An excellent piece by Frederick Hess on faculty hiring plans in an age of tricky legal decisions. Here’s a long excerpt:

Meanwhile, the University of Washington has been applauded for crafting job descriptions that promote race-conscious hiring in appropriately genteel ways, such as: “The University is dedicated to the goal of building a culturally diverse and pluralistic faculty and staff committed to teaching and working in a multicultural environment and strongly encourages applications from women, minorities,” and so forth. This fall, Duke University’s general counsel has publicly hailed that wording as a model of how institutions can avoid “legal risks when they deliberately seek to increase the racial and ethnic diversity of their faculties” while skirting Titles VI and VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act (which quaintly prohibit federally-funded institutions from discriminating on grounds that include race or ethnicity). In fact, something of a cottage industry has grown up around fudging prohibitions on racial preferences. In September, Caroline Sotello Viernes Turner, author of Diversifying the Faculty: A Guidebook for Search Committees (published by the Association of American Colleges and Universities), explained in the Chronicle of Higher Education that universities seeking minority faculty should require “a record of scholarship in areas related to diversity,” “previous experience interacting with communities of color,” or “interest in developing and implementing curricula that address multicultural issues.” The burgeoning ranks of diversity officers have grown to the extent that they are organizing a new national group that will meet for the first time in 2007: the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education. Doubtless the new group will applaud the $15 million that Columbia University has committed to minority faculty recruitment and the University of Southern California program that permits the provost to provide housing allowances, research funds, and other perks for black and Hispanic faculty candidates. Things may get much worse. In June 2005, the University of Oregon’s vice provost for institutional equity and diversity’s announced a diversity plan under which professors would henceforth be assessed on “cultural competency.” The resulting uproar forced the university to back off, though the assistant provost for multicultural and international affairs at the University of Connecticut has observed only, “Oregon may have tried to move too fast.”