Yoel Inbar rose to prominence in the fall of 2023, when he was in the process of getting hired at the University of California, Los Angeles. He didn’t end up getting the job—and it was transparently about a podcast episode he’d recorded a year earlier, in which he criticized “diversity statements”. The mandated letters have become part of the academic hiring process, page-long essays explaining how the candidate would contribute to campus diversity. Inbar wrote one for UCLA—and has been involved in hiring processes, finding them useful tools—but has been outspoken of the concept as a blanket rule, along with the broader scope of diversity, equtity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.
Now an associate professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, Inbar studies morality and judgments, particularly with respect to belief systems, political ideologies and social attitudes. While his flare-up with UCLA happened before Hamas’s attack on Oct. 7, he has since followed closely how poorly designed DEI programs are for adhering to students with differing views on political and social issues—like the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Inbar sat down with Phoebe Maltz Bovy to share his story and discuss how the campus atmosphere has shifted for Jewish students and faculty in the last two years.
— Yoel Inbar (@yorl) March 20, 2025
Transcript
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Hi, this is Phoebe Maltz Bovy, and you’re listening to The Jewish Angle, a podcast from The CJN. So diversity, equity, and inclusion all sound lovely, right? Good values. What could be nicer? In practice, though, initiatives promoting these values have gotten a lot of pushback in recent years, and there’s no one-sentence summary of why. Some of that pushback has come from people who outright oppose meritocracy and are just bigots, basically, or they prefer a world with hereditary elites. But what makes this a thorny topic is that some of the opposition also comes from people who are in favor of these values in principle, but who see DEI as it’s practiced in North America, or rather as it’s practiced in Canada now and was until recently in the United States, as damaging to the very goals it purports to benefit. We’ve been hearing a lot these days about Jewish professors moving from the US to Canada because of Trump. Yoel Inbar’s case is a bit different. Yoel is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. I am happy to have him here with us on The Jewish Angle today, because when I saw that the University of California system was getting rid of its mandatory DEI statements for applicants, your name is one that immediately came to my mind. Please explain why that was.
Yoel Inbar: Hey, Phoebe, thanks for having me. A couple of years ago, I was being considered for a job at UCLA, and this would have been a partner hire. So my partner already had an offer there. It’s not infrequent that universities, when they’re trying to recruit somebody, will ask if they’re in a couple and the couple is also an academic, can we find something for the partner? So that’s the context. I went out there, I interviewed, and they seemed to like me. It seemed to go well. They told me, “We really like your CV. It seems like you’d fit in well here,” etc. Afterwards, I heard that there was trouble. The trouble was basically that I have my own podcast in which my co-host and I talked about the pros and cons of requiring these kinds of diversity statements.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: And Nate, what’s the name of your podcast?
Yoel Inbar: Two Psychologists Four Beers. Yeah, so we drink and talk about stuff that’s going on in academia and beyond. For listeners who might not be familiar with what these are, basically, when you’re an applicant for a job, you’re asked to write a one or two-page statement about what you’ve done for diversity, equity, and inclusion, or what you would want to do in the future, or about your values. It’s kind of vague and it depends on the place you’re applying to. My co-host and I, about four or five years ago when these were first starting to pop up, recorded an episode where we talked about the pros and cons. Certainly, it wasn’t that we were condemning it as progressive overreach or anything like that. We were more talking about the upsides and downsides. Some of the really DEI-enthusiastic folks at UCLA did not like that. There were a couple of other things they disliked in the hundred-plus episodes of the podcast, but that really seemed to be the main issue. We were questioning whether DEI statements really were a good idea. In the end, they did not make me an offer under unusual circumstances. They spiked it before most of the faculty could really have a say, and it was clear from the documents we eventually got that it was because of the DEI stuff.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Mm. Mm. I mean, first of all, I’m so sorry this happened to you because that sucks.
Yoel Inbar: Well, that’s okay. It’s pretty great here. I’m happy to be here, you know.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: But it’s cold here.
Yoel Inbar: Yes.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: And yet at the same time. So I was going to— But you know, anything like that is always unpleasant to go through. But does this change in administration in the US mean nevermind, and now you go there and do that, or?
