Massachusetts Institute of Technology reportedly is doing away with a requirement for diversity statements for new hires, which is being billed as a watershed moment for college institutions that previously had widely accepted diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives pushed by Democrats and the Biden administration.

The requirement of diversity statements was considered a potential political litmus test for hiring, but MIT has ended them, according to the Unherd report Sunday.

“Requests for a statement on diversity will no longer be part of applications for any faculty positions at MIT,” an MIT spokesperson wrote in an email to Unherd on Saturday, acknowledging MIT President Sally Kornbluth has made the policy change “with the support of the Provost, Chancellor, and all six academic deans.”

DEI programs have been pushed by Democrats and the Biden administration, but they have widely been panned by conservatives as racially biased.

Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis often criticized DEI as been a guise for “division, exclusive, an inequity,” saying what might have had honest intentions actually had the exact opposite effect in its execution.

MIT was requiring a diversity statement as recently as late 2023 for a Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering assistant professor position, according to the report.

“We can build an inclusive environment in many ways, but compelled statements impinge on freedom of expression, and they don’t work,” Kornbluth wrote in a statement provided to Unherd.

The demand for DEI statements has unwound the reasons for the effort, according to Harvard Law School’s Randall Kennedy.

“It would be hard to overstate the degree to which many academics at Harvard and beyond feel intense and growing resentment against the DEI enterprise because of features that are perhaps most evident in the demand for DEI statements,”Kennedy wrote in The Harvard Crimson student newspaper last month.

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