Chavous, U of M’s Vice Provost for Equity & Inclusion and Chief Diversity Officer, excoriated the newspaper and the foundation in a letter posted on her LinkedIn page.

The article by the newspaper’s Nicholas Confessore speaks for itself, and I urge people to read it. However, the gist was hardly novel to DEI critics who have been spotlighting the flaws with this ideology for several years now. 

Basically, because it is intrinsically divisive, DEI causes grievances and more division. It’s that simple.

It was important, however, that in this instance, it was the New York Times saying it.

“Michigan’s own data suggests that in striving to become more diverse and equitable, the school has also become less inclusive,” wrote Confessore. “In a survey released in late 2022, students and faculty members reported a less positive campus climate than at the program’s start and less of a sense of belonging. Students were less likely to interact with people of a different race or religion or with different politics — the exact kind of engagement DEI programs, in theory, are meant to foster.”

“Michigan’s DEI efforts have created a powerful conceptual framework for student and faculty grievances, and formidable bureaucratic mechanisms to pursue them,” he added damningly. “Everyday campus complaints and academic disagreements, professors and students told me, were now cast as crises of inclusion and harm, each demanding some further administrative intervention or expansion. On a campus consumed with institutional self-criticism, seemingly the only thing to avoid a true reckoning was DEI itself.”

Confessore worked on his article for several weeks, interviewing more than 60 people by his own telling. One of these was my Heritage colleague Jay Greene, whose groundbreaking 2021 report on DEI found the University of Michigan to have the most bloated DEI bureaucracy among large universities — all of which have swelled their DEI numbers in the recent decade.

Greene and his coauthor James Paul, director of research at the Educational Freedom Institute, reviewed publicly available information at 65 universities to measure the number of people who have “formal responsibility for providing DEI programming and services” at these universities. 

The authors limited their focus to the universities that were members of the then-“Power Five” athletic conferences (the number has been reduced to four since the paper was published in 2021). This allowed them to concentrate not just on large public universities, but also on a student body that selected their institution largely because of geographical proximity and was then unwarily subjected to DEI indoctrination.

They found that “the average university had 3.4 people working to promote DEI for every 100 tenured or tenured-track faculty members.” On average, DEI staff totaled 4.2 times the staff that assist students with disabilities (something that, unlike DEI, is actually required by law, under the Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA), and “1.4 times larger than the number of professors in these universities’s corresponding history departments,” something that, again unlike DEI, advances the truth-discovery mission of higher learning. In total, the researchers found that the average university has 45.1 people working on promoting DEI.

By nearly all measures, Chavous’s University of Michigan was by far the most bloated. It had 163 people devoted to DEI responsibilities, against an average of 45.1 DEI officers among the universities studied. The University of Michigan listed 14.8 people promoting DEI for every one person working with the disabled. The University of Michigan also had 5.8 DEI personnel for every 100 core professors, almost double the average of 3.4.

And has U of M gotten racial peace from that? Not according to the numbers. Making the same case that Confessore made three years later, Greene and Paul found that “the size of the DEI bureaucracy bears little relationship to students’ satisfaction with their college experience, in general — or with their diversity experience, in particular. DEI bureaucracies appear to increase administrative bloat without contributing to the stated goals of diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

Small wonder, then, that in her attack on the newspaper, Chavous particularly zeroed in on Heritage.

“The article raises many concerns around political bias. For example, the reporter cites the Heritage Foundation as a primary data source for validating assertions regarding the failures of DEI efforts,” she wrote, then launching into ad hominem against us. “The Heritage Foundation is a political organization – not a research organization or think tank that uses empirical standards — and it is the architect of Project 2025, which is staunchly anti-DEI. However, in the article, the organization is presented as an objective and key research authority.”

Get that? We cannot be trusted because we point out that DEI is a Trojan Horse festooned with the bells and whistles of “social justice” to conceal the fact that it introduces into schools, universities, and workplaces culturally Marxist ideas that would fail at the ballot box. Only researchers who present DEI as a solution for racial disparities can be trusted.

If only we could all use that kind of circular logic.

At any rate, Greene is writing elsewhere a direct response to Chavous, in which he will highlight his years of academic scholarship and empirical research, so I will leave to him the fun of addressing that part of her nonsense. 

I will turn, rather, to another segment of Chavous’s plaidoyer. Somewhere in the middle of her post, Chavous chides Confessore for supposedly relying for his argument on incidents that are “unrelated to any DEI program efforts and made causal claims about DEI.”

As examples, she said, “DEI programs are erroneously blamed for community engagement and activism in response to major national and international events tied to longtime societal inequalities, tensions and conflicts (such as George Floyd’s murder and the current war in Israel-Gaza). Let me be clear — DEI work is not responsible for global societal challenges as some would like us to believe. To the contrary, DEI efforts are often part of the solutions to addressing these challenges.”

Chavous must make this claim because the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots, and more recently, the reaction to the Oct. 7, 2023 massacre of 1,200 Israeli civilians, have been the primary reasons the scales have fallen from the eyes of many Americans when it comes to DEI. They have been able to witness the moral confusion and chaos we have created by presenting the world as a stage for a winner-take-all, heroic struggle between oppressors and oppressed.

And that is, in a nutshell, what DEI is. DEI creates the opposite of inclusion and diversity precisely because it teaches children and adults alike that the world is divided into a dominant class and a subjugated one. It accretes grievances to create enough societal distress to ignite the conditions that will lead to a desire to overthrow the entire system, and out of those frustrations, we get things such as the 2020 BLM riots.

Sometimes this has results that may be peaceful though still aberrant, such as the idea that the dominant categories owe special dispensations, even monetary reparations, to those designated as marginalized Americans.

Often the result from this Manichean division of all of God’s creation is anything but peaceful, such as the idea that the oppressed are justified in taking any action. This is how you get students and other young people supporting the murderous sprees and gang rapes of Hamas, and the cruel indifference to the suffering of Israeli civilians, including the women who were violated before they were murdered.

This is why Chavous, whose raison d’etre at the University Michigan Confessore and Greene have the apparent gall to question, must trot out her disclaimer. But the BLM riots and the reactions to Oct. 7 are very much linked to DEI, no matter what she says.

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Mike Gonzalez is the Angeles T. Arredondo senior fellow on E Pluribus Unum at the Heritage Foundation and author of NextGen Marxism: What It Is and How to Combat It. Heritage is listed for identification purposes only. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect any institutional position for Heritage or its Board of Trustees.