You can tell much about higher education in America by looking at what schools consider a priority. Administrators and staff members devoted to diversity and inclusion were almost unheard of a decade ago.
Today, diversity has become an industry within higher education and the ranks are growing exponentially.
A recent report from the Heritage Foundation by Jay Greene and James Paul reveals that at some schools, the number of diversity staffers is higher than the number of people teaching history:
Diversity University: DEI Bloat in the AcademyThe promotion of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) on college campuses has become a central concern of higher education. Universities have created administrative and staff positions tasked with developing programming and offering services related to DEI. While it is widely understood that universities have devoted significant resources and attention to DEI goals, there has been little systematic examination of the scope of DEI staffing in the academy. Similarly, it is unclear how DEI staffing varies across institutions and how levels of DEI personnel compare to other staffing priorities…After reviewing publicly accessible websites, these authors found that the average university they sampled listed more than 45 people as having formal responsibility for promoting DEI goals. DEI staff listed by universities totaled 4.2 times the number of staff who assist students with disabilities in receiving reasonable accommodations, as required by law. DEI staff levels were 1.4 times larger than the number of professors in these universities’ corresponding history departments. Moreover, the average university had 3.4 people working to promote DEI for every 100 tenured or tenure-track faculty members.Certain universities had strikingly large numbers of people officially labeled with DEI responsibilities. At the University of Michigan, for example, 163 people were identified as having formal responsibility for providing DEI programming and services. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), there were 13.3 times as many people devoted to promoting DEI as providing services to people with disabilities. At Georgia Tech, there were 3.2 times as many DEI staff people as history professors. At the University of Louisville, the ratio of DEI personnel to history faculty was 2.9. The University of Virginia had 6.5 DEI staff for every 100 professors.
One of the things one might take away from this is that there are now more people on campus promoting the idea that some statues might be racist than there are people explaining why the statues exist in the first place.
More:
DEI Personnel Relative to History Faculty. These authors also compared each university’s DEI infrastructure to its number of history professors. History is a core academic subject that helps students understand their place in the world, as well as how to put current events in appropriate context and understand how citizens should engage in civic life. The ratio of DEI personnel to history faculty is an indicator of how much universities prioritize the narrower, particular narratives of DEI relative to the broader narratives traditionally covered by history faculty.
This graphic from the report offers a side-by-side comparison:
John Sexton of Hot Air notes that the schools in this study weren’t selected randomly:
The Heritage Foundation published a report yesterday which looks at the size of diversity, equity and inclusion staffing at 65 major universities around the country. The selection of schools wasn’t random. Instead, Heritage looked at Power Five universities, i.e. schools that are part of major athletic conferences such as the PAC 12. The point of selecting these universities was to select major, mainstream schools rather than smaller or more exclusive ones.
Anyone wondering why college tuition is so high may want to examine the salaries of these staffers.
Diversity pays well.
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