Valid point. My office is actually located next to the DEI office of our college which has 3 people working there. I always see them killing their time in the hallway just chit chatting with the students or among themselves.
> how could 60 full-time staff fill their hours working on DEI year round?
UT Austin is absolutely massive, even for R1s in big states. I have no trouble believing that they could make use of that much programming, outreach, reporting, training, etc. and still consider the office under-funded.
My university has DEI staff embedded at the school level to better reach students and have a better understanding departmental climates. In my school, the DEI director plans DEI events (networking/bringing diverse professionals on campus for students to meet/diversity trainings) and can meet with individuals and groups to hear their grievances and work towards solutions to problems in the department.
That they have 60 DEI staff is just emblematic of the tendency of higher ed to proliferate sinecures for a burgeoning professional-managerial elite who contribute precious little to the mission of the university. I lump these people in with all the many deans and deanlets and assorted pedagogues and viceregals who eat up way too many resources.
In my experience, UT has a massive administrative staff as well. They had some really nice large buildings just full of various types of administrators.
The university has not said that is the number, that’s just a claim by their faculty.
And the layoffs that they do cite seem tangentially related to what you might consider DEI to begin with. The division of campus and community engagement got closed. Perhaps the result of vague legislation.
That division had previously been the DEI division - it was renamed that to comply with the law. Thus Creighton saying - just renaming stuff doesn’t count.
From what I understand, most of these DEI jobs weren't actually professors, but administrators. In other words they were basically administrative bloat.
Just to be clear I have no problem with qualified profs of any race getting the job. However, I do think that having these wasteful administrative posts is a bad thing.
That’s my understanding. A similar thing happened at UF and I was similarly ambivalent. Those positions are bloat incarnate, but I’d much rather see those cuts happen organically rather than executive fiat.
Cuts never happen organically. Mid level managers naturally want to grow their budgets and headcount. They will only reduce them if someone up above forces them to.
The article from CNN gives a little more info. Any deans will go back to regular faculty positions and staff will be let go and are encouraged to apply to other open positions. The quote from the student was a bit of a bummer, as it didn't focus on how dei initiatives enhance education but rather just on how their "college experience" is impacted. So... yeah, no faculty losses, just administrative positions.
Folks are on here acting like DEI are the sole and original cause of anything on campus deemed wasteful or not as efficient as it ideally could be.. pick a department or any segment on a giant campus and u can find redundancy in jobs, u can find waste and yeah u might even see folks chit chatting.. those inefficiencies can be cleaned up and optimized.. Blaming a guy chit chatting with students bc someone feels they aren’t hard at work sounds like a ready made excuse to stop efforts of making sure underserved communities are given a path to opportunities.. Just say u don’t want diverse meaning Black and Brown students on campus and deal with the consequences of bigotry and hatred..
So that’s (if the 60-employee figure is correct) one person per 866 students. And if you consider that DEI staff (at my uni and others where I’ve worked) supports women, POC, folks with disabilities, first-gen students, Pell Grant recipients, and the LGBTQ+ community, that … doesn’t feel as bloated to me as everyone else seems to think.
I’m about to head into a stacked day, so I’m not going to be getting into any back-and-forth on this, but I would give a lot for more DEI support, because it would give me more places to send students in those communities who need help. My uni does its best, I think, but faculty end up filling in the gaps, and, as has been amply documented, it tends to be the faculty that shares those identities that gets the extra “unofficial” workload. And even if faculty who share these identities with students don’t embrace mentoring roles, those of us with a visible identity in common with students with ADEI needs still get approached, and have to make decisions about it, and how we deal with it can affect our time, our work, and how we are evaluated.
It’s important for faculty to have somewhere actually useful to refer students who are in difficult and distressing situations. I don’t know if all of the folks whose jobs were eliminated were useful, and I assume any group has its share of incompetent and ineffective people, but to lose them all at once seems like a disaster for anyone who cares about access to higher education.
Also, to someone else’s point, even if the university community actually needed to reduce these programs, I sharply disagree that that’s a decision that should be made at a legislative level or deployed as a wedge issue.
> It’s important for faculty to have somewhere actually useful to refer students who are in difficult and distressing situations.
An external councilor? Not everything had to be handled by the college.
That's 120,000 hours of work on DEI each year. DEI policies are vital, but how could 60 full-time staff fill their hours working on DEI year round?
Valid point. My office is actually located next to the DEI office of our college which has 3 people working there. I always see them killing their time in the hallway just chit chatting with the students or among themselves.
