The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) is on a roll to clean up its act and promulgate freedom of speech and divisive DEI actions. I’ve written before about how UNC-CH adopted institutional neutrality, making it one of seven schools that have done so. Now, according to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE), the entire UNC system is dismantling its DEI apparatus. Remember, the CHE isn’t a right-wing site, but the most respected source of reportage about developments in higher education. Click headline to read:
The reporter, Jasper Smith, seems to concentrate on issues of colleges and race.
An excerpt:
In a report released on Wednesday, campuses in the University of North Carolina system outlined how they’ve complied with a directive to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts — such as eliminating staff positions, altering or ending programs, and cutting spending.
Across the system, institutions eliminated 59 jobs and restructured 132 positions. The DEI-related cuts added up to more than $17 million, a majority of which was redirected to “student success” initiatives, according to university officials.
At a time when colleges across the country have been dismantling diversity programs in response to political pressure, the UNC report offers a particularly comprehensive look at how a wide-ranging group of institutions approached the purging of DEI.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the state’s flagship, accounted for the biggest changes: It axed 20 staff positions, reassigned 27 positions, and redirected more than $5 million away from DEI efforts.
The Chapel Hill campus eliminated seven positions in central administration, including the vice provost for equity and inclusion and chief diversity officer. Reassignments include the senior associate dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion, who in a new role will focus on “professional and leadership development” for students and faculty.
First, why is this something to celebrate? While the origin of DEI (“Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion”) may be well intentioned—to give a hand to underperforming minority students—the way it’s worked out has been counterproductive. And not just that—it’s divisive as well. Here are some of its problems (h/t Luana):
a.) DEI initiatives are universally associated with a particular ideology, one derived largely from postmodernism. It sees society as a clash between competing worldviews (in this case, among different ethnic groups or among the sexes), with the most powerful people getting to promulgate their worldview. In that sense it’s divisive, as it sets up a hierarchy of privilege that has led to things like increased anti-semitism in particular and the chilling of speech in general.
b.) DEI instills those lower on the “power” hierarchy with a sense of victimhood, which in some (but not all) cases leads to a sense of futility among those deemed “minoritized”. Why strive to improve if society is holding you down you from the outset?
c.) It has largely replaced merit as a criterion for success with ethnicity, race, or gender. This has largely reduced the quality of education in various fields. It’s because of this that most of the elite schools that initially got rid of standardized testing have now reinstated it.
d.) The initiatives almost uniformly state that their goal is “equity” (equal representation) rather than “equality of opportunity.” These are not the same thing, and leads to the notion that inequities are not the result of anything besides systemic racism and ubiquitous bigotry. This in turn buttresses the view that society is totally and inseparably wedded to racism. I know that, at least in academia, this is not true; but DEI pushes its false narrative that it is.
At any rate, What’s important for the UNC system is that positions aren’t just being “restructured” (a euphemism under which the system continues but with jobs given different names). but eliminated. Maybe there should be a small group of “DEI” people in charge of investigating claims about bias, but, as you know, the whole system has become bloated. (The University of Michigan, for example, has over 240 DEI jobs that costs the system over $30 million a year.)
This is, of course, blamed on the Republicans, and, indeed, it’s mostly the GOP that has pushed these changes, but I can’t say it’s all to the bad:
The changes in the UNC system come as Republican lawmakers, conservative activists, and others continue to push a national anti-DEI movement. Since 2023, 86 anti-DEI bills have been introduced, and 14 have been signed into law, according to The Chronicle’s DEI Legislation Tracker.
The Chronicle has also tallied more than 200 campuses in 30 states that have eliminated or altered diversity offices or programs.
Last year, North Carolina’s Republican-controlled legislature banned the use of diversity statements and mandatory DEI training, overriding a veto from the state’s Democratic governor, Roy Cooper. The legislation went into effect in December of 2023.
In May of this year, the UNC system’s Board of Governors voted to replace a policy that had mandated certain diversity-related activities on each campus. The system’s new policy emphasized a commitment to nondiscrimination and “institutional neutrality.”
Of course one likely result is that minority representation will fall, especially since the Supreme Court banned race-based admissions. Now I don’t think there’s equality of opportunity of any means, and that is one reason for inequities. But to me the solution is not to substantially lower the admissions bar to create equity for minorities, but to increase equality of opportunity, which must be done by starting with kids at a very young age. We all know how hard that will be, requiring a substantial investment of effort and money (throwing money at schools doesn’t seem to work). And I still believe in a form of affirmative action, one that nevertheless may be illegal under the Supreme Court ruling. In muy view, if two students are pretty much equally qualified, go for the minority student. But that may be “race-based” admissions, and may be prohibited by the Court’s decision.
Regardless, we simply don’t need the DEI bloat that is causing more problems on campus than it solves.
