The diversity mania continues to sweep through American higher education. A recent development is the “diversity statement,” which is meant to help cull out prospective faculty members who aren’t sufficiently enthusiastic about the Left’s big transformational project.

In today’s Martin Center article, computer-science professor Ed Gehringer examines this odious trend. He writes, “An American Enterprise Institute study last November found that these statements were required for 19 percent of academic jobs and were especially common at prestigious universities. The danger of the trend is perhaps best illustrated by a University of California, Berkeley, search that filtered applications in the biological sciences for ‘contributions to diversity, equity and inclusion.’ This eliminated 679 of 893 nominally qualified candidates on DEI criteria alone.”

You might think that in a field like computer science, there would be solid opposition to the intrusion of non-academic considerations like “diversity,” but you’d be mistaken. Gehringer explains that he was the only opponent in his department. Others thought that having diversity statements would make it more “welcoming” to minority candidates.

The good news here is that Gehringer’s arguments against mandatory diversity statements seem to have had some impact and the computer science department has held off from taking the plunge. Sometimes a single strong voice can make a difference.