Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives at the University of Michigan are a “failure”—at least according to the New York Times. As an October 16 article explained, efforts by the university to address inequality and injustice have left students and faculty feeling “more frustrated than ever,” and the mood on campus is characterized by disappointment and “wary disdain.”
I am a tenured faculty member at the University of Michigan. Unlike commentators who have seized upon the article in order to offer their hot takes about higher education and contemporary culture, I have firsthand knowledge of this university and the faculty, students, and staff who experience its DEI programs. I readily acknowledge that DEI efforts at Michigan are far from perfect and that there is ample room for improvement. I also know that the University of Michigan’s DEI work has had some real successes, such as investments in financial aid to improve socioeconomic access, which the article did not address but which was later discussed in a response from Tabbye Chavous, the University of Michigan’s Vice Provost for Equity & Inclusion and Chief Diversity Officer.
Most notably, the New York Times article neglected a core function of a top R1 university: research. News coverage of higher education tends to be hyper-focused on a few campus concerns known to draw clicks from readers—undergraduate admissions, culture war controversies, and political protests, to name a few. But the reality is that research is a central mission of the University of Michigan and other R1 institutions like it, and an article that doesn’t offer any meaningful discussion of this fundamental aspect of a university is itself a failure.
I offer a different perspective on the University of Michigan’s DEI efforts, one that highlights their impact on faculty members like me and the work we do. Focusing specifically on my field of research—the study of American religion—I want to explain how the University of Michigan’s DEI programs have supported scholars who are pursuing innovative and field-transforming research. Moreover, I highlight how the University of Michigan’s investment in DEI has had a ripple effect that reaches far beyond our university—one that is visible in the prize-winning publications produced by our scholars, in the service we do for our professional societies, and in the next generation of researchers we are mentoring, training, and preparing for their own scholarly careers. Ultimately, when it comes to research, the University of Michigan’s DEI programs have greatly benefited the careers of individual scholars like myself and the academy more broadly.
I was hired at the University of Michigan in early 2017, amid what is known as the university’s DEI 1.0 era, the five-year period between 2016 and 2021. During this time, the University of Michigan made real gains in hiring an increasingly diverse faculty. According to the university’s own evaluation report, between 2016 and 2021, the number of female tenured or tenure-track faculty increased by 7.5%, and the number of Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) faculty members increased by 12.3%. New hires contributed to the changing demographics of the faculty. Female faculty were 41.5% of new tenured or tenure-track hires during this period, and BIPOC faculty were 31.9% of new tenured or tenure-track hires. These shifts owed in part to initiatives like the LSA Collegiate Fellowship, through which the University of Michigan hired 60 postdoctoral scholars doing research, teaching, and service that advance diversity and equal opportunity in higher education. About 55 of these scholars have continued on in tenure-track positions at the university.
It’s one thing to hire faculty members; it’s another thing entirely to ensure that early career scholars have the resources they need to secure tenure and stay. But faculty members like me who were hired during the DEI 1.0 era are now going up for promotion, and we’re succeeding. For my part, I know that my success in getting promoted to Associate Professor in May owes in part to the enormous support I’ve received through the University of Michigan’s DEI efforts. For example, the National Center for Institutional Diversity (NCID), which advances DEI work on campus, funded my research, including a project I did about how Christian churches responded to anti-Asian racism and violence during the Covid-19 pandemic and the Atlanta Spa Shooting. It helped me organize a public event that brought together scholars and practitioners to talk about engaging different religious communities in social change. Finally, NCID’s webinars and events helped me build my academic networks and learn practical professional skills that have been vital to advancing my research career and building my scholarly portfolio so I could clear the bar for tenure.
The NCID and its programming have made it possible for me to be not only a better scholar but also a bolder one. It provided me with one of my first opportunities to write for a general audience when, back in 2018, I was invited to contribute to a series in their online magazine, Spark, about the role of the Bible in contemporary social justice debates. Amid the public fury over the forcible separation of migrant families at the Southern border, I wrote about the role of Christian social service agencies in administering government immigration and refugee policies, the topic of my first book. The chance to draw on my research to educate the public about a pressing issue in the news was transformative for me, and it helped me understand the power of sharing my scholarship in service of the public good.
However, when it comes to faculty scholarship and its connection to DEI programs, the New York Times had relatively little to say, except that “many faculty members”—none were identified by name—believed that the University of Michigan’s emphasis on DEI had “narrowed its departments rather than broadening them.” The article also quoted Jay P. Greene, who argued in a Heritage Foundation study that university DEI programs should be discontinued because they are unrelated to “research functions.”
