251 UT's DEI Workshops for Faculty Search Committees
Community & Government | Registration opens 8/4/26 9:00 AM EDT
For a decade University of Tennessee used to provide Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) workshops for members of committees searching for new faculty members. These workshops have now been discontinued due to mandates from the current federal government against DEI instruction. Together with a dedicated group of UT faculty, Soren Sorensen was responsible for developing and leading the workshops. In this short ORICL course he will explain the reasons for providing DEI information to search committees and show numerous examples of the content of the workshops.
These examples are nearly all based on academic, published and peer-reviewed studies on human behavior in evaluating and interacting with other humans. So, please sign up for this ORICL course so you can judge for yourself if DEI information is valuable and important or if it is something that should be prohibited.
Soren Sorensen
Soren Sorensen was a professor in nuclear physics at UT for nearly four decades with 12 years as department head and is now a Chancellor’s Professor Emeritus. He was also a research associate in the Physics Division at ORNL for 38 years. His main research focus has been experimental studies of hot and dense nuclear matter, and during the last 8 years of his tenure at UT he was also responsible for the STRIDE program that will be described in these ORICL lectures.