Yale announced yesterday that it will spend $50 million over the next five years in order to improve its faculty’s “diversity.”

One expects that this money will be used not to increase the number of Republicans, conservatives, or evangelical Christians, but to make more hiring and promotion decisions based on race, ethnicity, and sex. As the Chronicle of Higher Education noted in its story, “Yale faced criticism last month for a lack of racial diversity among its faculty members. According to … The Yale Daily News, a poster put up on the campus called attention to statistics reflecting a much higher representation of minorities among undergraduate students than among professors.”

But as I noted in my post to the Chronicle article: “I hope that Yale’s (my alma mater’s) general counsel is involved, since it is illegal to weigh race, ethnicity, and sex in the hiring and promotion of faculty. The ‘diversity’ exception that has been carved out of the law for student admissions does not apply to employment discrimination law. More here.”