Best DEI Money Can Buy, Failed

The bullets below are direct quotes from The New York Times. It’s a damning assessment for university DEI programs.

My view of the bottom line is that university DEI tend to be expensive, make-work policies and practices that foster grievances and largely provide lip service to those that they were built for. A lose-lose endeavor.

I personally experienced the culture of preference, discrimination, grievances and accusations during the last third of my 31 year career at the University of Hawaii at Manoa (2010 to 2021). It took away a big part of the fun teaching large undergraduate classes. It also enabled hypersensitive faculty, staff and students to create mountains out of molehills. I was lucky to be in Engineering which has only a small fraction of DEI issues as other colleges, but the DEI presence was looming large, particularly in my last six years as a department chair. 

The DEI climate was one of a handful of factors in my decisions to step down from Chairman after six years, and retire about three years before my large research project concluded.

• The University of Michigan, one of the country’s most prestigious public universities, built one of the most ambitious D.E.I. programs in higher education. It hoped to attract and retain a more diverse array of students and faculty. Since 2016, the university has spent roughly a quarter of a billion dollars on the effort.
• The program has yielded wins — a greater proportion of Hispanic and Asian undergraduates and a more racially diverse staff. It has also struggled to achieve some central goals. The proportion of Black undergraduates, now around 5 percent, has barely changed in a decade.
• Most strikingly, the university’s own data suggests that in striving to become more diverse and equitable, Michigan has become less inclusive. In a 2022 survey, students and faculty members reported a less positive campus climate than at the program’s start and less of a sense of belonging.
• Minority students — particularly those who are Black — were also less likely to report “feelings of being valued, belonging, personal growth and thriving.” Across the board, students were less likely to interact with people of a different race or with different politics.
• Last year, the school received more than twice as many formal complaints of sex or gender discrimination than it did in 2015. During roughly the same period, complaints involving race, religion or national origin have increased from a few dozen to almost 400.
• The school’s D.E.I. efforts had fostered a culture of grievance. At the law school, some students demanded that a professor be fired for referring to two students — who were both named Xu and sat next to each other in class — as “left Xu” and “right Xu.”
• Schools like Michigan pay lip service to religious or political diversity, for example, but may do little to advance those goals. Along the way, they make ambitious commitments to racial diversity that prove difficult to achieve. As a result, many Black students at Michigan have grown cynical about the school’s promises and feel that D.E.I. has forgotten them. A leader in the university’s Black Student Union told me that they are “invested in the work, but not in D.E.I. itself.”