Dividing the system-wide savings$ (or the saving$ just at Chapel Hill) by the number of DEI jobs eliminated gives in both cases an average cost per job in the mid-six-figures. Maybe there are other costs involved, and the cost per job is lower, but I doubt it. At my university the total compensation for our chief diversity officer is ~$350k but of course that’s Canadian dollars, domage.
For three hundred and fifty grand in Chapel Hill you could hire a fist full of new faculty members in Arts & Sciences @ ~$65k starting salaries, or give full-ride scholarships to a dozen students @ $27k.
And of course no Canadian university will be paring back DEI. Sigh.
I, for one, don’t know how hard or costly that would be because I’m unclear what is being suggested, or in what ways equality of opportunity is currently lacking.
(I agree that lack of funding for schools is not the problem; for example, if I believe what I read on Twitter, there are 23 public schools in Baltimore in which *no* student meets maths proficiency standards, despite Baltimore spending $23,000 per student per year.)
If we’re suggesting things like ensuring that all young children get read the same number of bed-time stories by their biological father, then isn’t this utterly impractical and wouldn’t it involve way too big an intrusion of the state into families?
I still don’t understand why a person would support a form of affirmative action in which a “minority” applicant — meaning black, surely — would automatically and arbitrarily get picked over an pretty-much-equally meritorious white (or Asian?) one. Every time? Or sort of haphazardly while you kept track of how often you were favouring the black candidate to make sure it was more than half the time, or more than 13% of the time? Or, more quietly, using an implicit and self-fulfilling grading system that awarded more points to black candidates just for being black and, presumably but not verifiably, having over-come adversity and racism within a couple of generations back if not this one personally?*
Dare I suggest that someone who never had children who would have been systematically discriminated against this way as they got started in life makes one unable to see how bitterly and personally unfair this would be? My son wonders if his four-year-old son is ever going to get a fair shake unless he is stunningly gifted, even though our grievance minorities are less numerous than yours…but reverse discrimination is enthusiastically legal. As with many social trends we copied DEI from America. But if America abandons it, it will take a decade for us to follow suit. It will be bemoaned as “America’s shift to the right which we in Canada must resist.”
If this is an ideological prior which I can’t empathize with not being American, OK, fair enough, I respect that and acknowledge my own blind spot but it’s one I vote against here at every opportunity.
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* One way to put a thumb on the scale is to recognize that a black and a white candidate of equal numerical merit would be at different places on their race-specific distributions. The white candidate who is one standard deviation above the white mean would be the equal of a black candidate who is two or more standard deviations above her black mean. This, it would be argued, makes her more of a standout than him, so she gets the nod. Scientific racism could cut both ways.
Speaking as a “childless cat lady”, I appreciate your point, Leslie. This is not an academic discussion in your case. It hits home. That’s when push comes to shove.
Leslie, I suggested your beautiful gloss on DEI (“Didn’t Earn It”) at http://www.allacronyms.com/aa-suggest/DEI, but it got rejected at the automated triage stage because it wasn’t “backed by multiple reputable online sources” and/or wasn’t “widely recognized and commonly used”. Fair enough.
But it got me thinking that maybe a hoard of WEITers could have a go at making it “viral”, e.g. by using it in comments at “reputable” blogs and in letters to the editors of “reputable” online publications, and spreading it on social media. IMO it’s worth a shot.
Oh dear, Barbara. That wasn’t me. I thought it was someone here at WEIT who coined it. Maybe a pseudonymic commenter on a Matt Walsh YouTube video whom I can’t cite. (I grant there is probably not a lot of overlap there…) Whatever, I can’t take credit for authorship.
If there are two applicants with an equal score, why go for the minority applicant instead of the one from a poorer household? Family wealth has a much more direct impact on educational opportunities than ethnicity, hasn’t it?
I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised that the person who came up with DEI is totally disgusted by what it’s become.
Even I respect the basic motive of insuring those who are often brushed aside are given the full chance to prove themselves and that can take some extra effort from the system but shoehorning them in is another.
DEI must go. And going it is! This is a good example. Microsoft dumped it as well: https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-layoffs-dei-leader-email-2024-7?r=US&IR=T.
Bye, bye.
The companies are cutting back because it’s not cost effective. It will linger longer in government and academia where cost isn’t as much of an issue.
Much of the DEI/affirmative action debate misses the point, which is why these programs fail. The point is to lift the academic skills of minorities, such as myself. That can’t happen at the college admissions office. By that point, the only thing colleges can do is ultimately lower standards. The real and effective work happens at the elementary and middle school levels. If we recruited, nurtured and valued academic talent as much as athletic talent, the United States would have a better educated populace.
Unfortunately, US educators as a whole are more interested in becoming pseudo social workers instead of teachers tasked with building academic skills. And teacher’s unions now use students as a source political power and don’t give a damn about student achievement.
The proof is in the pudding…take your pick, NAEP…PISA…ACT/SAT…