Yoel Inbar: No, no, this is all over, right? Like, yeah, no, there’s not a do-over on this stuff. I was sort of hoping they might send me an apology eventually. But, you know, maybe that’s still in the mail.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Yeah. I mean, it almost seems like that would be the very least they could do, but yeah. So timeline-wise, this is interesting. I was looking to see when this all happened, because I mentioned it in one of my columns at The CJN, and this was all 2023, but it was before October 7th.
Yoel Inbar: Yeah.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Right. So it seems like a lot of these issues would change abruptly. I do want to talk about these bigger angles, but also, what is it specifically that you objected to about these statements? Was it mainly them being mandatory or was it something else?
Yoel Inbar: Yeah, there were a few things we thought might be problematic. First, it could be compelled speech, where these statements ask you to support a particular ideology or worldview. They don’t necessarily have to be, but they might be used in that way. They could filter out everybody who doesn’t say the right things about DEI from an ideological standpoint, instead of being about teaching diverse populations. Another issue is they might just be cheap talk, especially if you’re recruiting graduate students who haven’t had a lot of opportunity to teach or mentor. You’re just asking people to say what they would do, and how informative is that, really? A third concern might be for people from outside the North American political context. They might not understand what’s being asked. If you’re coming from a school internationally, you might not have that same background in North American ideology around diversity, and you might be at a disadvantage. Ironically, you might end up helping people from the most privileged backgrounds. Harvard literally has people who will help you craft a diversity statement.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Yeah. I find that aspect super interesting because I wrote about this with privilege checking and all in my book, “The Perils of Privilege,” in 2017. I talked about college admissions essays and how writing one to show your privilege awareness is most effectively done by someone whose parents paid for a tutorial and knows it’s relevant. So is it similar?
Yoel Inbar: Yeah, yeah. Exactly. There’s all of this cultural knowledge that might seem obvious to people who are in that culture, but that is not obvious to people who are not in the culture. So, it might really be erecting barriers to people who don’t have the same cultural background as most of us in academia.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: So, to be clear, just for listeners, it’s not that you oppose diversity or fairness, or so forth, and think that there should be some sort of anointed elites at universities. Rather, it’s that you think this DEI stuff, as it was being practiced, was not furthering the goals it claimed it would. Is that more accurate?
Yoel Inbar: Yeah, I mean, I would even say, you know, the last hiring committee that I was on, we did ask for diversity statements, and I found them to be reasonably useful. Right. So, I think you can make a case that sometimes they are helpful, but the worry is that they are abused in a way that makes them not helpful. And more broadly, if we care about diversity, which I do, then we want to be asking, do these things help or not? We can’t be uncritical about an intervention because it’s claimed to help us achieve some goal that we like. We have to be able to say, well, does it actually help, or should we be doing something else? Or maybe even, is this counterproductive?
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Right. I mean, it seems like there are so many things, so many angles on this. One is the issue of equality of outcome with the identical outcome. We were both reading this Globe and Mail Business supplement article about this, which was saying that if you have your workplace structured right, you will just sort of automatically get people from all backgrounds in equal measure. I was just thinking about what is the likelihood that the Canadian Jewish News would have that outcome. It just seems like a lot of different jobs would potentially, you know, it’s tricky. But the other thing is just this that I wanted to talk about. Please say if you have anything on that also. But, like, just this question of which groups count seems to have been contentious kind of from the get-go, and then suddenly became very much so after October 7th.
Yoel Inbar: Yeah, certainly, in the DEI discourse that I was aware of pre-October 7th, Jews didn’t come up. Now, to be fair, in academia, we are kind of overrepresented. Right. So you don’t really have to worry about, we don’t have enough Jews and we need more Jews and so on. But it just wasn’t even on the radar. Right. So, yeah, it’s. When you get into this…
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Well, but the inclusion aspect, I was going to say…
Yoel Inbar: Right, right. Honestly, that wasn’t on the radar either. And I think we’ll get to how that was an issue post-October 7th. But, yeah, the way in which I dealt with it was pretty specifically around diversity of faculty. There, you know, I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect that we’re going to precisely match the population of Canada or the GTA or whatever it is. But still, when you have undergraduates who are at my campus, UT Scarborough, they’re a majority-minority, and like, literally every faculty member is white. It’s a little weird. So that’s something we definitely had in mind and thought about. And then also, how are you going to teach and mentor people who come from all sorts of different backgrounds? So that kind of broadly is about diversity. And then the last thing I should say is we care about the campus climate and the climate of the department, and so on. Those are all things that I think are completely reasonable and within our job description, and that we should be caring about. Any objections that I had were that it seems like this thing that you’re trying to do isn’t really helpful.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: So, would you say that your research as a psychology professor in any way informs how you look at this issue? Because I see that you study the moral language among elites as one of the things. So it seems like it would, but it’s not my area.
