Diversity, equity and inclusion programs in higher education have become one of the latest hot-button issues in politics.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis tried to advance his presidential ambitions in part through his opposition to DEI programs. It didn’t work, of course, as DeSantis dropped out of the Republican race after just one state, Iowa, showed it was less than enthusiastic about his candidacy.
But whether you think DEI — which aims to diversify staff and promote inclusivity for faculty and students — is a needed corrective to past and present discrimination or an exercise in reverse discrimination and liberal brainwashing, you should be concerned about its nonideological impact: increasing the amount of bureaucracy in higher education.
David Brooks, a conservative columnist at The New York Times, recently lamented the “growing bureaucratization of American life,” which he says not only costs money but frustrates those who have to deal with it, sapping their initiative, creativity and drive.
Higher education, Brooks writes, is one of the institutions most plagued by bureaucracy. He cites two glaring examples: “The Massachusetts Institute of Technology now has almost eight times as many nonfaculty employees as faculty employees. In the University of California system, the number of managers and senior professionals swelled by 60 percent between 2004 and 2014. The number of tenure-track faculty members grew by just 8 percent.”
This is where DEI is relevant. Whatever a program’s mission, no matter how well-meaning, anytime an institution creates a new office to carry out that mission, it means hiring administrators. Those administrators, in turn, create rules and add staff to help them enforce them. It becomes a self-perpetuating cycle. More rules translate into more staff. More staff translates into more rules.
Mississippi’s state auditor, Shad White, examined last year what the state’s eight public universities are spending on DEI programs. From 2019 to 2023, based on the universities’ self-reporting, the total figure was $23.4 million. That’s not a lot of money out of an annual budget that’s close to $4 billion. But the auditor’s report does confirm Brooks’ point about DEI as a reflection of creeping bureaucracy. In 2023, 70% of all DEI spending in Mississippi was spent on the salaries of DEI employees.
Adding one more layer of supervision to faculty members who are already feeling oversupervised contributes to their burnout. A University of Virginia professor of literature, according to Brooks, says that the annual self-evaluation he is compelled to complete has grown over the years from one page to about 15, including demonstrating how his work advances DEI. How much of that self-evaluation is really helpful to the professor and his students, and how much of it is an exercise in justifying the jobs of administrators?
We suspect it’s a lot more of the latter than the former.
