The University of Michigan has built a sprawling diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) bureaucracy, which now boasts over 500 jobs dedicated to advancing the agenda, and costs the university more than $30 million every year according to an analysis by one of its own professors.
The university has at least 241 employees whose main duties “are to provide DEI programming and services as either their exclusive or primary job responsibility,” according to an analysis conducted by Mark Perry, an economics professor at the University of Michigan-Flint, on behalf of The College Fix reveals.
Full-time DEI staff at the university cost the institution an estimated $30.68 million every year, with $23.34 million for staff salaries and another $7.44 million for benefits. The total sum could pay for in-state tuition and fees for 1,781 undergraduate students, according to Perry, who is also a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
Some DEI staff at the University of Michigan raked in enormous salaries, with Tabbye Chavous Sellers, UM’s Vice Provost for Equity and Inclusion & Chief Diversity Officer, enjoying a whopping $402,800 a year, roughly double what the average full-time professor on campus makes in a year.
But Sellers isn’t the only one pulling in a lucrative salary while engaging in DEI work. Thirteen DEI staff members earn over $200,000 every year while another 66 make more than $100,000 per year. The average yearly salary for DEI staff members is $96,000 not including benefits.
In addition to the full-time DEI staff members, there are also another 76 faculty and staff members who serve as “DEI Unit Leads,” who push the diversity agenda across the university’s various schools in service of the institution’s five-year DEI plan.
When accounting for those who push the DEI agenda in both full-time and part-time capacities, as well as unfilled positions and those who further DEI at the institution on an unpaid basis, it “brings the total number of UM employees who advance DEI on either a paid or unpaid basis to well more than 500 and possibly as high as 600,” Mark Perry explained.
The University of Michigan disputes the findings, however, calling the analysis “misleading” and claiming “Diversity, equity and inclusion are core values at the University of Michigan. As such, there is not a specific budget set aside for diversity outreach and recruitment.”
“Most employees working on DEI are not solely dedicated to DEI efforts but do so in addition to their other roles and responsibilities,” a university spokesperson continued. “The university’s DEI efforts are appropriate to the size, scope, and complexity of our university – spanning the university, including 51 units over our three campuses, our academic medical center, and our over 100,000 students and employees.
The institution’s five-year academic plan mandates that DEI practices be implemented across the university, with even non-academic units like its botanical gardens, IT department, art museum, and athletics, among others, each being required to adopt a DEI plan.
Perry blasted the institution’s DEI bureaucracy, asserting that the University of Michigan’s diversity plans “are reminiscent of the Soviet Union’s and Communist China’s five-year central plans to achieve ‘Ideal Communist Societies’ which are examples of top-down oppressive bureaucratic blueprints to socially engineer outcomes decided by the top leadership of the dictatorial regimes.”