The Trump administration is routing DEI regimes on college campuses.

The University of California announced Wednesday that it would drop diversity statement requirements when hiring new faculty. The university’s provost, Katherine S. Newman, announced the move.

HUGE NEWS: The University of California Board of Regents just ended the use diversity statements in faculty hiring throughout the system.

“To be clear, stand-alone diversity statements will no longer be permitted in recruitments,” the system’s provost said in a letter today. pic.twitter.com/zqKaHUZSqt

— John Sailer (@JohnDSailer) March 20, 2025

“The requirement to submit a diversity statement may lead applicants to focus on an aspect of their candidacy that is outside their expertise or prior experience,” read a letter from Newman, according to Fox News Digital. While applicants to faculty jobs can still include diversity, equity, and inclusion accomplishments, they won’t be required anymore.

While this doesn’t remove DEI in hiring entirely, it represents a massive blow to the overall movement and signals what a dramatic sea change has taken place in just a few years.

The University of California system was the first place to implement mandatory diversity statements. In California, affirmative action is deeply unpopular with voters, who opposed its implementation in school admissions.

Don’t think that deterred the leftists who run California universities.

The state’s higher ed elites simply concocted other stealthy methods to discriminate and evade the will of the people. They created “holistic” admission standards and all kinds of ways to essentially maintain affirmative action. School systems around the country have copied the UC system’s methods, including the implementation of diversity statements.

As an aside, just remember what higher ed’s priorities are as these schools whine about losing money for “research” when the Trump administration uses civil rights law to pull taxpayer-funded grants. These institutions aggressively evade voter preferences to eliminate racial discrimination yet think you, the taxpayers, should send them hundreds of millions of dollars year, after year, after year.

The UC used its diversity statement requirement both as an ideological test and as a means to enact racial affirmative action. This applied to all departments, whether in the humanities or the hard sciences. It seemed to be doing its job.

According to a study reported in The New York Times, “At Berkeley, a faculty committee rejected 75 percent of applicants in life sciences and environmental sciences and management purely on diversity statements.”

More from the Times on the effect of the diversity statement:

Latino candidates constituted 13% of applicants and 59% of finalists. Asian and Asian-American applicants constituted 26% of applicants and 19% of finalists. Fifty-four percent of applicants were white and 14% made it to the final stage. Black candidates made up 3% of applicants and 9% of finalists.

As one professor posted on X, the diversity statement became so important in the hiring process that the UC system created templates for writing them that were basically just race reveals and a demonstration of commitment to left-wing activism.

Diversity statements were so important to hiring in the UC system that they would show you how to write them.

The UCSD School of Physical Sciences posted redacted examples and it’s just people revealing their race and gender and promising to do activism. Good riddance. https://t.co/RpdAm8oRHt pic.twitter.com/eVq2pZ64jA

— Brandon Warmke (@BrandonWarmke) March 20, 2025

This highly “effective” diversity statement requirement was replicated in elite schools around the country. One of those schools was the University of Michigan, which is in another state that banned affirmative action.

But the DEI empire didn’t last.

The University of Michigan dropped the diversity statement requirement at the end of 2024.

Many other schools that adopted the diversity statement requirement have dropped it recently, too. Now that it’s also been abolished in its birthplace, it may be worth asking why this is all happening at once.

In 2020, DEI reached its high-water mark during the Black Lives Matter “mostly peaceful” protests. Elite institutions almost uniformly, and with maximum encouragement from the legacy media, embraced the “racial awakening.” This didn’t just happen in the United States, but across the globe, wherever elite, liberal institutions had power.

But one wonders if it ever had a larger societal mandate. In fact, it almost certainly didn’t. DEI and various forms of metastasized social liberalism became the moral justification for institutions which had already been losing societal trust before the great awokening.

The demands of the movement became oppressive, discriminatory, and increasingly totalitarian. Merit was being replaced by racial identity and ideology, even in fields like medicine and engineering.

New doctors were pledging oaths to fight “white supremacy” rather than “do no harm.”

But the country turned against this revolutionary fanaticism whose chief proponents often turned out to be intellectual frauds or outright crooks.

Then an even more devastating blow came when the American people elected President Donald Trump in November. Not only did this signal a monumental “vibe shift,” a stunning rebuke to the countless institutions that pulled out all the stops to keep him out of office, but it opened the door for massive civil rights lawsuits from the executive branch.

Trump made it clear that he intended to end DEI, and given recent Supreme Court rulings, it is increasingly likely the law will be on his side. Universities now risk losing their federal funding for supporting DEI, which would be devastating to their business model.

So, a massive amount of cultural, political, and now financial pressure is weighing on universities to reform despite their clear internal unwillingness to do so. Even the left-wing University of California system has had to adjust to this new reality.

So even if this doesn’t “fix” higher education by a long shot, it’s still cause for celebration. The tide has turned. Forcing higher education to change its ways and eject DEI isn’t destroying America’s edge in research and academics—it just might be saving it.