It’s been a busy week for the education team at Heritage.  On Tuesday, I released a new study along with co-author James Paul, Diversity University: DEI Bloat in the Academy, which documents just how many people 65 universities devote to promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) goals.  The main finding is that it is a lot of people.  The average university has 45 people listed on their web sites as having formal responsibility for DEI.  This is a very conservative estimate since it does not include the faculty in ethnic and gender studies departments and the numerous deans who promote DEI even though it is not listed in their job title. 

At the University of Michigan, there are 163 DEI personnel.  The average university has 40% more DEI staff than history professors.  At Georgia Tech, there are three times as many DEI staff as history faculty.

Check out this very accessible data visualization that allows you to look up each of those 65 universities to see how many DEI staff they have, how large that effort is relative to other staffing priorities, and how each institution ranks on all of those outcomes.

What does the presence of numerous DEI staff mean for students? Despite this very large investment in people whose job it is to welcome students from diverse backgrounds and promote inclusion, we examine surveys that universities administer to their students and find no evidence that having more DEI staff contributes to students feeling more welcome or included.  If anything, the survey results seem to point in the opposite direction.

The release of this new study led to an excellent article on Fox News.  It has also generated a lot of Twitter conversation and radio interviews.  Expect to hear more about how this study is shaping policy discussion over the following weeks.

Also this week I published a review in Education Next of Jesse Singal’s new book, The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can’t Cure Our Social Ills.  This review, along with an article I wrote this week for The Daily Signal, highlight just how limited social science is for settling debates about what direction public policy should take. 

The Daily Signal piece describes the shortcomings of a new study claiming to prove that “strict” discipline policies cause students to grow up to commit more crimes.  And this research is being waved around to support the Biden Administration in resuming what the Obama Administrated started with attempts to dictate school discipline policy from DC.  As it turns out, the study doesn’t even directly examine school discipline policies and is plagued by a variety of other problems. 

Given the flaws I reveal in this school discipline study as well as the research discussed in my book review, you will see why I come to the conclusion:

“social science can shed light on human behavior and even help guide it, [but] it is not the only or necessarily the most reliable source of wisdom on how to live our lives. That’s also what the great religious traditions and their deference to experience and past practice are about.  The Enlightenment values that gave rise to the social sciences can supplement the ancient teachings but need not replace them.”

Critical Race Theory Update

Jonathan Butcher and our Heritage Foundation colleague Mike Gonzalez visited Texas last week to speak for an audience hosted by Heritage Action for America. Jonathan and Mike talked about critical race theory's racial discrimination and offered parents, educators and policymakers solutions that would protect individuals from critical race theory's prejudicial ideas.

Interested in joining our team? Apply to be our new Research Associate and Project Coordinator.

Warmly,