Diversity is big business these days, perhaps nowhere so much as in the universities. Apparently the liberal college presidents need numerous underlings to promote the ideology of diversity rather than excellence, a value that has been lost in the leftists’ pet project.
Tucker Carlson presented brief remarks on the subject last week and turned up some facts about the dollar cost of diversity to students in Michigan.
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, diversity is our strength, nobody ever explains exactly what that means, but it’s basically our new national motto. Turns out diversity is also lucrative on college campuses — who knew? Mark Perry at the American Enterprise Institute tallied the total payroll of diversity-related positions [1] at the University of Michigan — that’s just one public university among hundreds in this country. Overall, Michigan employs an army of 88 people as diversity and inclusion bureaucrats of various kinds. Twenty-four of them make more than a hundred grand a year. Collectively these 88 make about $11 million a year in salary and benefits — that’s enough to fund in-state tuition for 742 students per year at a single school. So it turns out that principle is making a lot of money for a small group of people.
Even the Simpsons show has noticed the University of Michigan’s campus diversity [2].
Unfortunately, big spending on campus for diversity is widespread.
In 2012, I reported about the office of equity and inclusion at UC Berkeley [3], which has a staff of approximately 150 and a $17-million budget.
But that budget is tiny compared with USC’s stunning $100 million dedicated to diversity [4]: in 2016, the University of Southern California pledged “to dish out millions of dollars in scholarship funds for Syrian and Mexican immigrants as part of a campus wide diversity initiative.”
Meanwhile, today’s college graduates have accrued an average debt load of $37,172 [5], due in part to the criminal waste in spending on liberal projects in the university.