For the last two years, a program with the ungainly name “Re-Imagining STEM Equity Utilizing Postdoctoral Pathways” (RISE UPP)—a large-scale university-hiring initiative funded through a $10 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant—has faced a legal dilemma.
The project aims to recruit and subsequently hire “minoritized postdoctoral scholars”—part of the “fellow-to-faculty” pipeline that, in practice, installs activists in tenure-track positions. As I’ve previously reported, RISE UPP administrators at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, which hosts the program, have also tried to implement it at state universities in Texas and North Carolina.
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But since the project’s 2022 inception, policymakers in both states have banned a broad array of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives at their public universities. That raised a tough question for RISE UPP administrators: how could they run a race-conscious program in states where such race consciousness is illegal?
I’ve acquired a trove of documents created by members of the RISE UPP Alliance—a working group that includes professors and administrators from Maryland, California, North Carolina, and Texas. The records show how program administrators brainstormed “workarounds” to state policy, disguised the project’s true intentions, and used proxies to achieve their demographic goals.
These documents reveal NSF’s influence on diversity policies at universities across the country. They show how a racialist hiring scheme continues to operate at public universities in states that have banned DEI. And as more schools ditch diversity policies in response to federal pressure, the records detail how administrators are trying to maneuver around these reforms.
In May 2024, a team of RISE UPP administrators conducted a “reverse site visit,” a progress report meeting with the NSF, which involved a long presentation to an NSF-appointed panel of reviewers responsible for evaluating the program.
The panel, whose comments were documented in a report that I obtained, urged the RISE UPP team to use more overtly identitarian language in the way that they framed the program. “The panel noted that the Alliance did not discuss fundamental issues within the majority of STEM disciplines,” the report explained, “where ways of doing STEM are based on white, patriarchal, colonizing Western European norms.”
“We are deeply aware of the ways that Eurocentric, colonial, and cis-patriarchical [sic] norms underline and inform every aspect of academia,” the RISE UPP team wrote in reply. However, the group explained, many of RISE UPP’s administrators find themselves “situated in states that are hostile to any mention of diversity, equity, and inclusion, much less references to white Eurocentric and patriarchal dominance.” Thus, in the interest of the team’s “safety and livelihood,” the program doesn’t “often use such language.”
In private, RISE UPP personnel remain committed to a race-conscious ethos. In an appendix to the report, for example, the team boasted that the “vast majority” of the academic literature that informed RISE UPP “represents equity- and inclusion-minded, race-concsious [sic], and otherwise critical perspectives”—emphasizing that the program “is guided by a critical lens which helps us disrupt norms, practices, and conventions that reinforce white privilege/dominance, colonial logics, etc.”
Administrators are aware, however, that they must be cautious when undertaking these activities in Texas and North Carolina. In a series of RISE UPP group chat messages, one official describes “proactively planning workarounds” for administrators who felt uncomfortable booking their own travel to DEI-focused conferences. Instead, “travel can be booked centrally by [University of Maryland, Baltimore County] as lead institution,” which would allow the other universities to avoid scrutiny for their DEI spending.
Others in the chat argued that these states’ anti-DEI policies made RISE UPP’s diversity-recruitment initiative all the more important. “TX and NC are 2 states that are at the forefront of a war, the battleground states,” another team member wrote. “This is where the work is the hardest. Many states are watching keenly what happens and what can be learned from the TX and NC experiences. This is why the NSF should be more not less interested in continuing RISE UPP funding.”
RISE UPP leaders seem to be aware of the need to be covert about the program’s diversity effort and strategic in addressing anti-DEI state laws. One bullet point in the group’s NSF meeting agenda asks, “Is the [reverse site visit] presentation available publicly through FOIA?”—indicating that they might not want certain material available to the public. An earlier meeting note, referring to Texas and North Carolina, noted that “NSF Awards are not bound by state law but we need to be sensitive around this > innovative solutions that allow practice to continue while policy changes.”
At key points, the documents highlighted a basic problem: administrators had to figure out how to recruit for demographic diversity despite states’ bans on diversity-hiring programs.
Early in their slide presentation for NSF, RISE UPP administrators repeated the program’s goal: to shepherd “minoritized” (the politically correct term for “minority”) postdocs “into tenure-track positions.” Later in the presentation, the team directly acknowledged the policies in Texas and North Carolina that prohibit racial preferences.
Nonetheless, several documents suggested ways for administrators to continue the program in those states by using proxy measures in lieu of explicit race-based recruitment. For example, the NSF presentation described plans for the University of Texas system to engage in “[t]argeted [r]ecruiting” by partnering with groups like the Alliance of Hispanic Service Research Universities, as well as for “[r]ecruiting cohorts around particular topics (e.g., Health Disparities).”
Likewise, in a section titled “Shifting from Identity Markers to Process,” the NSF review panel suggested that, instead of hiring explicitly on the basis of applicants’ race, RISE UPP hire scholars who conducted identity-based research. The program could hire from disciplines of “greater interest” to “underrepresented groups” such as “community engaged research” and “health equity for Black and Latino Communities.”
One partner in the RISE UPP program, the University of California system, uses this diversity-by-proxy approach for its own fellow-to-faculty program. The “President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program” selects for scholars who show a commitment to diversity, rather than hiring explicitly on the basis of scholars’ identity. In one document, the RISE UPP team mentioned that PPFP “offers an example of how to operate in the current legal environment,” as the program’s hires “remain highly diverse without [the program] working under the framework of Affirmative Action.”
In its presentation, the team states that it’s “unclear” whether RISE UPP could pivot to the PPFP model. But at least one university system with a RISE UPP program appears to have adopted the diversity-by-proxy approach. A flier describing the Texas A&M University System’s “RISE UPP Postdoctoral Fellowship” notes that it was recruiting scholars who “[d]emonstrate a commitment to diversity.” The Texas A&M University–Corpus Christie website, which hosted the flier, adds that fellows will show a commitment to “social justice, campus climate, student success and mentorship.”
After I reported on the RISE UPP program, Texas A&M–Corpus Christie removed the flier from its website and edited its webpage, scrubbing references to its “commitment to diversity” and the term “social justice.”
We should hope that Texas A&M and all other RISE UPP-participating universities reject the diversity-by-proxy approach. If past is prologue, however, schools will use applicants’ “commitment to diversity” as a stand-in for race to try to appear to comply with state law.
This loophole is at least as bad as the original problem. Reformers should be ready for it.
Photo by Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
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