This is a big win for the Trump administration. California's system of universities announced yesterday that it will do away with mandatory diversity statements in hiring and promotion. You no longer have to pledge allegiance to the BLM flag to get a job teaching in these universities.

University of California leaders said Wednesday they are eliminating a years-old practice of requiring faculty job applicants to submit “diversity statements,” a move that comes after the Trump administration threatened to revoke federal funding from schools and universities that maintain diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

As part of job applications or promotions, many departments at UC campuses have required job seekers to submit written testimonials of one or two pages about how they have worked to enhance and support racial and other kinds of diversity in their fields. The essay requests started to appear in some UC applications in the early 2000s and gained popularity in the 2010s, attracting both praise and controversy...

“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,” Katherine S. Newman, UC provost and executive vice president for academic affairs, said in a Wednesday letter to campus provosts.

That admission by the UC provost, that this might have nothing to do with a lot of jobs the university is hiring for, shouldn't have required any arm twisting by the federal government. It was always the case that diversity statements had no connection to many of the jobs and promotions at hand. If you teach math or chemistry, hiring should be based on your ability to teach math or chemistry, not your fealty to Ibram Kendi's worldview. And yet, somehow these same people thought it was fine to require everyone to bend the knee to the cult of identity politics for the past decade, even if they knew it was only testing people's ability to juggle buzzwords.

For a decade, the 10-campus system was a national leader in using such statements, as universities increasingly came under pressure from those who wanted more diverse student bodies and faculties...

Some states, including North Dakota, Florida and Texas, have barred requiring them or stopped them altogether. Amid the pressure, several colleges, including Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Michigan, recently said they would stop requiring them in faculty hiring.

“They encouraged a performativity,” said Steven Brint, a professor at the University of California, Riverside. “People knew the right thing to say.”

As of last night, the DEI messaging was still on the UCLA website.

Diversity is currently one objective of the UCLA Faculty Search Process, according to the UCLA Equity, Diversity & Inclusion website. UCLA Media Relations did not immediately respond to a request for comment on how UCLA’s hiring objectives or policies will change at the campus level.

University guidance stating that promotion and recognition will be based in part on efforts to further diversity and inclusion remained live on the UCLA Academic Senate website as of 10:40 p.m. Wednesday evening.

“Contributions in all areas of faculty achievement that promote diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging should be given due recognition in the academic personnel process, and they should be evaluated and credited in the same way as other faculty achievements,” the UC Academic Personnel Manual states.

Maybe it will take them a few days to rewrite that. So the bottom line here is that standalone diversity statements are no longer allowed at all, though applicants can voluntarily mention diversity in their applications.

A UC Davis law professor named Brian Soucek is very sad to see these statements go. "It can only be explained as an attempt at advanced appeasement of the Trump administration’s current threats," he said. He's probably right about that. If not for the Trump administration's cutting off grants to Columbia University, this would have gone on for another decade. But now these schools are on notice that it could cost them something. In the case of the UC system, they are already facing state budget cuts because the state is broke and struggling to balance the budget.

So this really is a win for the Trump administration and of course for every sane person stuck in an academic career who just wants to teach the subject matter at hand without having to justify it to a bunch of race minders paid to find fault with their efforts.