This week, advocacy group Heterodox Academy reported that DEI statements required by academic job-seekers are in “sharp decline”, based on a comparison of faculty job ads in 2025 and 2024. That sounds like a resounding victory for those seeking to push back against entrenched Left-wing bias and ideological conformity on America’s campuses.

But this victory isn’t as decisive as it appears. During the so-called “Great Awokening”, intersectional social-justice advocacy under the rubric of DEI was the avowed North Star of Fortune 500 corporations, the sacred mission of universities, and the “whole of government” agenda espoused by the Biden administration. The personnel who implemented these programs are now part of the “Resistance” to the Trump Administration and red-state efforts to dismantle these ideological initiatives.

A steady stream of evidence indicates that universities are nominally complying with political pressure to end DEI programs. But they are doing this by renaming or rebranding their activities, meaning that there have been no real changes to underlying hiring practices. Such evidence includes statements from DEI officials and college admissions reps describing tricks of the trade, as well as persistent questions raised by investigators inside and outside academia.

Universities were warned by Trump’s Department of Education to eliminate DEI programs or risk the loss of federal funding, and at least 17 states have banned the use of diversity statements in faculty hiring or DEI content in classroom instruction. As a result, requests for DEI pledges from faculty job applicants dropped from 25% in 2024 to 11% in 2025, the Heterodox Academy says. But in large part, universities have changed DEI statements from mandatory to optional, “suggesting that while formal DEI statement requests have declined, many institutions continue to consider DEI-related material when evaluating candidates,” the report states.

As universities were removing DEI language from their mission statements and professing institutional neutrality, a number of college DEI officers — three of them in North Carolina alone — were fired after the group Accuracy in Media released surreptitiously filmed video in which the officials bragged about circumventing DEI rollbacks. “So, even though we still do it, we’re not supposed to say it,” a Florida A&M University administrator stated in a video, noting that DEI is “no longer called that” at the university.

A similar story can be found in college admissions, where affirmative action has been banned by the US Supreme Court. On various podcasts, college admissions officers have explained that they have developed a work-around, euphemistically called “holistic” or “contextual” admissions, where standardized test scores are adjusted or weighted to account for a student’s “background” or “lived experience”, widely understood as proxies for race or gender identity. Not surprisingly, acceptance rates for racial minorities have remained steady or even increased at some elite universities after the elimination of affirmative action.

The academic establishment’s resistance is legion. When Harvard University refused to comply with Trump administration demands to eliminate DEI programs, the feds froze over $2.2 billion in federal grants. This year, the US Justice Department launched an investigation into the racially-based admissions practices of three US medical schools in California and Ohio.

For at least half a century, academia has been an incubator of the DEI, antiracism and social-justice worldview. This identity-based belief system emphasizes privilege and oppression as the defining dynamics of Western societies, which are propped up by systems of Eurocentrism, colonialism and capitalism. It would be wishful thinking to believe that these entrenched beliefs, generations in the making, will vanish overnight.