UW Professor Cliff Mass told the Dori Monson Show that the ballot issue earlier this month needed at least a two-thirds majority to pass. Instead, the employment requirement statement failed when nearly 40% of faculty either rejected it or abstained.
A faculty vote that would have required University of Washington professors seeking tenure or advancement to sign a statement supporting a uniform diversity, equity, and inclusion statement has failed – and at least one conservative professor calls the vote itself “a fight for the soul of UW.”
But instead of breaking down between liberal and conservative lines, Mass explained, the vote failed for an entirely different reason. The professor compared this vote to anti-Community loyalty oaths that faculties were pressured to sign in the 1950s. Back then, he told Dori, “Some faculty got fired when they refused to do this. . . It was wrong then and it would have been wrong now if we did it again.”