I appreciate your response and I will point out a few things about the links you provide. Regarding [1] I will say a few things. First, the paper makes clear that the effort described is not a typical search process.

This search was unique, both in scale and in intent ... Limiting the first review to contributions in DE&I is itself a dramatic change of emphasis in the typical evaluation process which generally focuses on primarily on research accomplishments.

So we must be clear that this is a unique and dramatic departure from the way things are usually done, as described in my reply to your sibling comment. You can't point to this as the way things are in academia because it's a self described outlier at an already outlier institution, UC Berkeley.

Secondly, I will also tell you that filtering down applications from 893 to 214 on the basis of a robust diversity statement is not surprising. A lot of people treat it as a cursory exercise and devote no real effort to it. It's not hard to spot these. And ~24% seems like a reasonable ratio based on my experience. One of the issues with academics is as they are being brought up through the Ph.D. system, they do not place a large emphasis on DEI activities at all. So it's easy as a Ph.D. student if you're not careful to devote 100% of your time to research and very little to DEI related activities. And as I've said in another post, DEI issues are important discharging the actual job duties of a professor. I'm going to keep emphasizing that because it can often get lost, giving way to the idea that this whole DEI thing is orthogonal to professorship. It's not.

Third, this looks like it was a special search process directed for the specific reason's stated in the document. This kind of experimental and one-time thing is typically separate from the normal hiring process.

> But I have read one set of rating criteria [2]. Candidates that merely do "what is already expected of staff" [3] regarding diversity (I.e. what you claim is the goal of DEI statements) are given the lowest scores.

What [2] is saying would be the lowest score isn't really what I was saying in my post. The document characterizes low scoring DEI statements as "vague", "little expressed knowledge", "little demonstrated awareness", "seems to be not aware", "no specifics", "brief descriptions" etc. A vague DEI statement should score low on the rubric.

The "Only mentions activities that are already the expectation of faculty as evidence of commitment and involvement" is because a lot of people will say something along the lines of "My experience with DEI is that I tutored a black/Hispanic/female/Muslim/blind person" or "I've taught in diverse classrooms". That's not what we're looking for. We want specific examples of practices that you have implemented in your classroom and mentorship that demonstrates an understand of the issues faced by educators who teach diverse classrooms. It's not interesting to anyone that you taught a diverse classroom. We all do that. How did you teach it? What specific teaching methodologies did you deploy and why? What was the specific outcome of those teaching practices? How did you adjust them? These are all basic questions that yes, probably 75%+ of applications cannot answer.

Look at how the the rubric characterizes top scoring DEI statements: "clear knowledge", "aware", "comfort", "understands", "discusses", "consistent track record", "roles taken were significant and appropriate", "identifies", "clearly formulates", "convincingly expresses". The bar is not super high here. You just have to demonstrate a clear understanding of the issues, show examples of actual instances where they mattered to you as a teacher, and talk cogently about the subject. It's not hard, and yet indeed, many fail because they don't take it seriously as a job requirement. Many aspiring faculty think the job of being a professor is 100% research, and that's just not the case and really never has been.

And anyway, even if you only do the minimum expectation you can still score a 12/15, so not exactly the "lowest" scoring. The lowest scoring would be if you do the minimum, and also are vague and express little knowledge of the field and have no track record. That sounds reasonable to me.

> And that's in academia, in California - the most liberal of the most liberal.

I mean, we're talking about Berkeley here. It's one of the top schools in the world. The applications will come from all over including totalitarian regimes like China and Iran where I imagine there's not a lot of emphasis on DEI. Applications aren't restricted to Californians.