Commentary
At the University of Michigan, one of America’s top public research institutions, the average tenured professor makes $93,000 a year, according to data from
Salary.com. That’s after a probationary period of around six years as an untenured “assistant professor” proving one’s research and teaching chops—plus the four to seven years it typically takes to complete a doctorate program.
At the same University of Michigan, the average “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) staffer makes $97,000 a year, according to data
analyzed by Mark Perry, an emeritus professor of economics there. That’s a job that typically requires only a bachelor’s degree in some human resources-related field. And at Michigan, DEI staffers need only a few years—if that—of on-the-job experience.
As recently as 2017, the university’s DEI team consisted of 69 people. By the 2022–2023 school year, that number had more than doubled—to 142, working on a budget of $18 million. Considering that just a decade ago Michigan’s DEI staff had comprised a mere 17 employees, it’s not surprising that Perry told the Daily Caller that the number of brand-new hires had “metastasized like a cancer.”
Welcome to the DEI invasion of public colleges and universities, eating up taxpayer dollars that could fund scholarships for low-income students or slots and salaries for professors teaching substantive subjects: chemistry, history, and literature. What does DEI add to the college experience? At Michigan, you won’t find much on the DEI office’s
official website beyond vague verbal mush about “fostering an inclusive and equitable community” on campus. But when you dig deeper, you discover what the office really does—and it’s creepy.
One of the Michigan programs consists of an “
inclusive teaching initiative” that sponsors supposedly voluntary “training workshops,” in which instructors learn how to incorporate such concepts as “unconscious bias” (talking about “racial hatred” was the way
one Michigan dean put it in 2016) into their freshman physics, calculus, and Spanish classrooms. And in fact, those workshops—sessions in indoctrination—are actually mandatory for all new tenure-track and graduate-assistant hires at Michigan, as well as senior faculty members who serve on hiring committees.
The University of Michigan is scarcely an anomaly. A report (
pdf) issued in January by the Virginia Association of Scholars noted that the public university system in Virginia spent more than $15 million in 2020 alone on instructors and administrators with the words “diversity,” “inclusion,” and “equity” in their job titles. The report wasn’t just concerned with the siphoning of taxpayer dollars away from substantive instruction, but with the left-leaning ideological content—stressing such concepts as “critical race theory,” “white privilege,” and gender oppression—in the training sessions that the diversity bureaucrats pushed upon students and faculty alike.
For example, at James Madison University, a public research institution in Harrisonburg, Virginia,
training material for freshman-orientation leaders (typically upper-level students) in September 2021 included the assertion that people who identified as male, straight, cisgender, or Christian were “oppressors” engaged in “systematic subjugation” of other groups.
At Ohio State University, which ranks close to Michigan with
132 DEI staffers on a $13 million budget, critical race theory is now a key criterion for hiring faculty, even in seemingly unrelated fields.
The Ohio State philosophy department, for example, is currently looking for a tenure-track professor specializing in the “
philosophy of race,” which includes “the epistemological significance of race or racism” and “race in the philosophy of science.” Ohio State’s physics, mathematics, and chemistry departments are
looking for professors “to study issues relevant to educational equity across these STEM fields, with a special focus on race and other factors identifying historically marginalized groups.” The Ohio State anthropology department recently
sought a professor whose research promoted “social justice,” with an emphasis on “decolonization, feminist theory, queer theory, critical race theory, and/or Indigenous ontologies.”
At the University of Texas–Austin’s medical school,
training in “health equity” is now mandatory. In classes that sound like Red Guard struggle sessions, aspiring physicians learn to “recognize one’s own power and privilege” and “identify one’s own biases and demonstrate a willingness to accept and remedy them.”
The Utah public higher-education system has adopted an “equity lens framework” (
pdf) based on critical race theory that’s supposed to dismantle the system’s alleged previous pattern of serving only “a narrow slice of the state’s population, namely white men of privilege.”
At the University of Tennessee, several departments, including the engineering school,
now require or recommend DEI commitment statements from all faculty job applicants, as well as anyone seeking tenure or promotion.
Academics’ obsession with DEI used to be mostly confined to the Ivy League and private liberal arts colleges that could afford the luxury of dabbling in “woke” fashions. But now DEI—and the massive, well-compensated campus bureaucracies that go along with it—are mushrooming in public university systems as well, to the detriment of the taxpayers who fund public universities’ budgets. A professor hired to teach and research “educational equity” in physics means one fewer professor hired to teach and research physics itself. And it must be galling for the other physics professors to realize that the DEI staffers responsible for this situation are probably banking larger salaries than they are.
But the wasted money and educational opportunities are relatively minor problems. The real problem is the foisting, at taxpayer expense, of divisive radical ideologies onto students and faculty members who know they will likely suffer academic and financial consequences—low grades, limited job opportunities—if they don’t go along. You don’t want to be at the University of Michigan arguing against your workshop trainer’s insistence that you suffer from “unconscious bias.”
Fortunately, some states are realizing that they don’t have to underwrite public campus activities that their residents don’t want and whose main purpose seems to be to shame heterosexual white males.
In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis has announced plans to defund DEI initiatives at public universities in his state. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s office
issued a memo on Jan. 6 warning universities and agency officials that using DEI criteria in hiring decisions violates state anti-discrimination laws. South Carolina legislators are looking into DEI spending at that state’s public universities and colleges, and Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt has
stated that he wants Oklahoma’s universities to have fewer DEI officers and more career placement counselors for students.
The one thing to be said about the DEI invasion of public universities is that it can be stopped if there’s no public money to pay for it.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
