How the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) movement is ruining and bankrupting higher education

Ever wonder where all the money goes that's spent on DEI staff in colleges? Edward Ring of the California Policy Center investigates who's getting the $400k+ salaries and and the mess they're creating.

In an interview posted last month by the Hoover Institution, the estimable Victor Davis Hanson, speaking in character, made a typically provocative comment, saying “for what we are paying for every provost of diversity and inclusion we could probably hire three professors of electrical engineering.”

That can be fact checked. And the results are illuminating.

On the Public Records Act-enabled online database “Transparent California,” take a look at these 2018 search results for job titles that include the word “inclusion,” or “diversity.” Note that taxpayers funded a position for Jerry Kang, UCLA’s vice chancellor for equity, diversity and inclusion, that bestowed a total pay and benefits package worth $468,919 in 2018.

Compare that to the faculty of UCLA’s School of Engineering, where two assistant professors (Jonathan Kao and Ankur Mehta) along with an associate professor (Chi On Chui), altogether collected pay and benefits in 2018 of $564,123. That’s pretty close. At UCLA, at least, you can definitely hire two electrical engineering faculty members for the price of one diversity don, and quite nearly three.

To be fair, perhaps an apples to apples comparison would be to look at UCLA’s top engineering faculty member. Ok. The chair of that department is Gregory Pottie, who made $312,027 in 2018, only two-thirds what Kang made. But Gregory Pottie is running an engineering department. That takes technical expertise and produces graduates that keep the world running. What does Kang do?

Read UCLA’s “Sample Candidate Evaluation Tool.” Or read UCLA’s “Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Statement FAQs” that presumably comes from Kang’s office. This is toxic drivel, undermining UCLA’s ability to hire the most qualified applicants for faculty positions or admit the most qualified students.

These departments of “equity, diversity and inclusion,” now operating in every major college and university in America, and at stupefying taxpayer expense, are indoctrinating students to equate their academic failures to systemic discrimination, a preposterous lie that only serves to weaken the character of anyone who believes it, at the same time as it lines the pockets of the diversity bureaucrats who spew such filth.

Experts on this topic include not only Victor Davis Hanson but Heather MacDonald, whose impeccable research drives stakes through every seductive shibboleth ever conjured by the diversity careerists who are worse than useless; they are destroying academia. In a recent guest column for the Wall Street Journal entitled “Would You Care if a White Man Cured COVID-19,” MacDonald wrote:

“Mandatory diversity statements are now ubiquitous in hiring for science, technology, engineering and mathematics jobs. An Alzheimer’s researcher seeking a position in a neurology lab must document his contributions to ‘diversity, equity and inclusion.’ At the University of California, Berkeley, the life sciences department rejected 76% of the applications it received last year because they lacked sufficiently effusive diversity, equity and inclusion statements. The hiring committee didn’t even look at the failed applicants’ research records.”

This article originally appeared in the California Policy Center. Read the whole thing here.