This Baltimore employer asks job candidates to submit a "contributions to diversity statement"

What if you aren't dedicated to the left's version of diversity at all?

The University of Maryland, Baltimore

The Maryland Daily Record recently hosted a Diversity Summit that wasn’t diverse at all, where local DEI leaders shared ideas ranging from bad to downright silly, including replacing the 40 hour work week because it was made for white men. 

A more tangibly consequential bad idea was shared by the University of Maryland Baltimore’s Chief DEI Officer, as she was describing how she is integrating DEI into the University’s hiring practices.  

According to her, as job candidates are going through the application and interview process, especially if the job is a Director level position or above, candidates are asked to submit a “contributions to diversity statement” where they should detail how they’ve “advanced equity, diversity, or inclusion”. 

But what if you aren’t dedicated to advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion, in the way that the institutional left defines it, because it conflicts with your values and therefore your political affiliation? What if you believe candidates should be assessed purely on their merits alone?

Considering how divisive the entire concept of DEI has become, one has to wonder whether a practice such as this is tantamount to political discrimination in the workplace. Of course the problem with making that argument, at least from a legal standpoint, is that political affiliation is not a protected class in the same way that race and gender are. 

So then, how are conservatives to bring political balance back to the state’s institutions?     

One option would be to borrow a strategy from the left, where conservatives would make the long march through the institutions, gradually infiltrating and reshaping them over decades from within. 

But then again, if conservatives are being filtered out at the point of entry via hiring practices such as the one described above, they’d be unable to take even step one in that long march. 

Another option would be to elect a Governor like Virginia’s Glenn Youngkin, who has reformed his state’s DEI office, now orienting it around economic opportunity, cooperation, and free speech.  

And while it will still take years for that mentality to percolate throughout each of Virginia’s organizations, it’s at least a substantive start.

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