A psychologist spoke out this week about what critics see as a job offer gone awry over an ideological spat about diversity statements.
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.
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.” (Inbar shared his account on a podcast episode released on Tuesday, and spoke with The Chronicle on Wednesday.)
Days after the letter came out, the psychology-department chair emailed Inbar to say she wouldn’t be extending him a job offer, following the recommendation of an ad hoc committee.
“There is no doubt that unusual events occurred surrounding your visit,” Annette L. Stanton wrote to Inbar, who shared a copy of the email with The Chronicle. “After much consideration and consultation, I believe that following the department’s standard process spanning more than two decades is the right way to go. That said, I’m disappointed with the outcome.” (Stanton told The Chronicle on Wednesday that she was in a meeting and not immediately available for comment; the three members of the ad hoc committee did not return requests for comment. Efforts to reach several of the graduate-student signatories on Wednesday were also unsuccessful.)
There is no doubt that unusual events occurred surrounding your visit.
While the students’ concerns extended to a broader critique of Inbar’s sensitivity to DEI issues, his comments about diversity statements were what initially gave them pause, and what has dominated the debate online.
The situation illustrates how diversity statements have become a live wire nationally, with several university systems and states banning their use in hiring over concerns about their legality or potential use as a “political litmus test.” One professor sued the University of California system last month, saying a requirement that he submit a diversity statement for consideration for a job in the Santa Cruz campus’s psychology department violated his First Amendment rights. (The professor, John D. Haltigan, coincidentally, was formerly employed at the University of Toronto, but left because his grant funding had run out.)
The Inbar case is also rich with drama: A scholar of moral judgments and the psychology of political affiliation is questioned — publicly, by graduate students — about his own commitment to the DEI values they hold dear. Much of the story has played out in podcast episodes Inbar recorded nearly five years apart: one in which he posed questions about the utility of diversity statements in hiring, and another, released this week, in which he shares his view of what happened at UCLA.
“It’s funny because from a research perspective, I understand a lot of what’s going on here,” Inbar, who co-authored a 2012 paper in which he asked psychology professors whether they would discriminate in hiring based on a candidate’s political views, told The Chronicle. “I understand how people feel that they have to protect a certain set of moral values and that they don’t want people around who threaten them. I would just say, often those moral instincts can mislead us into rushing to judgment.”
What Happened?
Behind the scenes, Inbar’s potential hiring had rocked the department.
A group of graduate students had emailed the department’s entire faculty to argue against it, Stanton wrote in a February email to the department explaining the situation. (Stanton forwarded that note to Inbar, who shared it with The Chronicle.) Airing such grievances publicly, Stanton wrote, marked “a significant and problematic departure from our typical searches.”
Then there was the matter of the podcast Inbar co-hosts, Two Psychologists Four Beers, which was repeatedly cited by the graduate students in their open letter opposing Inbar’s hiring. Because the podcast episodes weren’t part of Inbar’s formal application materials, Stanton and other administrators asked UCLA’s Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion whether the search committee was allowed to mention them in interviewing Inbar, according to emails reviewed by The Chronicle. No, the UCLA office said: The search committee’s interview questions had to be limited to a candidate’s submitted materials, though other faculty members could bring up other topics.
So members of the department’s diversity-issues committee instead asked Inbar about the podcast material, which Stanton wrote in the email was “consistent with their standard process this year of being free to ask follow-up questions of candidates, as long as the restrictions all faculty follow during interviews aren’t violated.”
The goals are good, but I don’t know if the diversity statements necessarily accomplish the goals.
The story began, Inbar said Tuesday on the podcast Very Bad Wizards, when his partner received a job offer from the UCLA psychology department. When she inquired about the possibility of bringing Inbar on as a partner hire, the department was receptive, Inbar said. During a campus visit in late January, faculty members seemed enthusiastic about him as a candidate.
But he told the hosts of Very Bad Wizards that his meeting with the diversity-issues committee was one of several “strange things” that happened while he was on campus. At the end of the meeting, in which the committee asked standard questions about his approach to diversity in his teaching and research, Inbar said he had been asked about a December 2018 episode of Two Psychologists Four Beers.
In that episode, Inbar said that diversity statements “sort of seem like administrator virtue-signaling,” questioned how they would be used in a hiring process, and suggested “it’s not clear that they lead to better outcomes for underrepresented groups.”
