What Do All Those DEI Employees Do?

A reader wrote this letter in response to our article highlighting OpenTheBooks.com's finding of 235 employees and interns in the University of Virginia’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) bureaucracy. The author asked to remain anonymous.

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Thanks for sharing this article. I am not surprised at the number of DEI positions at UVA. We have long known that there are more and more people employed at UVA or any university who do not teach, conduct research, garden, cook food, or attend to maintenance. A good chunk of the rise in college costs goes to the increase in the position that are loosely administrative. When I got to UVA in 1995, we had a dean, three or four associate deans, and a few counselors in the School of Education. Today we still have a dean, 5 associate deans, and at least fifteen directors, some of whom do not hold faculty positions. Some of these new positions are related to fund raising development, grant administration, and other outreach functions. In 1995, we had 75-100 full-time faculty and about 2,000 students. We still have the same number of faculty and students, but we built a new building to hold the administrators.

As I was reading the article and clicking on the links, I kept wondering just what do these people do? I suspect they attend a lot of meetings and write a lot of reports, but do any of the students benefit? I did a quick check: in 2009 about eight percent of the student body was African American, in 2021 about six percent. Clearly these folks are not succeeding at making the place more diverse. The percentage of Hispanic students has ticked up by two percent and Asians by seven percent.

I doubt that these fifty-five or two hundred positions are making the students better educated. I also suspect that it is not always clear if these positions are DEI or not. Are the tutors for the football and basketball players considered DEI? I don’t know.

Some of these newer positions are a result of federal and state laws and social change. For example, because sexual assault is an issue at UVA, we have dramatically increased the number of counselors. Because any grant has to comply with diversity standards, someone has to read the proposal to see that it complies with federal guidelines.

For years people have argued about what are the best universities in America. Harvard, Yale, etc. make the top of the list. What are the criteria for being rated number one in the nation? Typically they cite number of award winning professors, quality and quantity of research, size of the library, number of grants, and reputation. That puts Harvard at the top. If you change the criteria to number of first children in a family to go to college or number of people who rise from lower class to middle class, the best universities in the nation are UC Berkeley and UCLA. These two schools actually promote social mobility. Low income students get a good opportunity, they learn, and they get better jobs.

Finally, I am against purely race based scholarships. All scholarships should be based on need, merit, and some combination of the two. There are middle class minorities who do not need or deserve the scholarships. UC Davis has one of the most diverse student bodies in the nation. They did this based on need without considering the race of the students. A poor white kid from Bakersfield is just as deserving as a poor Black kid from Watts.

To echo the article — if all this money went into scholarships and education, would everyone be better off?