Colleges Face a Barrage of Questions About How Much They Pay Diversity Officers

Last fall the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill received a public-records request for the salaries and benefits of the chief diversity officer and her staff from a man named Connor Kurtz. His explanation — “I’m researching staffing in various departments at top American public universities” — sounded simple enough.

But a look at Kurtz’s employer suggests bigger motives are in play. He works for the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank that has railed against rising tuition costs and what it calls higher education’s lack of ideological diversity. The records he sought revealed salaries totaling about $700,000. (AEI didn’t respond to requests for comment about its research.)

The institute isn’t the only organization interested in the salaries of officials who focus on diversity at public universities. In recent months, conservative think tanks and news outlets have taken aim at a handful of prominent institutions, searching salary databases and filing records requests like the one Chapel Hill received.

The critics point to the total compensation bound up in diversity offices — which can run into the millions — and call that spending wasteful and ineffective. What’s more, they say it’s causing tuition costs to rise.

Skepticism of how much colleges spend on diversity and inclusion is nothing new. But the criticism is getting more sophisticated. And the recent attacks are driving a narrative that colleges have created an unwieldy bureaucracy at the expense of students, parents, and taxpayers. In a fraught political climate, the idea of inflated diversity spending has taken hold among many conservatives, including some state lawmakers and university board members.

Campus administrators say that narrative is simplistic, even overblown. Some argue that colleges shouldn’t pay attention to the complaints of conservative ideologues, especially those who try to spin information solely to provoke outrage. At the same time, though, state colleges can’t exactly ignore questions from lawmakers and the public about how they spend their money.

Diversity officers and funding have proved vulnerable. At the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, the chief diversity officer left in 2016 after the state legislature took away the diversity office’s budget for a year, amid concerns about its agenda.

And while the critics’ concerns might be misconstrued, some of their questions are legitimate: How should colleges measure students’ attitudes about diversity? What are appropriate goals for diversity-oriented programs? What does an inclusive campus environment actually look like?

Parents and Provocateurs

Last fall Mark J. Perry, a professor of economics and finance at the University of Michigan at Flint, tweeted about the salaries of diversity employees at Michigan’s flagship, in Ann Arbor. Perry, who is also an American Enterprise Institute scholar, has published his concerns about wasteful spending on his AEI blog, but he said he was acting on his own. The tweet went viral.

The University of Michigan Has At Least 82 Full-Time Diversity Officers at a Total Annual Payroll Cost of $10.6M. That Would Support Full In-State Tuition for 708 Students. pic.twitter.com/hdvgCMaSAc

— Mark J. Perry (@Mark_J_Perry) December 31, 2018

Perry wrote in an email that he had reviewed years of Michigan’s salary records. Before 2004 no administrators had “diversity,” “equity,” or “inclusion” in their titles. But in his most recent search of the database, he said, he had found at least 76 of them. He calculated diversity-salary spending for the entire Michigan system, which includes two other campuses, at $10.6 million.

Within higher education, “the ‘gospel of diversity, equity, and inclusion’ is either blindly accepted without debate, or tolerated without being challenged,” he said. To many people outside the academy, he said, big-time spending on diversity offices doesn’t make sense.

Katrina C. Wade-Golden, deputy chief diversity officer at Michigan, said it’s reasonable to ask questions about diversity-office spending, in that public-university education should be a public good.

It’s inaccurate, however, to blame diversity spending for higher tuition, Wade-Golden said. There’s no evidence for that, nor is there evidence that people on the campus are dissatisfied with the institution’s promotion of equity and inclusion, she said. “Students are not paying a high price for diversity at Michigan,” she said.

She cited multiple programs at Michigan to recruit more low-income students and defray their tuition costs, and she said the university had increased its percentage of Pell Grant recipients to 18 percent from 16 percent in 2014. Those changes in the student body, she said, make creating a welcoming environment and improving the campus experience all the more necessary.

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After Perry’s digging at Michigan, the Mississippi Center for Public Policy, a right-leaning think tank, filed public-records requests for diversity-salary spending at the University of Mississippi and Mississippi State University.

In January the center published the results: Ole Miss was spending $1.2 million per year, while Mississippi State was spending about $800,000. Those figures, the center argued, were a larger percentage of the universities’ respective budgets than was Michigan’s diversity spending.

The center described working in a diversity office as “a lucrative career,” citing the six-figure salary of Ole Miss’s vice chancellor for diversity, and cast doubt on the notion that taxpayers were “seeing a benefit for this spending.” An Ole Miss spokesman didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The University of California at Berkeley and Ohio State University were targeted by two conservative outlets, Campus Reform and The College Fix, respectively, that purport to expose liberal bias on college campuses.

