Over the last decade, many advertisements for faculty positions in universities and colleges in the U.S. have asked prospective applicants to submit, along with the usual materials (CV, teaching statement, research statement, and cover letter) additional information pertinent to their experience, values, commitments, intentions, and/or activities concerning diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Occasionally other related values have been invoked along with (or occasionally instead of) the usual DEI triad, such as justice, accessibility, antiracism, cultural sensitivity, building a “team culture,” or belonging. This information—whether submitted as a separate document or integrated into other application materials—is typically known as a “diversity statement,” or, in this report’s usage, a “DEI statement.” 

DEI statements arose first in the University of California (UC) system, in response to concern from some university leaders that the UC’s practices of tenuring and promoting faculty were insufficiently sensitive to diversity considerations and so out of step with the UC’s efforts to fulfill its mission with respect to diversity. In response, UC leaders spearheaded efforts to shift policy and practice to address this concern, with DEI statements emerging as a key part of their strategy.

As the practice of requesting DEI statements has spread through higher education in the U.S., so too have criticisms. Critics have noted that such statements infringe upon academic freedom, amount to requiring an illegal loyalty oath from faculty job applicants, constitute an objectionable political litmus test, and invidiously discriminate against applicants whose views about DEI depart from the typical “progressive” stance. Requiring these statements pressures applicants to align with specific ideological views regardless of their personal beliefs, effectively functioning as compelled political speech. As some have noted, DEI statements often encourage “performativity” where “people [know] the right thing to say” rather than fostering genuine diversity of thought. Importantly, requiring these statements has not been shown to improve student experiences.

Because we believe that academics should be judged on the quality of their scholarship and teaching and not by their ideologies, Heterodox Academy agrees with many of these criticisms and so generally opposes the use of DEI statements in faculty hiring. However, despite intense debate around this practice, there remains a lack of comprehensive, up-to-date information on the prevalence and nature of DEI statement requirements in American higher education. To address this gap in understanding, this research report seeks to document the prevalence, distribution, and characteristics of DEI statement requirements in the most recent faculty hiring cycle.

Key findings include:

• 22.3% of 10,000+ faculty job advertisements from the 2024-2025 U.S. higher education hiring cycle requested DEI statements or other DEI-related materials, with private institutions (28.6%) requesting them at higher rates than public institutions (19.0%).
• Public institutions in coastal states requested DEI statements at much higher rates than those in the Southeast and Midwest.
• Baccalaureate colleges led all Carnegie classifications in request rates for DEI statements in their faculty job ads (42.8%).
• Faculty job ads in STEM fields (25.5%) requested DEI statements at rates comparable to humanities (23.5%) and social sciences (24.8%), challenging perceptions that DEI concerns are limited to certain disciplines.
• DEI statement requests take remarkably varied forms: in states with bans on the use of DEI statements in faculty hiring at public institutions, it appears that some public institutions have adapted by asking applicants to give DEI-related information in cover letters, teaching philosophies, and other application materials.
• Only 15.6% of job ads requesting DEI statements mention viewpoint diversity concepts, suggesting that most requests for DEI statements focus on demographic diversity rather than intellectual or ideological diversity.