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Notes -
We did.
That is: there was a general pressure from administration and other professors to have some kind of DEI statement; we (the search committee) wrote the prompt ourselves, and nobody outside of the search committee read these statements. We deliberately avoided DEI/woke jargon in our prompt, which went something like: "Describe how you have adjusted your teaching based on considerations of your students' various backgrounds. Give specific examples." We wanted applicants who have a track record of appropriately adjusting their pedagogy to fit the students that are actually in their course, and that's what we looked for.
Quite a few applicants phrased their statement with lots of DEI/woke jargon--probably because they were applying for other academic positions as well and DEI statements got pretty common then. That wasn't a drawback for those whose examples were actual useful pedagogy, like the guy who made a point to reach out to struggling students, noted that many of them were black ( but also conveyed that he reached out to all struggling students). Showing facility with currently-fashionable jargon is a definite plus at a small liberal arts college, because it means students aren't going to out-jargon you. However, we did scrutinize such statements for signs that the candidate was a possible liability (like those that supported actual discriminatory treatment based on protected categories) or poor collegiality (like those who made a point to publically "call out" various shit at their institution without even approaching people in private).
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