Tips

• 08 Nov, 2021
• 5 comments

A national nonprofit civil liberties group is calling on the University of Iowa College of Law to remove or revise a new question added to faculty evaluation forms asking how the professors have improved their law school’s “diversity, equity, and inclusion” — calling those terms “broad,” “subjective” and “political.”

“Incorporating such a question into faculty evaluations risks establishing an ideological litmus test for professors, which could impact promotion and tenure consideration and penalize faculty for holding a dissenting opinion on matters of public concern,” asserted The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, or FIRE.

The UI law school added the question in fall 2020 at the suggestion from an anti-racism committee formed in the wake of that summer’s Black Lives Matter protests and after UI College of Law Dean Kevin Washburn issued a statement committing to changes.

“At the College of Law, we embrace social justice as our responsibility and we commit to making anti-racism an integral part of our work, in the classes we teach, in the clinical and advocacy work we undertake, in the scholarship we produce, in the decisions we make, and in our everyday interactions within and without these walls,” Washburn wrote in June 2020. “We also dedicate ourselves to examine systems and processes throughout the law school — ranging from curriculum and alumni support to outreach and community building — in order to guard against institutional racism and implicit bias.”

The faculty evaluation form now includes the following statement: “The Iowa Law Anti-Racism Committee has encouraged me to ask each faculty member to identify any contributions you have made to improving our law school community in the areas of diversity, equity and inclusion. Please do so.”