What We’re Watching Out For In The 2026-2027 Academic Job Ad Cycle

DEI statement requirements are on the decline. Will this trend continue in 2026?

As we meander into the summer months following commencement ceremonies, the pace of campus life changes. Many (though not all) students and their professors go on a break from courses, turning their thoughts to planning for the coming academic year. For department chairs and search committees, that means something specific: faculty job ads for the 2026–27 hiring cycle are being drafted right now. By the time those ads go live later this summer, a set of consequential decisions will have been made about how to signal institutional and department values, and what criteria search committees will use to evaluate candidates.

My research team at Heterodox Academy has been tracking faculty job ad content for the last two years with an eye towards understanding how required Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) criteria have changed. Our recently published research report showed that the share of jobs requesting DEI statements — whether standalone, within cover letters, or within research or teaching statements — declined sharply, falling from approximately 25% in 2024 to 11% in 2025. (There are many other detailed analyses within the report that are worth your time to explore!)

With the backdrop of this report in mind, here’s what we’re watching out for in the coming 2026-2027 academic job cycle. Have additional suggestions for our upcoming analysis? Drop us a line at research@heterodoxacademy.org.

1. Will the DEI decline continue, or has it hit a floor?

Between 2024 and 2025, the share of job ads requesting that candidates address DEI dropped from 25% to 11%. As our report explains, some of the decline may be associated with anti-DEI legislation in red states; although blue states also saw a decline and some of the indirect pressure against DEI was coming from the federal government. Some enthusiastic crusaders may argue that 11% is not small enough, and the number should be zero. But our research also found that there was also striking variation across states, with rates in many red states either at or hovering near zero: 0.9% in Kansas, .06% in Alabama, and 0.0% in each of the Dakotas. This is at least partially attributable to schools in those states facing legal or political pressure to change course. However, some of our data challenge this hypothesis, showing that DEI statements also declined in states without anti-DEI legislation, and among private universities, which are not bound by such restrictions.

Still, job ads in blue states request DEI statements at much higher rates, including 34% in California, 36% in Washington, 44% in Maine, and 69% in Vermont (this was the highest percentage of any state, although Vermont also posted the fewest raw number of total job ads). So even if the overall nationwide rate of DEI statements in job ads is already on the decline, that trend could realistically continue in 2026, with the most potential for change coming in the Northeast and West Coast regions. It will be important to document what schools in those regions do differently going forward, if anything.

Last year’s decline, and any further decline could also reflect a broader societal trend. As HxA-affiliated scholar Musa al-Gharbi has argued, we may be entering a new era that is “past peak woke” in terms of academic scholarship (mirroring changes in other areas of society such as journalism and entertainment). But critics of our report have offered a different interpretation, which is that schools are rebranding. Specifically, administrators and department chairs, facing legal exposure or political pressure, are simply swapping explicit language for subtler signals that accomplish the same screening function. I think that explanation is less likely — if the subtle signals increased alongside decreases in explicit requests to address DEI, that would be stronger evidence for the rebranding hypothesis. But if the subtle signaling language decreases in subsequent job cycles, that would be further evidence against the rebranding hypothesis.

2. Do search committees signal and select for DEI in more subtle ways?

One finding from our recent report that we think deserves special attention going into the new cycle is the language describing candidate evaluation criteria. While explicit DEI statement requests fell, a different kind of language held steady. Roughly 40% of ads told applicants that their institutions value DEI and this framework would be used to evaluate candidates. This number was nearly identical to what we observed in the 2024 cycle. For instance, some ads had language indicating that their ideal candidates will have a “demonstrated commitment to promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion” in the classroom or in research/clinical environments, even without instructions for applications to write statements.

It may be worth watching for vocabulary drift in the upcoming job cycle. Even in states that outlaw DEI, other related terms like “inclusive pedagogy,” “justice-oriented scholarship,” or “culturally sensitive teaching,” accomplishes the same screening function while being harder to legislate against. Some ads may drift further into activist vocabulary, using terms like “anti-racist pedagogy,” “decolonial scholarship,” and “critical theory approaches.”

3. What does the geographic trend tell us about academic hiring markets?

Right now, the gap between red and blue states in terms of DEI restrictions is substantial, and it may widen to the extent that more red and purple states move to further reduce or eliminate other DEI programs. We don’t yet fully understand how this political variable is affecting potential job candidates’ applications, as well as their vetting and selection by search committees. American academia may be heading toward something like two separate hiring markets, operating under different rules and sending candidates very different signals about who belongs. If early career scholars start self-sorting by perceived political expectations before they even submit an application, the result could be deepening political homogeneity within institutions across states, which is precisely a condition that makes open inquiry harder on local campuses. A bifurcated market could wind up nationalizing the problems associated with litmus tests. This is already happening to some extent given policies that restrict academic freedom, as surveys show that faculty in red states are looking for new jobs in other states or internationally, or looking for non-academic jobs. Students may also be sorting into different schools according to their political views.

One place we’ll be watching closely is a category of academic units that our job ad data has not yet examined in depth: civics centers. HxA’s own research on the new landscape of civics centers found that half of all identified civics centers were founded in 2021 or later, with many of those created between 2022 and 2025 established through state legislation. These new centers, which are concentrated at public institutions in states like Ohio, Florida, Tennessee, and Texas, represent a structurally distinct hiring market, operating under different mandates and often different governance than traditional academic departments. In some cases, state legislators have directly shaped who gets hired: Ohio State’s Chase Center, for instance, has a separate academic council whose members must be approved by the state legislature.

Whether these centers are actually producing viewpoint diversity in hiring is an open question. Another possibility is that they craft ideological substitutions in the opposite political direction, with a stronger emphasis on conservative scholarship. A Chronicle of Higher Education analysis found that faculty at civics centers get “hundreds and hundreds” of applications per year, suggesting there is real demand among job candidates. It would be interesting to examine whether civic center job ads differ meaningfully from traditional department ads in how they signal evaluation criteria, and whether they’re actually avoiding the litmus test problem or simply inverting it.

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As we look forward to the upcoming academic year, the full findings from the 2025-26 cycle, including state-by-state breakdowns and our methodology, are in HxA’s recently published report. If you serve on a search committee or work in a provost’s office, it’s worth reading closely before your job ads are finalized. It’s also worth asking not just what your job postings say and what materials are requested, but also how your committees actually evaluate the people who apply.

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