To the woke, everything is racist — including breakfast cereal and botanical gardens. The College Fix reports on how the University of Michigan has hired a diversity & equity (DEI) manager for its botanical gardens, to make this slice of nature less racist:
University of Michigan’s Matthaei Botanical Gardens & Nichols Arboretum is committed to diversity – but not simply the diversity of the plants and animals that call the facility home. It also employs a DEI manager and actively works to combat racism within its 700 acres of gardens and natural preserves to make up for its “participation in systemic injustices.” Efforts have included unconscious bias trainings, live-streamed DEI events, food justice and seed rematriation programs, and DEI workshops covering topics like “confronting racism, cross-cultural difference, and bystander intervention”…
In September 2021 the Botanical Gardens & Nichols Arboretum hired a full-time DEI manager, Ivana Lopez Espinosa, for close to $60,000 per year, thus adding to the University of Michigan’s expansive DEI bureaucracy….It recommitted itself to diversity, equity and inclusion by developing a strategic plan in the wake of COVID and George Floyd’s death, gardens and arboretum Director Tony Kolenic stated in a letter posted online.
“MBGNA is committed to catalyzing equity and justice, and will continue to reckon with itself and the history of living collections to do so,” Kolenic stated. “This strategic plan is our road map for how that commitment is turned into action; how MBGNA will continue to thoroughly examine and combat its participation in systemic injustices, and how we will co-create new ways forward with historically excluded communities through the years ahead.
The University of Michigan now has a diversity & equity staff of close to 200, thanks to new hires of DEI officers at places like its botanical gardens. In early 2021, there were already at least 167 staffers at the University of Michigan “whose primary role is propagating DEI,” according to the National Review. That was a dramatic increase over a mere 40 diversity & equity staffers on campus in 2002.
In 2021, the Heritage Foundation’s “Diversity University” report found that of dozens of universities profiled, the University of Michigan had “by far the largest” number of staff whose jobs are creating and advancing DEI initiatives.
The combined salary for all University of Michigan DEI staff multiplied more than seven-fold in the past two decades, from at least $2.1 million in 2002 to more than $14.3 million in 2021.
A study by a California State University professor found that an increase in “diversity, equity and inclusion” policies at a college is linked to rising opposition there to free speech. “The rise of DEI bureaucracies has actually coincided with the beginning of a ‘Free-Speech Crisis on College Campuses,’” noted the study.
The University of Michigan has repeatedly imposed unconstitutional speech codes restricting the free speech rights of its students, such as in the “harassment” code a federal judge struck down in Doe v. University of Michigan (1989).
The University of Michigan is not unique in having a large and costly bureaucracy devoted to diversity and equity. By 2011, there were already more college administrators than faculty at California State University, many of them devoted to diversity and equity. And the University of California, which claimed to have cut administrative spending “to the bone,” was busy creating new positions for politically-correct bureaucrats even as it raised student fees and tuition to record levels. As the Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald noted in 2011:
The University of California at San Diego, for example, is creating a new full-time “vice chancellor for equity, diversity, and inclusion.” This position would augment UC San Diego’s already massive diversity apparatus, which includes the Chancellor’s Diversity Office, the associate vice chancellor for faculty equity, the assistant vice chancellor for diversity, the faculty equity advisors, the graduate diversity coordinators, the staff diversity liaison, the undergraduate student diversity liaison, the graduate student diversity liaison, the chief diversity officer, the director of development for diversity initiatives, the Office of Academic Diversity and Equal Opportunity, the Committee on Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation Issues, the Committee on the Status of Women, the Campus Council on Climate, Culture and Inclusion, the Diversity Council, and the directors of the Cross-Cultural Center, the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Resource Center, and the Women’s Center.
Some colleges have raised spending on administrators by more than 600% in recent years.
As colleges become more woke, students are learning less and less. People’s vocabularies are shrinking at a time when more and more people have college degrees. As Zach Goldberg notes, people’s mastery of hard words has been falling for well over 20 years, and their mastery of easier words has been falling for over 15 years. Going to college no longer expands people’s vocabularies the way it once did: Since 1970, there has been a steady decline in the correlation between years of education and a person’s word stock.
Nearly half of the nation’s undergraduates learn almost nothing in their first two years in college, according to a 2011 study by New York University’s Richard Arum and others. Thirty-six percent learned little even by graduation. Although federal higher-education spending had mushroomed in the preceding years, students “spent 50% less time studying compared with students a few decades” earlier. The National Assessment of Adult Literacy also shows that degree holders are learning less.