In reality, my colleagues at the University of Michigan who were hired in the past eight years have not only changed the demographics of the faculty but are also excelling as scholars who are broadening, not narrowing, the scope of our respective fields. They are doing pathbreaking research that is winning national recognition, all while they are also drawing on their scholarship, their teaching, and their service to the academy to create a university and a world that is more equitable and just. Indeed, these DEI efforts have been tightly intertwined with “research functions,” in a way that is breathing new life into our different corners of the academy.
Take, for instance, the scholars in my own department, American Culture, and the impact they are having on the field of American religion. Consider my colleague William Calvo-Quiros, a core faculty member in Latina/o Studies, whose research interests include religion, critical race theory, gender and sexuality, and decolonial methods and theory. His fascinating first book, Undocumented Saints: The Politics of Migrating Devotions—which I discussed with him at the Anxious Bench two years ago—explores the evolving practices and meanings of devotions to popular saints in Mexico and the United States. This year, it won the Best First Book Award in the History of Religions from the American Academy of Religion, and last year it won the Frank S. and Elizabeth D. Brewer Prize from the American Society of Church History. Or consider my colleague Nancy Khalil, a core faculty member in Arab and Muslim American Studies. An anthropologist by training, she studies the politics of American Islam and how states use bureaucratic policies to regulate religion in the United States. In recognition of her exceptional promise, she was named a Young Scholar in American Religion and a Mellon Emerging Faculty Leader. Both Calvo-Quiros and Khalil are doing research that pushes the boundaries of the current scholarship and urges researchers to ask fresh questions about the relationship between religion and the state, the role of religion in migration, and the connections between religion, race, gender, sexuality, nation, and more.
They are changing the field not only as scholars but as people who are actively training and advising junior scholars. This mentorship is yet another way that the University of Michigan’s DEI efforts matter. Whenever an R1 university hires and tenures a faculty member, it opens up a pipeline for that scholar to train another generation of students, especially doctoral students. Ideally, these graduate students will then go on to work as researchers, writers, and faculty members who determine the future direction of the field. Cultivating a pipeline is especially important when it comes to nurturing scholars who come from underrepresented backgrounds and supporting research agendas that have historically been on the margins of the discipline.
To give one specific example from my own experience: at present, the number of faculty members who have expertise in both religious studies and Asian American studies and who are tenured at R1 universities is very small—I estimate that there are fewer than ten. As a result, the opportunities for doctoral students to receive training in the small but growing field of Asian American religion are quite limited. However, after I was granted tenure in the spring, another stable pathway opened up for aspiring doctoral students to get trained in this field, which is now likelier to flourish in the long run.
My efforts to train the next generation of scholars is already underway. In the past six months alone, I’ve graduated four doctoral students whom I’ve helped to mentor during my seven years at the University of Michigan. Three of these students are doing highly original projects on an exciting range of topics in American religion: the online politics of evangelical writers, the experiences of Santería and Espiritismo practitioners in Puerto Rico, and the justice work of Sikh activists in the United States and the United Kingdom.
In addition, I’ve used research funds from NCID to support projects that have involved mentoring undergraduate students and introducing them to the fundamentals of research. These efforts that have also set them up to pursue scholarly careers. For instance, the research project I mentioned earlier about Christian churches and Covid-related racism involved a collaboration with an undergraduate student who presented our work at a national conference and co-authored a peer-reviewed journal article with me. She eventually went on to win a Fulbright fellowship and a predoctoral research fellowship at Harvard. Another one of my research assistants is currently in her first year in a doctoral program at the University of Pennsylvania.
DEI initiatives have changed both who is writing about American religion and what they are saying in their scholarship, and as a result, the study of American religion looks very different now compared to 20 years ago, when I first entered graduate school. If I do my job well, it will almost certainly look very different 20 years from now, too. That is the goal.
In January 2024, I was invited to participate in a panel at the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Church History. At the beginning of the session, which was about Asian American Christianity, I offered a few observations about how the society had changed since 2014, when I first attended the conference. For one, there was much less conversation about Asian American religious life a decade ago. The questions we were asking then were completely different, as were the concepts and communities at the center of our discussions. The leadership of the society was also more diverse, and so were the conference attendees. “At my first ASCH panel ever, ten years ago, there were more bowties in the room than there were women and people of color combined,” I joked. In contrast, the 2024 conference program was refreshingly full of a broader range of perspectives, and the conference hall revealed a broader range of sartorial choices. What a difference a decade can make, I said.
Reflecting on my remarks now, I think I misspoke. I perhaps should have said this: what a difference a commitment to DEI can make. It was during the past decade that institutions like the University of Michigan began to invest mightily in DEI programs, and in my view, those initiatives are one reason why I’m witnessing change–in my career, in my university, and also in the academy beyond.
DEI initiatives are far from perfect, and we certain have a lot of work to do to fulfill their lofty goals. But they are hardly a “failure.” They are in fact beginning to bear real fruit, and the harvest time has only just begun.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In