The University of California system has ended its use of mandatory diversity statements in faculty hiring, repudiating a controversial practice that it had pioneered and long championed.
It’s hard to overstate the decision’s significance. Diversity statements—short essays describing faculty candidates’ commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion—are controversial even among the professoriate. One survey of professors found that half regarded them as ideological litmus tests. A growing number of universities, including MIT and the University of Michigan, have ended the practice.
Until now, though, the UC system had shown little sign of backtracking. That’s unsurprising, given its leading role in developing the diversity-statement model. As early as 2012, UC San Diego had designated 30 percent of its new faculty positions for applicants whose “contributions to diversity would be a primary consideration” in their selection. In 2017, as part of a special life sciences hiring initiative, a UC Berkeley search committee rejected 600 of over 800 applicants based solely on their DEI statements.
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What started in California spread nationwide. A 2021 survey found that 19 percent of academic jobs now required diversity statements. They began to appear even at universities in conservative states. The UNC School of Medicine, for example, required diversity statements for promotion and tenure. Texas Tech’s Department of Biological Sciences passed a resolution promising to “require and strongly weight a diversity statement from all candidates” in its faculty-hiring process.
The UC system also influenced how other universities assessed applicants’ diversity statements, effectively making “race-consciousness” a job requirement for scholars. UC Berkeley’s rubric for evaluating diversity statements penalized candidates for saying that they prefer to “treat everyone the same,” or for objecting to racially segregated affinity groups. As my reporting has shown, by the early 2020s, the Berkeley rubric had become something of a gold standard, used by search committees across the country, including at the University of New Mexico, University of South Carolina, Northwestern University, and Ohio State University.
It’s not hard to see why diversity statements are corrosive. First, they threaten academic freedom and free expression. “Faculty at universities across the country are facing an echo of the loyalty oath, a mandatory ‘Diversity Statement’ for job applicants,” wrote Abigail Thompson, a math professor at UC Davis, in a 2018 piece for Notices of the American Mathematical Society. “[I]t’s a political test, and it’s a political test with teeth.”
Though her essay outraged colleagues, Thompson has been repeatedly vindicated. Documents that I acquired from Texas Tech, for example, showed how one search committee penalized a job candidate for not properly explaining the difference between equality and equity. At Ohio State, a search committee noted approvingly in its DEI evaluation that a nuclear-physics applicant could understand minorities’ plight because he was married to “an immigrant in Texas in the Age of Trump.”
Screening applicants for ideology also raises legal concerns. The Supreme Court has long been wary of threats to free speech in educational settings. In Keyishian v. Board of Regents, the Court noted that academic freedom is “a special concern of the First Amendment,” which does not permit laws that “cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom.”
Second, diversity statements often facilitate racial discrimination. Officially, these statements are not meant to discuss an applicant’s race, ethnicity, or sex. Yet, they have proven remarkably effective in achieving universities’ demographic aims. Consider UC Berkeley’s life-sciences initiative. The program’s initial applicant pool was 13.2 percent Hispanic. The shortlist, curated after the university weeded out applicants based on their diversity statements, rocketed up to 59.1 percent Hispanic. The proportion of white candidates fell from 53.7 percent to 13.6 percent. Program administrators deemed the initiative a resounding success. The disparate impact was the point.
Similar hiring initiatives in other states show that mandatory diversity statements can serve as a smokescreen for discrimination. At the University of New Mexico, for example, one NIH-funded faculty hiring program used diversity statements as a facially legal way to boost demographic diversity. Though the NIH emphasized that universities must comply with federal nondiscrimination laws, emails I obtained revealed that the program administrators were discriminating behind the scenes. One wrote bluntly, “I don’t want to hire white men for sure.”
The legal risks associated with such practices are contributing to the growing rollback of diversity statements. In February 2023, following my reporting on litmus tests in its biology department, Texas Tech publicly ended their use. Since then, the University of North Carolina system, the Texas A&M System, the University of Houston System, the Arizona University System, the University System of Georgia, the University of Missouri System, MIT, Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and the University of Michigan have all taken similar steps.
The UC system has not abandoned all its problematic faculty-hiring policies. It still maintains a policy that allows faculty contributions to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging in “teaching, research, and service” to be considered during the academic-review process. Nor has it ended its President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, which selects postdocs who “contribute” to diversity and gives them favor in tenure-track faculty searches. Still, the UC system’s recent decision marks a definitive moment—the symbolic end of one of the most misguided practices to afflict American higher education in the twenty-first century.
The UC system’s new policy was likely influenced by pressure from the Trump administration, including its threat to withdraw federal funding. The White House rightly sees a mandate for reform. More and more Americans view universities as progressive echo chambers—hostile to conservatives and even moderates—in ways that undermine the core mission of higher education. Diversity statements contribute to this perception by pushing right-leaning scholars out of academia altogether. They send a clear signal that conservatives and classical liberals are not welcome.
The UC system’s decision marks a significant step away from policies that effectively shut the door on non-progressive academics. Reformers should build on this momentum and press other universities to follow suit—fostering institutions that welcome all scholars committed to the pursuit of truth.
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