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.