APRIL 21, 2026, NEW YORK, NEW YORK — Heterodox Academy (HxA), a non-partisan, non-profit organization that advocates for open inquiry in higher education, announced today the release of a new report, Changing DEI Requirements in Faculty Hiring: A Comparative Analysis Between 2024 and 2025 Hiring Cycles, a data-driven analysis of how requests for DEI-related materials in faculty job advertisements have shifted over the past year.

The report analyzes more than 16,500 faculty job advertisements from the Fall 2025 hiring cycle and compares them against 10,000 faculty job advertisements from the Fall 2024 cycle, offering the most current and comprehensive picture of DEI requirements in U.S. faculty hiring to date.

The HxA team finds significant changes year-to-year, noting several key takeaways:

• Explicit requests for applicants to address DEI in their application materials fell by more than half, dropping from approximately 25% of full-time faculty job ads in 2024 to just 11% in 2025.
• The most dramatic shift was the near-disappearance of standalone DEI statement requirements, which declined from 13.4% of job ads to just 2.5%.
• An additional 37% of 2025 job ads do not explicitly request DEI materials but still signal that DEI commitments will be valued in candidate selection. Combining implicit and explicit signals, roughly 48% of ads in 2025 still carry DEI expectations of some kind, down from about 66% in 2024.
• Geographic variation is stark: 34% of faculty job ads in California include explicit DEI requirements, compared to less than 1% in states such as Kansas and Alabama. DEI requests remain most prevalent in the Northeast and on the West Coast, and least prevalent in states with anti-DEI legislation.
• Social sciences and humanities request DEI materials at higher rates than STEM and professional disciplines.
• Only 13% of faculty job ads requesting DEI-related materials mention viewpoint diversity, suggesting that universities continue to emphasize demographic diversity rather than other potential dimensions of diversity, such as intellectual heterogeneity.

The report attributes the decline to a combination of state-level legislation — 17 states had passed laws restricting diversity statements in hiring as of December 2025 — and broader national trends, including federal executive orders directing agencies to end DEI programs and high-profile university decisions such as the University of California system's announcement that it would no longer require standalone DEI statements.

“The decline in explicit DEI statement requirements is real and substantial. That's the clear top-line finding," said Dylan Selterman, Director of Research and Resource Development at HxA. "But it's only part of the story. Even when departments aren't asking candidates to write about DEI, many are still signaling that it will factor into hiring. When you combine explicit requests with that kind of implicit language, nearly half of faculty job ads in 2025 still carry DEI expectations of some form, down from about two-thirds the year before. Institutions are adapting to a changing legal and political environment, but DEI hasn't disappeared completely from the hiring process.”

The report also notes that the decline has not been accompanied by any corresponding increase in attention to viewpoint diversity, a dimension of diversity that HxA has long argued is central to the academic mission. Even among institutions still requesting DEI materials, intellectual and ideological diversity remains largely absent from the conversation.

About Heterodox Academy

Heterodox Academy (HxA) is a nonpartisan, nonprofit membership organization of faculty, staff, and graduate students committed to fostering a culture of open inquiry on college and university campuses. Through a combination of grassroots membership efforts and direct engagement with institutional leaders, HxA equips campus stakeholders to advance viewpoint diversity, constructive disagreement, and the free exchange of ideas — values essential to higher education's role as a truth-seeking, knowledge-generating enterprise.

Press Contact 

Nicole Barbaro Director of Communications barbaro@heterodoxacademy.org