by Dick Hall-Sizemore
Today I participated in a Zoom webinar with our Jim Bacon and Adam Andrzejewski of Open the Books. The title of the session was “How the Open-Government Movement Can Revolutionize Public Policy At UVA.” In reality, it was a rant against DEI and how UVa is “pushing this radical ideology.”
The focus was the report by Andrzejewski’s organization, Open the Books, that UVa has 235 employees on its payroll supporting and “pushing” DEI throughout the institution at a cost of $20 million. After the session was over, I took Andrzejewski up on his invitation to examine the report. Its claims are exaggerated and misleading and are based on flimsy assumptions.
Before discussing the report in detail, I want to make two things clear:
- I have long contended, on this blog and elsewhere, that higher education administration is bloated. That feeling was reinforced as I went through the names in Open the Books. The same question kept popping up in my mind as I went through the list of deans, associate deans, directors, etc.: “What do all these people actually do?”
- Although I support the aims of DEI, I think higher education has gone into overkill mode on the issue. For example, I recently participated in a program sponsored by a state institution of higher education, consisting of several sessions. Each session opened with a segment on DEI, which seemed out of place and sometimes strained to fit into the topic of the program.
Those are legitimate issues for debate. What is not acceptable is throwing out numbers that are misleading and have little basis in fact.
The “report” is basically a data dump with little or no analysis. Open the Books took UVa’s list of employees, their job titles, and salaries, and sorted it, using key words associated with the “DEI rubric.” During the Zoom session, I posed two questions. (Actually, I posed three questions, but one was not relevant to this discussion.)
The first question was, “How many of the employees listed were in positions that existed before the DEI policy was adopted?” The implication of the report is that UVa created this vast “DEI bureaucracy.” However, if those positions had existed before DEI was adopted, that means people in those positions were, supposedly, doing something for the university and DEI had been added to their responsibilities. When Jim posed this question, Andrzejewski dodged it. He started talking about the UVa Board’s decision in 2020 to embark on a $1 billion DEI push over a course of years. Open the Books “assumed” that the employee head count had to go up to implement that policy, he said. He went on to say that they had not taken a look at the hiring dates of the employees singled out. But that was not the question. I wanted to know how many of the positions had been established prior to 2020. There is a difference, but he did not even examine the easiest data to get in this regard.
Digging into his report and checking the UVa website, I found lots of positions that had been around a long time. The list included folks who worked for the Maxine Platzen Lynn Women’s Center. That was started in 1989. Lots of names from the Office of Equal Opportunity and Civil Rights were included in the report. First of all, that office was established in response to federal law; second, it has been in existence for many years. Then there were staff who worked in the Office of African-American Affairs established in 1976.
Jim did not have time to get to my second question. It was, “Did you determine the proportion of an employee’s time that was devoted to DEI?” The answer is clearly no. If a person’s job title included any of the key words related to the “rubric” of DEI, that person’s entire salary was included in the calculation. That would be a proper course of action only if that person spent all of his or her time on DEI. I am sure that was not the case for many positions.
Job titles can be misleading about what a person actually does. For example, I once was in a state agency position in which my title was something similar to “program evaluation analyst.” Very little of my time was spent on program evaluation. Instead, my assignments mostly involved various tasks that popped up that the deputy director needed someone to do.
Higher ed is notorious for inflated job titles. One of the employees on the report’s list is the “Senior Director of Procurement and Supplies Diversity Services.” I looked him up on UVa’s website. He is the director of the procurement section in the Office of Finance. It’s a good bet that he spends most of his time managing a sizable staff and dealing with sensitive procurement issues. Any time spent on DEI is incidental. Yet, his entire salary of $224,375 is counted toward the total spent on DEI.
The job title of the procurement director, “Senior Director of Procurement and Supplies Diversity Services” is very awkward. I suspect that the university upper management, anxious to demonstrate the school’s progressive outlook, went around sticking “diversity” and “equity” into the job titles of a lot of existing positions, like this one. The title may have changed but the nature of the job did not.
Whole divisions or programs got caught up in this report due to the presence of one of those key words. For example, the report includes 15 staff, with total salaries of $2.1 million, of the Office of Equal Opportunity and Civil Rights. In addition to handling discrimination issues, staff in this office enforce Title IX requirements and handle ADA issues, among other matters. DEI may be the philosophical basis they use now, but most of their work deals with work separate from DEI. They were there before DEI became the policy and they will be there if DEI is ever dismantled.
Then there is the Center for Global Health Equity, which had the misfortune of having that boogeyman term, “equity,” in its name. From what I can gather from the UVa website this center is in the medical school and focuses on providing financial assistance to medical students who wish to do medical rotations in poor countries or areas, such as Southwest Virginia. Seven staff from that center are included in the report, along with their total of $295,401 in salaries.
In the webinar session, Andrzejewski made a generalization for which he has no basis. He claimed that the $20 million that he says UVa is spending on DEI is taxpayer and tuition money. He compared it to the in-state tuition paid by 1,000 students. Despite his claims, he has no idea where all that money came from.
Higher ed budget documents are notoriously opaque and UVa is one of the worst. Their expenditures are a conglomeration of general fund money, tuition money, grants, federal funds, endowments, and other non-general fund sources. All the Open the Books report did was list the salaries of the identified employees. There was no attempt to identify the source of the funds. If Andrzejewski and his staff had taken the time to examine the UVa website, they would have learned that the Maxine Platzen Lynn Women’s Center is funded from an endowment. Those 21 employees, with their total salaries of $1.1 million, to the extent that they are even “pushing DEI,” are not being funded by the public or parents of students.
I would guess there is some federal money supporting some of those positions in the Office of Equal Opportunity. However, even with the use of some additional public records, I still could not identify the sources of the funding in the areas highlighted by Open the Books. The information is somewhere and it is public, but it will take more effort than just using a publicly available list of employees, job titles, and salaries.
To be credible, a study such as this should have been conducted by a neutral party. Andrzejewski is anything but neutral. He is adamantly opposed to DEI. He compared the atmosphere at UVa to that of Poland under Communism. According to him, DEI “cuts and shreds” Jeffersonian principles. Its proponents are enemies of our country and UVa is “ground zero” in the battle. With a mindset in which one thinks DEI is everywhere, when he goes looking for it, he finds it everywhere, even if it is not there.