UC Berkeley ends waiver program that was used as a pipeline to tenure for activists: REPORT
A hiring policy that allegedly funneled political activists into faculty roles has apparently been scrapped by UC Berkeley.
The waiver allowed recipients a backdoor into tenure-track positions without the scrutiny of a competitive search.
UC Berkeley appears to have quietly dismantled a hiring policy that critics say funneled political activists into permanent faculty roles without the scrutiny of a competitive search.
Until recently, the University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program (PPFP) allegedly functioned as a pathway into tenure-track positions. Fellowship recipients, many of whom openly identify as activist-scholars, could be hired through a special search waiver that bypassed the normal faculty hiring process. That waiver has now been removed from Berkeley’s academic recruitment website, signaling the end of a program that was widely seen as guaranteeing jobs for fellows whose activism aligned with university administrators’ “diversity” priorities.
An archived version of the site from January confirms search waivers were available for current and former PPFP fellows.
The waiver’s removal was first reported in an X post by John D. Sailer, higher education policy director at the Manhattan Institute, who said the PPFP has been used to fast-track “hundreds of scholar-activists into tenure-track jobs.”
The PPFP has long marketed itself as an initiative to ”broaden” perspectives in the UC system. But in practice, it overwhelmingly advanced fellows whose work centers on identity politics, critical theory, and progressive activism.
In a review of the program in City Journal, Sailer found that all 42 fellows in the 2024 humanities and social sciences cohort focused their research on identity-based topics.
Examples cited by Sailer include David Turner, now a professor at UCLA, who co-founded the “Police-Free LAUSD Coalition” calling for the abolition of school police and praised Black Lives Matter activists for rejecting capitalism through a “Black queer feminist lens.” Another PPFP fellow, Amir Aziz of UC Berkeley, described himself as an “activist-scholar.” At UC Riverside, fellow Dan Bustillo studies “trans Latinx activist media.”
The PPFP remains open to all scholars holding terminal degrees.
Without the waiver, however, former fellows must now compete in open searches like all other candidates—a move that undercuts what had allegedly become a de facto pipeline from activist postdoctoral work to permanent professorships.
In a statement to Campus Reform, a UC Berkeley spokesperson said that it “closely abides by California law — in place since the 1990s — and our own policies that prohibit us from taking race, gender, religion or ethnicity into account when it comes to admissions and hiring.” The spokesperson said Berkeley’s programs are “open to all and free of discrimination of any sort,” and that the university remains committed to policies that allow all students, staff, and faculty to “thrive without regard for their beliefs and perspectives.”