The University of Michigan’s DEI department keeps growing, but student satisfaction is plummeting.
The University of Michigan's DEI department keeps growing, but student satisfaction is plummeting.
O n March 10, 2022, the University of Michigan’s Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion emailed students notifying them of the end of “DEI 1.0” and its intentions to transition to “DEI 2.0,” a new strategic plan set to begin in the fall of 2023. The 2022–2023 school year is an evaluation period for DEI 1.0, so it is not quite set in stone how the new program will look, but the university’s email made it clear that DEI 2.0 will double down on the school’s “commitment to . . . the advancement of anti-racism, anti-ableism, anti-Semitism, gender equity and building a climate resistant to sexual misconduct.” And no, you did not read that third item in the list wrong.
Several hours later, the administration sent out a follow-up email apologizing for the “harm” caused by the obvious mistake. Although insignificant in and of itself, such errors are the natural product of the incompetent DEI bureaucracy at U-M, which employed 163 staff in 2021 and is the largest office of its kind in the country according to a report from the Heritage Foundation. And according to a recent survey conducted by the university, since the size of the DEI staff began ballooning under President Mark Schlissel (who arrived in 2015 and was fired earlier in the year for an inappropriate relationship with a subordinate), the campus climate has only worsened.
On Tuesday, the administration partially released the results of the university’s 2021 Campus Climate Survey, which follows up on a similar survey conducted in 2016. Considering that the University’s DEI staff grew exponentially during the period between the two surveys, the results are devastating. “Overall, 2021 sample respondents experience the general university climate and their own personal experiences less positively than the 2016 sample,” the university announced at a presentation Tuesday. Though the complete results are not yet public, Chief Diversity Officer Tabbye Chavous did outline some of the most striking datapoints. In 2016, around 70 percent of students, faculty, and staff expressed satisfaction with the overall climate of the university. Now, less than 60 percent of students and staff, and under 50 percent of faculty, feel satisfied. All three groups also felt markedly less valued at the university than their predecessors in 2016.
Although it is practically impossible to draw a causal relationship between the growth of the DEI bureaucracy at Michigan and lower satisfaction rates — the Covid-19 pandemic and the racial unrest of 2020 were also detrimental to campus life, for example — we can conclude that hiring almost 100 additional DEI bureaucrats certainly did not help matters.
In the long run, no amount of money or new hires will fix the problem with U-M’s DEI department, which is fundamentally an ill-conceived effort. And while its failure is multifaceted, one look at the values guiding the university may provide more than enough evidence as to what its problem may be. This goal-setting guide, for example, defines diversity as “the goal of creating an environment that reflects racial, generational, gender, educational, socioeconomic and religious differences, among many others.” Notably missing, of course, is the category of intellectual diversity.
At a university locally nicknamed the “People’s Republic of Ann Arbor,” it should come as no surprise that an overwhelming left-wing monoculture predominates in the community. Recently, it has even started to become an explicit institutional feature. In May, interim president Mary Sue Coleman announced the creation of an abortion-access task force, making explicit the university’s pro-abortion stance and going so far at to commit to helping patients circumvent an abortion ban if the procedure becomes illegal in Michigan in the aftermath of Roe v. Wade’s reversal.
The affront on intellectual diversity at U-M is not only from the top down, but from the bottom up as well. In July, for example, after a petition to cancel the speech failed, incoming students at the University’s medical school walked out on their White Coat Ceremony’s keynote speaker, Dr. Kristin Collier, a pro-life associate professor in the school. In response to the situation, school dean Dr. Marschall Runge committed to holding a forum on diversity of thought, but no plans have yet materialized.
At the end of the day, the numbers speak for themselves. Since the DEI department began to swell in size in 2015, it has committed to making the University of Michigan a place where all students feel welcome. According to the University’s own data, however, it has failed at that most basic function. As it plans to roll out DEI 2.0, the administration should learn that no matter how much money or staff it throws at a problem, it cannot solve it without solid principles.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated since its original publication.