Yoel Inbar: Yeah, no, I study morality and moral thinking broadly. And there are some characteristic things that happen when people start to think of something as a moral issue. One thing that happens is they just become more black and white in their thinking. They don’t like question asking. It starts to feel heretical. You’re supposed to agree rather than asking inconvenient questions. And when people encounter those sorts of people who are asking those questions, they get upset, right? They don’t like them, they get emotionally upset with them, and they want to kick them out. Kick them out of the tribe, kick them out of the coalition, whatever. I feel like that is kind of what we see here sometimes. Again, I think most people are reasonable about this, but I think there are some folks who really think of this as a moral crusade. And you see all of those characteristics of moral thinking in how they respond to threats.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: You’re so calm and reasoned, which I guess explains why you have not turned this into your whole personality, because you have a backstory where you could have done that.
Yoel Inbar: Yeah, it’s partly that I really didn’t want that. I consciously took a step back and thought: I’m going to be thoughtful about how I talk about this publicly. I’m going to decline the invitations to go on right-wing podcasts or get interviewed for right-wing media because it’s just not—nothing against them per se—just not how I want to spend my life. I like what I do. I don’t particularly enjoy being a political figure, and I just don’t want to do that with my time.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: That seems fair. So, all of this stuff with Jews became quite different after October 7th, the whole sort of inclusion aspect. It struck me that a lot of Jews on campuses in Canada and the United States had been kind of promised something DEI-like to happen for them, and then it didn’t. You know what I mean? Does this ring a bell at all?
Yoel Inbar: I don’t know. I can’t say what people felt they had been promised. As a Jewish person pre-October 7th, I felt that this DEI thinking just wasn’t about Jewish people at all. It wasn’t mentioned. It didn’t come up. So, I don’t know. Broadly, you would think if you’re a member of a religious minority and you’re going to university, you expect the DEI people to care about you feeling included. That seems…
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: I was just reading also this New York Times article about the president of Harvard who has been standing up to Trump on this. Well, maybe we will now leap ahead in time a little bit. But the whole gist of this article is that the president of Harvard also agrees with Trump that Harvard has an antisemitism problem and an ideological diversity problem and all of this, but just doesn’t think that the president of the United States gets to decide what universities do. So, what do you make of the way this crackdown from the Trump administration on DEI is being done in the name of fighting antisemitism?
Yoel Inbar: Yeah, I don’t give the Trump administration a lot of credit for sincerely caring about antisemitism. Speaker A: I think this is a way for them to whack their ideological adversaries, people they don’t like, and they’ve had an axe to grind against higher ed for quite a while. And, you know, I mean, fair enough. So, like, I don’t. Leaving aside the specific things that the Trump administration that they’re trying to do, which I think many of them ultimately won’t survive legal scrutiny, the idea that if you as an institution align yourself in a very partisan way and at the same time take a lot of government money, that is going to cause a conflict once the people who disagree with you come into power, which is going to happen eventually. And I think it’s complicated on the part of universities because I think university administrations at the higher levels are very aware of this, and they are really making efforts to reach out to people on the right. But the faculty on average are very left-wing. And so this is just a really difficult thing for universities to manage. Like, culturally, they just are left-wing institutions. At the same time, in the US and Canada, they’re really dependent on the government in all sorts of ways. Even private institutions we’ve seen basically can’t function without government support, and they’re sort of in a box there. So that’s tough. The way the Trump administration has gone about this, I think is very bad, and I think lots of kind of heterodox critics of university cultures have said the same thing. You know, all of my critiques apply still, but the way that the Trump administration is doing this is bad when it comes to campus antisemitism. Maybe we can go a little deeper there about the role that DEI has played. I think at the very least, it’s fair to say that these institutions that promised that if you’re a religious minority, we are going to care that you feel included and that you belong here. That really hasn’t been felt by many Jewish students.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Yeah, I mean, I think that seems to be sort of down to the details of specific DEI sessions and so forth. It seems like that has been a big issue. I want to talk about all of this, but the speech issues from Trump seem to me and to many others to exceed the ones from that era preceding. It seems like the crackdown on speech coming from the Trump administration is of a scale different from the compelled speech of a DEI statement. Do you think that’s accurate, or am I just a knee-jerk liberal in an echo chamber?
