POSTED ON FEBRUARY 1, 2024

THE DAILY CHART: DEI DEGRINGOLADE?

I’m just catching up with a 2022 article in the Southern Economic Journal on “The
impact of chief diversity officers on diverse faculty hiring,” by four economists from
Baylor University. The article analyzes the growth and results of the explosion of hiring
of DEI administrators on college campuses from 2001 to 2019, and makes some
judgments about the results.
The first most useful thing about the study is quantifying the rapid growth of campus
commissars in this period, shown in the first figure below. Bottom line: DEI officers
“increased from 2.7% in 2001 to 69.3% in 2019.” Of course, after the death of George
Floyd (blessed be his name forever and ever), the DEI machinery went into overdrive, so
the number of institutions with DEI commissars is likely over 95 percent by now.

More interesting in the data-rich article is the conclusion that DEI bureaucracies, and
their endless circulars demanding more “diversity” in faculty hiring, hasn’t made any real
difference. In this respect, high-profile DEI initiatives really do resemble old Soviet five-
year plans that don’t bear any relation to reality. To quote the study, “we are unable to
find significant effects of a CDO [chief diversity officer] on underrepresented hires. We
are unable to find evidence of either significant contemporaneous or dynamic effects of a
CDO in place on underrepresented faculty hiring.” In other words, DEI is a Potemkin
Village when it comes to real results. Where has “diversity” increased the most in higher
education? Just where you’d predict without statistics: administrators, and non-tenure
track faculty.

This kind of academic journal article is always presented in the most bland language
available, in part to defend itself from the risk of being read by a wider public. Thus,
some of the academese, when translated into plain English, is devastating. Some of
these passages don’t need much translation, though:

As the number of universities with a CDO present grows, the ability of a CDO to
enhance the diversity of faculty hires diminishes. . .

In most hiring cycles, mean diversity in universities with a CDO present differs
little from the diversity that would be achieved under a uniform distribution of
underrepresented candidates across all universities. . .

On average, universities with CDOs are less diverse in their student

populations, faculty, and administrators than universities without CDOs. . .

A university under public pressure to increase its diversity could hire a CDO as
an administrative response without tackling the underlying obstacles to a more
diverse community. . .

Recent experimental studies find evidence that including an Equal Employment

Opportunity statement in job advertisements paradoxically decreases applicant
diversity because such efforts were perceived as a token rather than a genuine
intention . .

The proportion of underrepresented Ph.Ds seeking employment in academia

appears to be declining . .

Each one of these statements is damning of the DEI ideology in practice. This longer
section also points out the obvious of achieving “diversity” in, say, physics departments:

In 2020, underrepresented minority groups earned 15.7% of the 34,492

PhDs awarded to U.S. Citizens and Permanent Residents. This average
belies a substantial variation in the proportion of PhDs earned by
underrepresented minorities by field, from a low of 8.8% in Physical
Sciences and Earth Sciences to a high of 26.1% in Education. Variation by
subfield is even more substantial with the proportion of PhDs earned by
minorities as high as 46% for Public Administration and 43.9% for Area
& Ethnic & Cultural & Gender Studies, to a low of 7.4% in Physics and
Astronomy and 12% in Economics. These large variations have several
implications for our study. First, the diversity level of a university
potentially depends on the composition of its academic departments. For
example, schools with larger education programs may be more diverse,
but universities that specialize in the physical sciences or engineering
may be less so.