Study Finds Hiring of Chief Diversity Officer Doesn’t Increase Campus Diversity
“We are unable to find significant statistical evidence”
It’s almost like the hiring of pointless diversity administrators is an exercise in virtue signaling.
Reason reports:
New Study Finds Zero Evidence That Hiring a Chief Diversity Officer Produces More Diversity on Campus
Campus diversity czars frequently draw massive salaries. The University of Michigan’s chief diversity officer, for example, rakes in $396,000 a year.
Is that money well spent? Probably not. A new study went looking for evidence that employing a chief diversity official produced a more diverse faculty and came back empty-handed.
“We are unable to find significant statistical evidence that preexisting growth in diversity for underrepresented racial/ethnic minority groups is affected by the hiring of an executive level diversity officer,” write the study’s authors, a team of researchers associated with Baylor University.
The team looked at data from 2001 to 2016. Over that time period, universities hired a lot of chief diversity officers, but this did not correlate with diversity-related faculty hiring.
Possibly sensing that these findings will likely offend many administrators, lead author Steven Bradley defended the research in an interview with Inside Higher Ed. He stressed that he wasn’t saying diversity czars are bad for diversity—just that he couldn’t produce any evidence that they were good for it.
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Comments
Water = wet. Give me a grant.
Hahahaha
I would like to see the statistical distribution of the so-called Diversity officers. I am willing to bet it is 1/%inreallife.
We had a really heated discussion about this 20 years ago when it came to hiring new faculty. I pointed out that the current faculty represented the actual percentages of those groups who were being trained at the time, basically a 4:1 ratio of males to females. Current hiring at best should reflect the current training ratio, which is about 1:1. Over time the faculty will naturally approach that distribution. But some felt that the teaching faculty should become 1:1 immediately, which essentially meant that all white males being trained would be SOL career wise for the next 10-15 years regardless of competency. They are now suffering the consequences of going against the natural order. Get woke, go broke, does not discriminate.