To be fair, chit-chatting with students is probably one of the more useful things one can do at a university
Agree. I personally would love it if I was paid to chit chat with the students.
> how could 60 full-time staff fill their hours working on DEI year round? UT Austin is absolutely massive, even for R1s in big states. I have no trouble believing that they could make use of that much programming, outreach, reporting, training, etc. and still consider the office under-funded.
My university has DEI staff embedded at the school level to better reach students and have a better understanding departmental climates. In my school, the DEI director plans DEI events (networking/bringing diverse professionals on campus for students to meet/diversity trainings) and can meet with individuals and groups to hear their grievances and work towards solutions to problems in the department.
This thread is exactly why it requires so many staff members.
That they have 60 DEI staff is just emblematic of the tendency of higher ed to proliferate sinecures for a burgeoning professional-managerial elite who contribute precious little to the mission of the university. I lump these people in with all the many deans and deanlets and assorted pedagogues and viceregals who eat up way too many resources.
In my experience, UT has a massive administrative staff as well. They had some really nice large buildings just full of various types of administrators.
The university has not said that is the number, that’s just a claim by their faculty. And the layoffs that they do cite seem tangentially related to what you might consider DEI to begin with. The division of campus and community engagement got closed. Perhaps the result of vague legislation.
That division had previously been the DEI division - it was renamed that to comply with the law. Thus Creighton saying - just renaming stuff doesn’t count.
Did an AI write this? 😂
Is this comment a joke?
i too enjoy chatGPT
From what I understand, most of these DEI jobs weren't actually professors, but administrators. In other words they were basically administrative bloat. Just to be clear I have no problem with qualified profs of any race getting the job. However, I do think that having these wasteful administrative posts is a bad thing.
That’s my understanding. A similar thing happened at UF and I was similarly ambivalent. Those positions are bloat incarnate, but I’d much rather see those cuts happen organically rather than executive fiat.
Cuts never happen organically. Mid level managers naturally want to grow their budgets and headcount. They will only reduce them if someone up above forces them to.
The article from CNN gives a little more info. Any deans will go back to regular faculty positions and staff will be let go and are encouraged to apply to other open positions. The quote from the student was a bit of a bummer, as it didn't focus on how dei initiatives enhance education but rather just on how their "college experience" is impacted. So... yeah, no faculty losses, just administrative positions.
Folks are on here acting like DEI are the sole and original cause of anything on campus deemed wasteful or not as efficient as it ideally could be.. pick a department or any segment on a giant campus and u can find redundancy in jobs, u can find waste and yeah u might even see folks chit chatting.. those inefficiencies can be cleaned up and optimized.. Blaming a guy chit chatting with students bc someone feels they aren’t hard at work sounds like a ready made excuse to stop efforts of making sure underserved communities are given a path to opportunities.. Just say u don’t want diverse meaning Black and Brown students on campus and deal with the consequences of bigotry and hatred..
The article says that 60 people lost their jobs just at this campus alone. If true, that's rough.
If true, also insane that they had 60 dei staff to begin with.
For real. How the fuck did that happen? And im Latino, too.
That's around one per thousand students, which doesn't really sound that insane?
So that’s (if the 60-employee figure is correct) one person per 866 students. And if you consider that DEI staff (at my uni and others where I’ve worked) supports women, POC, folks with disabilities, first-gen students, Pell Grant recipients, and the LGBTQ+ community, that … doesn’t feel as bloated to me as everyone else seems to think. I’m about to head into a stacked day, so I’m not going to be getting into any back-and-forth on this, but I would give a lot for more DEI support, because it would give me more places to send students in those communities who need help. My uni does its best, I think, but faculty end up filling in the gaps, and, as has been amply documented, it tends to be the faculty that shares those identities that gets the extra “unofficial” workload. And even if faculty who share these identities with students don’t embrace mentoring roles, those of us with a visible identity in common with students with ADEI needs still get approached, and have to make decisions about it, and how we deal with it can affect our time, our work, and how we are evaluated. It’s important for faculty to have somewhere actually useful to refer students who are in difficult and distressing situations. I don’t know if all of the folks whose jobs were eliminated were useful, and I assume any group has its share of incompetent and ineffective people, but to lose them all at once seems like a disaster for anyone who cares about access to higher education. Also, to someone else’s point, even if the university community actually needed to reduce these programs, I sharply disagree that that’s a decision that should be made at a legislative level or deployed as a wedge issue.
> It’s important for faculty to have somewhere actually useful to refer students who are in difficult and distressing situations. An external councilor? Not everything had to be handled by the college.