continues, Inbar’s answers to questions about diversity, equity, and inclusion were in some cases “outright disconcerting.”

It was Inbar’s position on DEI statements that drew the most outrage and generated the most debate, including an inquiry from FIRE as to the basis for Berkeley’s decision against hiring Inbar.

Meanwhile, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression has requested from UCLA documents related to Inbar’s case, including the committee’s report; the university denied that request in March and an appeal this month. Alex Morey, director of campus rights advocacy at FIRE, told The Chronicle that her organization is preparing a second appeal, arguing that the records are a matter of public interest.

“What we suspect may be happening here is that because Professor Inbar allegedly did not parrot the correct views on DEI and some students objected to that, he may have been discriminated against because of his views in the hiring process,” Morey said. That’s not allowed at a public university, she said: “They can hold faculty to viewpoint-neutral type of criteria, objective standards, but they can’t say, ‘If you don’t pledge allegiance to our particular view on diversity, you can’t have a job.’”

Much as this is correct, the fact remains that potential public university faculty who fail to swear fealty to DEI won’t get the job. To add insult to injury, but putting new hires through the gauntlet of student DEI inquisition, without regard to the new hire’s competency and skills since students are generally incapable of making a useful assessment because they’re still students, even a new prof who passes muster with the faculty hiring committee may be dinged because the kids have decided the prof is a pariah for failing to meet their concept of adequately dedicated to their ideology.

Do profs pretend? Do profs mush together the sort of worthless verbiage that sates the childish beliefs of the unduly passionate students? Or do the profs answer the students’ questions clearly and honestly, thus precluding any possibility that the students won’t hate them for believing in the wrong god?

“Is there a cost to opening your mouth about this stuff? Absolutely, there is,” he said. “Would I advise a junior person to take any sort of heterodox position on this publicly? Absolutely not, because you only need to piss off a few people. It just takes one or two to sink you. Just stay out of it.”

While “playing the game” and spouting the DEI platitudes the kids so desperately want to hear is the path to employment in academia, it comes at the expense of integrity. And yet, as Inbar says, there is no for tolerance of heterodoxy if you want a job as a professor, even at public universities where the First Amendment would seemingly prohibit hiring on the basis of ideological conformity.