Colleges have so many diversity managers and other bureaucrats that non-instructional staff outnumber faculty. The College Fix reports:
Columbia University’s Earth Observatory has its own DEI director and two supporting administrators as part of its 6,756 administrator army.
The office currently includes Associate Director for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Vicki Ferrini, Senior Manager for Academic Affairs Nicole deRoberts, and Deputy Director David Goldberg.
They are just three of the 9,856 full-time employees at Columbia University, compared to 8,262 full-time undergraduate students. This works out to 1,602 more full-time workers than undergrad students, according to a College Fix analysis.
“The Office of Academic Affairs & Diversity at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory…is committed to fostering a diverse, vibrant, and inclusive work environment,” its website states.
“We have failed science and ourselves over the last half century by unintentionally and/or intentionally excluding representative numbers of Black people, and other people of color, from our ranks,” a statement reads.
“A renewed and effective dedication to anti-racist practices is imperative to the operation of a just institution and our ability to undertake the most creative, innovative, salient, and beneficial research,” the department wrote in June 2021….
The [rise in college staff] is driven largely by the 6,756 administrators. There are 818 administrators for every 1,000 students, or roughly two administrators for every three students. This includes student and academic affairs divisions, IT, public relations, administrative support, maintenance, and legal and other non-academic departments. Specifically, there were 2,467 “management” employees in the 2022-23 school year, making an average salary of $128,298 per year.
According to Paul Weinstein of the Progressive Policy Institute, “The rise in administrative bloat is partially due to government regulations, but it is also the result of demands made by accreditors (which in most cases do nothing to improve the quality of student education), the demands of students for clubs, services, etc., and the tendency of administrators to solve problems by hiring more administrators.”
Diversity staff are embedded deeply in colleges, with even tiny divisions having their own diversity managers. For example, the University of Michigan’s botanical garden has its own DEI manager.
These universities are 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. 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.
“Diversity, equity and inclusion” bureaucracies lead to more campus censorship, according to a recent study by a California State University professor. “The rise of DEI bureaucracies has actually coincided with the beginning of a ‘Free-Speech Crisis on College Campuses,’” it found.
“A diversity and inclusion director at Cornell University has come under fire over disturbing social media posts supporting Hamas and dismissing the terror group’s slaughter of innocent civilians as a ‘resistance’”, reported the New York Post.
