The Ohio State University system spent $13.3 million on DEI-related salaries last year, according to a government-spending watchdog.

The red-state university system employs 201 people in DEI-related roles, according to a new report from Open the Books, including two employees who make nearly $300,000 each: chief of diversity James L. Moore and VP of the Office of Institutional Equity Keesha Mitchell.

Another 29 DEI staffers earn between $100,000 and $269,000. While most of the staffers are concentrated in DEI offices, several are appointed to various departments within the university system, the report found. There are 90 people working in the Office of Diversity and Inclusion and 32 people in the Office of Institutional Equity.

There are 26 professors, lecturers, instructors, and academic program services specialists who work in women’s gender and sexuality studies. But as the report notes, the gender and sexuality studies has morphed in recent years to keep up with the most recent progressive theory.

The university now offers a course on “Queer Ecologies,” which seeks to “disrupt the gendered and heterosexual assumptions embedded in how we understand the environment, nature, and bodies (human and animal)” in an effort to reach a new way of thinking about “planetary and climate change.”

As the Big 10 university spent big on DEI payroll, it received more than $3 billion in federal tax dollars from grants and contracts since 2020, according to the report, with several research grants focused on DEI-related endeavors.

The university received $717,000 from the Department of Agriculture to “solve cultural resistance in the USA and Europe [that] impedes the acceptance of insect proteins as food source.” It received another $445,000 from the National Science Foundation to give girls and “nonbinary” teens “hands-on experiences in geoscience,” including rock climbing in the Rocky Mountains. 

The university has also taken in millions of dollars in foreign funds, the report notes, including $15.8 million from China and $7.7 million from Saudi Arabian sources.