HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The University of Michigan’s Costly and Pointless Diversity Plan.

Read through the official DEI materials and you soon feel overwhelmed by inspiring platitudes and glossy pictures of smiling minorities. As I noted in an earlier Michigan Review article, the administration has a nasty habit of hiding potentially controversial policy decisions deep in a matrix of feel-good fluff and pages of meaningless drivel, such as:

Your passion for making us better, your belief that all individuals deserve an equal opportunity to succeed and your unwavering dedication to the highest aspirations of our university.

Whether DEI will accomplish that is questionable, but the plan certainly succeeded in adding new positions within the administration, including the vice provost for equity, inclusion, and academic affairs. According to UM Salary, the University of Michigan’s open salary database, the provost earned $385,000 during the 2016-2017 school year.

Robert Sellers, who occupies this provost position, wrote an op-ed in the Michigan Daily last April defending those developments. Citing the importance of DEI’s “personal, professional, and educational benefits,” Sellers boasted of over 200 University of Michigan community members “who are devoting all or a portion of their professional lives to this work.”

He didn’t say exactly what are the “historic and contemporary contributions” those staff members provide, that Michigan taxpayers now sponsor. . . .

A major theme of the DEI plan thus emerges: to perpetuate the existence of our school administration’s diversity industry. Committees are formed to produce unreadable diversity pamphlets; these committees recommend more committees, and finally, the diversity provost makes sure everyone gets paid.

Yep. It’s all just an excuse for administrative bloat.