Yoel Inbar: I mean, I think that the two just almost can’t be compared in terms of their consequences. I think that the DEI statements often were used as sort of an ideological filter, and I think that’s bad for scientific research. It’s unfair to some of the individuals who get filtered out. But what the Trump administration is doing is like, you know, deporting people for writing op-eds or defunding a bunch of cancer research. You know, just in the scale of the impact, I just can’t compare those two even.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Right, so, okay, so it sounds like we’re on the same page on this. But yeah, so it’s going to be one of those, a lot of agreeing podcasts. Sorry about that, for those who wanted more mudslinging. But this is something that I’ve been, I don’t even know if struggling with is the right word because I feel like I’m actually kind of clear on it. But you get a lot of, especially maybe this is a Blue Sky phenomenon, the platform Bluesky, the nicer alternative to Twitter or not, depending. But a lot of what I’ve been seeing is this kind of, see, the real threat is from the right. If you were ever speaking out against something like a mandatory DEI statement, this is on you. If you ever express any kind of heterodox thought, this is on you. If you ever complained about antisemitism, this is on you. I see it a bit differently. I see it more as that the progressive illiberalism kind of paved the way for some of this and it makes it so that there is something real that the Trump administration can kind of latch onto and then do all sorts of stuff that isn’t actually addressing it. How do you see it?
Yoel Inbar: Yeah, sorry, man, I would love to disagree with you.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Please do.
Yoel Inbar: Yeah, no, I can’t on this. I think that’s exactly right. I think that this kind of Blue Sky criticism is stupid. This is why I don’t go on Blue Sky. It’s really, it’s what a disaster of, I mean, okay, so I will say the one thing that’s good about academic Blue Sky is that people talk about their new papers, and sometimes you’re like, oh, I’d like to read that paper. But anything political, groupthink machine, it’s just ridiculous. And so people say this dumb shit and nobody contradicts them. This is stupid. Okay, like the reason that Trump is going after this stuff is in part because it actually is unpopular. The way to not get attacked by demagogues is to make yourself harder to demagogue. And what Trump is going after is stuff that many people don’t like, and they don’t like it because there actually is some bad stuff that happened there. Now, in terms of scale, obviously, I think what Trump is doing is worse, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t have responsibility, you, faculty member or administrator or whatever, for making it easy. And I think that leaving aside whatever political fight we’re having right now in the US, which is, as momentous as it seems, is only one moment in time, what we ought to be worrying about is why, as institutions, have we dramatically lost the trust of the public? Right. If you look at people’s trust in higher ed as an institution, it’s just this precipitous decline over the last 10, 15 years. And not just among the right, among independents and among people on the left as well. So there is something real happening there and we really should worry about it and try to fix it. And that is irrespective of whatever thing that Trump has to be, you know, whatever he’s trying to do in the moment. I think the Harvard approach is exactly right. They’re pushing back on the stuff that is illegal and overreach, and at the same time, they’re acknowledging that there are issues that need to be addressed.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: I mean, it does seem like what happened after October 7 was that it suddenly became clear that there wasn’t just, in all cases, the oppressed and the oppressor, and it was just everybody was going to agree on who’s who. But instead of that just sort of leading to academia itself naturally backing away from certain things, we got something else.
Yoel Inbar: I think this underscores maybe a more fundamental problem with the way that we have been doing DEI. So one of the promises, kind of broadly, was supposed to be, we’re going to understand each other better. When we have conflicts with each other, we’re going to be able to resolve those better. In practice, that’s never what this was designed to do. The way that DEI on college campuses was designed to work was to say, I’m a member of some minority group and I’m experiencing this problem, and I want that addressed. And what that leaves out is sometimes solving my problem makes some other minority group worse off. So when you have these real conflicts, these real conflicts of values or preferences or needs between different groups, the DEI framework is just not set up right now to resolve those. And so on campus, post October 7th, I. Speaker A: I would characterise it as a conflict of values, kind of broadly, between people who were pro-Palestinian, very upset about the war and wanted to protest, and Jewish students who felt, often with reason, that those protests made them unsafe. How do you arbitrate that? I think there are legitimate claims on both sides, and the DEI apparatus just was not set up to say, well, you both have a point, and now we’re going to figure out some sort of way to reconcile those competing values or claims.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: So something that I find really sort of, I don’t know, mind-boggling or something like, I don’t even know what the word is, discombobulating about talking about any of these topics is that your brain has to be kind of in two places at once. You, being a psychology professor, maybe you understand this better than I do, but in the U.S., talking about DEI feels like you’re talking in the past tense. But in Canada, it seems to be very much present to the point that there was just a National Post article about Michael Fraiman, a University of Saskatchewan law professor, who described to a National Post reporter the mandatory DEI trainings there, where they’re checking their privilege, like it’s 2014 in Saskatchewan. And so you seem particularly well-placed at explaining what’s up with where Canada is at in all of this, specifically Canadian academia, because it seems like business may be a different story.
