When Republican Glenn Youngkin took on the role of Governor of Virginia, conservatives around the country breathed a sigh of relief, hoping that some of the woke policies in education there could be changed.
But you must remember that when it comes to education, and especially higher ed, the left has had a decades-long head start in shaping and controlling these institutions.
Tyler O’Neil writes at the Daily Signal:
The Left’s Priesthood: How DEI Offices Weaponize Virginia UniversitiesThose of us who work in the capital city I refer to as “Mordor” have slim pickings on where to live, and I chose Virginia, which I consider to be the most conservative option. Little did I know, the Old Dominion ranks first in the nation for applying the Left’s most effective tool in weaponizing public universities: offices purporting to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion.These DEI offices are the bureaucracy of the bureaucracy. They exist to push leftist ideology throughout the institution, hounding school administrators, staff, and professors to toe the line on “anti-racism” and gender ideology.They represent a new priesthood pushing leftist dogma within noble institutions once dedicated to higher learning but increasingly acting as ideological factories that produce “woke” activists.While corporate America has begun excising the DEI cancer, it has taken root and flourished in academia…A Heritage Foundation report measured the size of DEI bureaucracies at the 65 universities that in 2021 were members of one of the Power 5 athletic conferences (the Big Ten, the Big 12, the Pac-12, the Southeastern Conference, and the Atlantic Coast Conference), finding that the average university listed more than 45 people as having formal responsibility for promoting DEI goals. (The Daily Signal is The Heritage Foundation’s news outlet.)
The Heritage Foundation report is extensive:
The Dangerous DEI Bloat at Virginia’s Public UniversitiesWhich state’s public universities have the largest diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) bureaucracies? It is not a deep-blue state, like California or Oregon. It is the decidedly purple state of Virginia.When Heritage Foundation analysts measured the size of DEI bureaucracies in the 65 universities that were members of one of the Power 5 athletic conferences (the Big Ten, the Big 12, the Pac-12, the Southeastern Conference, and the Atlantic Coast Conference) in 2021, they discovered that Virginia led the nation as the state with the biggest DEI bureaucracies in its public universities…The University of Virginia (UVA) listed 94 people on university websites as part of its DEI bureaucracy…DEI personnel include all people listed as staff or interns on the university websites for units ostensibly designed to advocate for and serve racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual-orientation groups on campus. These entities go by various names, but they tend to include the words diversity, equity, inclusion, multicultural and/or the identity of a group in the title. Staff involved in legally required activities, such as ensuring compliance with civil rights legislation, were not counted in the DEI personnel totals. Similarly, academic units that offered classes and degrees, such as African American or gender studies departments were also not counted as DEI personnel. The DEI staff are best understood as administrative units on campus that articulate and enforce orthodox views on matters related to race, gender, or sexual orientation.Two years ago, UVA had 1,454 tenured or tenure-track faculty, giving it a ratio of 6.5 DEI personnel for every 100 faculty members. Only the University of Michigan had more DEI personnel, with 163, but Michigan lagged UVA in the size of its DEI bureaucracy relative to the number of faculty, with a ratio of 5.8. Virginia Tech was not far behind UVA in DEI bloat. Virginia Tech had 83 DEI personnel and 5.6 DEI staff for every 100 faculty.To paint a more complete picture of public universities in Virginia, the authors of this Backgrounder also collected information on the size of the DEI bureaucracy at George Mason University (GMU). GMU has at least 69 DEI personnel, which, given that it has 938 tenured or tenure-track faculty, yields a ratio of 7.4 DEI staff per 100 faculty. Only Syracuse University, a private institution, matched GMU’s ratio of 7.4 DEI per 100 faculty.When adding GMU to the set of data from the 65 Power 5 universities collected in 2021, the Commonwealth of Virginia has three of the top six spots among public universities for DEI size relative to faculty. GMU has the highest DEI ratio, followed by UVA, with Virginia Tech coming in sixth. No other state has more than one public university in the top six. See Chart 1. The average ratio of these three Virginia public universities is 6.5 DEI staff per 100 faculty, which is higher than any single public university outside Virginia.
The list of diversity related job titles will blow your mind.
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