In February a Campus Reform reporter told Dan Mogulof, a Berkeley spokesman, that, according to her calculations, the university was spending $2.3 million on the salaries of diversity employees and that 175 people there could be considered “diversity bureaucrats.” (She had obtained the numbers from a public salary database.)

She asked officials to “provide any evidence” that would justify having “such a large portion of funding spent on salaries alone.”

Mogulof gave her a straightforward answer: It just wasn’t that much money. Berkeley has a $2.3-billion operating budget, he told The Chronicle, and that “large portion” amounted to just one-tenth of 1 percent of it. Undeterred, Campus Reform published an article headlined “EXCLUSIVE REPORT: UC-Berkeley Spends $2.3 Million Annually on Diversity Employee Salaries.”

“It is completely baffling and somewhat absurd that these sorts of efforts have somehow become politicized,” Mogulof said. The benefits of increased diversity, he said, “aren’t matters of interpretation — these are objective facts.”

Universities should “keep their eyes on their audience,” he said. That means prioritizing the perspectives and needs of students, parents, and alumni, he said, not provocateurs.

Not the Thought Police

Partisan news outlets and think tanks aren’t the only ones asking questions about salaries and the value of diversity programs. North Carolina lawmakers and University of North Carolina board members, most of whom are conservatives, have plenty of doubts too.

In 2017 the legislature directed the UNC system to study spending on diversity offices and equal-opportunity offices, and how campuses were defining success in those areas. Lawmakers wanted to know whether it would save money to move all staff members and programs in both units under a single roof with one administrator in charge.

So last year UNC officials got to work, reviewing research and commissioning an outside firm to prepare a report. It found $16.6 million in total spending on equal opportunity and diversity across the 17 UNC campuses, including $14.7 million on salaries. About half of that money was going toward compliance with federal and state laws, the report estimated.

UNC board members were skeptical of the spending and the possible agenda of diversity programs. “My question is, Does the public believe we need a diversity officer in every single department?” said Steven B. Long, a board member, according to The News & Observer. “Because it does get to be expensive.”

Long complained about a privilege exercise at the Chapel Hill flagship in which students were asked to step forward if they identified as white or if they had grown up in a two-parent household. (The university has since stopped the exercise.)

In its recommendations for changes in UNC’s diversity strategy, a committee of the board wrote: “While diversity is important, overemphasis on race, gender, sexual orientation, and other human characteristics can prevent us from focusing on each person as an individual and can cause unproductive and harmful divisions within the university.”

Diversity officers push back at that kind of rhetoric. Lawmakers and others are often influenced by stereotypes, said Kathleen Wong(Lau), chief diversity officer at San Jose State University. “There’s this perception that we are thought police, or that we are mandatorily indoctrinating people,” she said. “No CDO or diversity office would survive at a university doing that kind of work.”

To Wong(Lau), the belief that diversity offices are gigantic organizations is almost laughable. At San Jose State, she said, four staff members serve about 36,000 students and employees.

In the face of criticism, college officials often stress that many employees have “diversity” in their titles because they’ve taken on the work as an additional responsibility. They also make other common arguments: Cultural competence is increasingly important as the nation’s demographics continue to diversify. Employers want college graduates to know how to work with people who are different from them. Those points are backed up by research and the employers themselves.

At UNC, the outside firm determined that consolidating equal-opportunity and diversity offices wouldn’t save money, and didn’t single out current spending levels or salaries as problems. Still, the report revealed that some of the critics’ questions had merit.

The UNC system wasn’t providing guidance on how “diversity” and “inclusion” should be defined. Fewer than half of the diversity programs had clear performance metrics, and most were qualitative — for example, did an event have a good turnout? While climate surveys can measure attitudes, the report said, only a few UNC campuses conducted them.

Even administrators acknowledged room for improvement. They told the firm that more coordination — both within and across campuses — would make their work more effective, and that more transparency on the outcomes of diversity programs would benefit the UNC system.

Neither the outside firm nor the UNC system office found much research on best practices and effectiveness within diversity programs across higher education. UNC should fill that gap, the university board’s committee wrote. The board submitted the report and its recommendations to the legislature last year, but hasn’t yet put in place all the changes.

Presenting salary numbers without context and pinpointing them as the cause of rising tuition might be a flawed way to think about campus diversity offices. But it’s important for public-college officials to help people understand why diversity work matters, said Wong(Lau), of San Jose State. “We have nothing to hide.”

Sarah Brown writes about a range of higher-education topics, including sexual assault, race on campus, and Greek life. Follow her on Twitter @Brown_e_Points, or email her at sarah.brown@chronicle.com.