The committee asked: Was he prepared to defend those comments now?
“To be honest, I wasn’t, because this episode is like, four and a half years old,” Inbar said on Very Bad Wizards. But he explained his current stance: “The very short version is, I think that the goals are good, but I don’t know if the diversity statements necessarily accomplish the goals.” (One host of Very Bad Wizards, David A. Pizarro, a professor of psychology at Cornell University, said he’d let Inbar’s comments on the podcast speak for themselves.)
The UCLA faculty members “seemed satisfied” with Inbar’s answer, he said. “Then one of them said, kind of almost apologetically, ‘Well, you know, we have some very passionate graduate students here, which is great, but what would you say to them if they were upset about this?’” Inbar said he didn’t know what he’d say beyond explaining his views, as he had to the committee.
Then Inbar met with some of the graduate students. Both parties recalled the meeting as unusual. The students wrote in their letter that Inbar had told them that his “work does not really deal with identity,” which they found problematic. Inbar studies morality and political ideology, the students wrote, so “it was deeply troubling to hear that he does not believe identity (i.e., individual background as it pertains to race, gender, sexuality, class, or ability) has bearing on these research questions.”
But Inbar said the graduate students had never asked him directly about the podcast episodes mentioned in their letter. “To be honest, it wasn’t entirely clear what they were getting at” in the meeting, Inbar told The Chronicle; if they had asked more-direct questions about, for instance, his approach to mentoring students from diverse backgrounds, he said he could have answered them.
The department’s graduate students didn’t all share the same view of the matter. A handful of students drafted a response to the first letter, defending the nuance of Inbar’s comments and calling for further conversation among themselves. Inbar shared a copy of that letter with The Chronicle.
‘Just Stay Out of It’
Stanton, the department chair, told faculty members that she had tried to play the situation by the book, according to the emails shared with The Chronicle. As is standard procedure for potential partner hires, Stanton convened an ad hoc committee to make a recommendation on whether to hire Inbar. The members of that committee — Benjamin R. Karney, Carolyn Parkinson, and Hal E. Hershfield — opted not to recommend Inbar’s hiring.
Whether to give a candidate a green light rests entirely with that committee, Stanton wrote in an email. But because of the unusual circumstances in Inbar’s case, she said she’d considered a few alternatives — a “do-over” interview or a faculty vote on Inbar’s case, for example — before ultimately deciding to let the committee’s decision stand.
She did, however, ask the committee to write an internal report explaining its decision, which she described as an unusual step.
Inbar told The Chronicle that the report had not been shared with him. 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.
They can hold faculty to viewpoint-neutral type of criteria, … but they can’t say, ‘If you don’t pledge allegiance to our particular view on diversity, you can’t have a job.’
“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.’”
On Tuesday, during the Very Bad Wizards episode, Inbar said the graduate students who opposed his hiring had missed the nuance in his remarks about diversity statements.
“You can pull out selective quotes that make me sound like I’m a rabid anti-diversity-statement person, which I’m really not,” Inbar said. His main concern is with their effectiveness, he said: “What you want is somebody who’s going to be able to teach and to mentor people from diverse backgrounds. But what you get is somebody writing about what they believe, and perhaps what they’ve done to demonstrate that.”
In their open letter, the students also contested Inbar’s comments in a more-recent Two Psychologists episode about how the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the field’s professional organization, uses DEI criteria to evaluate submissions. He also took a public stance against Georgia’s anti-abortion law. Inbar said on Two Psychologists that, while he considers himself “pro-choice,” he believed it wasn’t the organization’s place to take sides: “When we align ourselves with a political side or faction, it’s bad for our science.”
To the students, Inbar’s remarks about the professional society were more evidence he wouldn’t be a good fit. “Time and time again in these episodes, he fails to reflect on how these issues structurally affect marginalized individuals,” they wrote.
Meanwhile, Inbar is not asking for sympathy. His partner received a one-year extension of her job offer from UCLA, which he told The Chronicle was “spectacular,” and the couple may consider moving to Los Angeles if Inbar can find a job in the area. “I don’t want people to cry over this for me,” he said on Very Bad Wizards.
In the past, he added, he’s urged faculty members to speak up about potentially controversial topics they believe in. His recent experience has changed his mind.
“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.”
