…we don't, at this stage, know whether all campuses are using them perniciously and illegally, as Berkeley and perhaps also Davis, and Santa Cruz are, in some significant number of their searches.  The potential for this misuse is there at all the campuses, of course, and it remains to be seen how things develop elsewhere.

Remember what's at issue here.  Berkeley has made the criteria for evaluating diversity statements public.   A job candidate will get a low score if he “defines diversity only in terms of different areas of study or different nationalities, but doesn't discuss gender or ethnicity/race” or if he “discount[s] the importance of diversity.”   As I noted in a prior CHE column, “diversity” was not the original (or even most plausible) rationale for affirmative action for African-Americans.  “Diversity” only took over our discourse when the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1978 Bakke case endorsed “diversity” over the more plausible justifications such as compensating the victims of race-based injustice by facilitating the social mobility of their descendants, and providing salient role models for racial minorities.  Almost all advocates of affirmative action prior to the Bakke case would have discounted “the importance of diversity” except perhaps with regard to “different areas of study"; those folks wouldn't make the cut at Berkeley these days!

ADDENDUM:   Even at Berkeley, not all department searches are–yet anyway–using the "diversity statement" for a first cut.  The same may also be true at Davis and Santa Cruz.