Yoel Inbar: Yeah. So I think I can speak most to what I’ve seen here at U of T and then maybe a little bit to other institutions. It definitely now feels like a different world from the U.S. The U.S. has changed very quickly. I think in Canada, hopefully, we are going to be a little slower and more thoughtful about what changes we want to make. I know that many of the complaints or reservations from people who generally think of themselves as center-left are the same across Canadian versus U.S. institutions. The difference is Trump, obviously. My hope is that we will be able to moderate a bit, to think about what works well and what doesn’t, maybe to do fewer of these dumb trainings as described in this National Post article. I think even many fervently pro-DEI people are willing to say, yeah, these trainings don’t really work well.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: This is actually just one thing I wanted to follow up on that regard. If you’re in a meeting now, not you particularly, but if somebody in Canada is in a meeting now, do you think that they will feel emboldened? I don’t even know if this is generalizable, but would they feel emboldened by the fact that in the U.S., this has just been gotten rid of sort of outright, that they’d feel emboldened to make whichever critiques or give whichever sort of mild pushback? Or conversely, do you think it’s like if you do some pushback now, it’s like, oh, you’re Trumpy, go to America then if you don’t want this.
Yoel Inbar: Right, right. I mean, I think that’s a great question and remains to be seen. It might be that the vibe shift now is that we are in opposition to everything that America is doing, and so we might counter-polarize. Before that, like before the trade war, my feeling was this vibe shift was going to come here as well, and we are in many ways still really culturally downstream of the U.S. here in Canada. So my expectation was that we were going to go in the same direction, although not as quickly or extremely, always kind of more moderately. But we’re living in a different world now, so it remains to be seen. I think for us, just the stuff that I’ve seen is a little more pushback and questioning and the feeling that we’re past the peak of just really extreme and silly stuff. But maybe that’s also just rose-colored glasses. I don’t know.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: I mean, just for Canadian Jews, I think there’s probably some interest in at least a bit of reform of this type of thing, perhaps more so than for other populations. I don’t know.
Yoel Inbar: Yeah, I mean, anecdotally, when I talk to colleagues about this, the Jewish colleagues are usually, let’s say, more sensitive to how some of this stuff has played out, post-October 7th.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Right. I mean, I guess all this is hard to generalize, and I think there are also a lot of Jews who are among the people very enthusiastic about DEI, which makes it hard to measure. Oh, this is so complicated. But are you hopeful for the future of academia? Will there still be academia in 10 years?
Yoel Inbar: I am confident that there will still be academia in 10 years, Phoebe.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: In Canada and in the United States, or just in Canada?
Yoel Inbar: You know, I’m more confident about Canada. No, I mean, I’m kidding. Like, these storms will pass. I think academia does need some serious changes in how it relates to the broader culture. But I think that we’ve changed and adapted before, and we can do that again.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Yoel Inbar, thank you so much for coming on The Jewish Angle. Where can people find you?
Yoel Inbar: Well, first of all, thanks so much for having me. They can look at my website if, for some reason, they want to read my scientific papers. More likely, they might be interested in my podcast, Four Beers. You can find all of our episodes there.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Excellent. Thank you so much.
Yoel Inbar: Thanks, Phoebe.
Show Notes
Related links
- Yoel Inbar’s website and podcast, Two Psychologists Four Beers
- “Saskatchewan professor blogs his way through mandatory anti-racism ‘boot camp’” (National Post)
Credits
- Host: Phoebe Maltz Bovy
- Producer and editor: Michael Fraiman
- Music: “Gypsy Waltz” by Frank Freeman, licensed from the Independent Music Licensing Collective
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