The College Fix

UC Berkeley employs 150 professionals and 250 additional students dedicated to addressing “systemic inequities,” according to a document obtained this week by The College Fix.

The public research institution’s Division of Equity and Inclusion spends $25 million annually to support the 400 full and part-time staff to run diversity and inclusion-related programs, according to the document, an eight-page job description for a new Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion.

These programs include “staff diversity formal collaborations with People & Culture, the Othering & Belonging Institute, the American Cultures Engaged Community teaching program, the Basic Needs Center, and other programs serving a broad array of constituencies.”

According to the document, 58 percent of Berkeley’s $25 million diversity budget is from “campus and state funds,” or taxpayer money and tuition, 31 percent is from federal and state public service grants, and 11 percent is from philanthropy and private grants.

UC Berkeley spokesman Dan Mogulof told The College Fix that the $25 million equity and inclusion budget makes up less than one percent of the university’s total budget, and that the school has “no plans” to seek any increase in funding for the division.

Mogulof added the school is “uncertain why anyone would oppose efforts to ensure that every student on an extraordinarily diverse campus feels a equal sense of belonging to the campus’s community.”

By comparison, the University of Michigan’s diversity budget is nearly $7 million per year. In 2018, a state economics professor caused a stir when he reported that Michigan paid roughly 50 diversity employees.

According to the Harvard Business Review, thousands of studies have been conducted over the past several decades to determine whether diversity programs work, and few have shown any benefit.

“It shouldn’t be surprising that most diversity programs aren’t increasing diversity,” the authors found. “Despite a few new bells and whistles, courtesy of big data, companies are basically doubling down on the same approaches they’ve used since the 1960s—which often make things worse, not better.”

The authors found laboratory studies show that “force-feeding” diversity training can “activate bias rather than stamp it out.”

The job notice for the new Vice Chancellor of Equity and Inclusion states the hire will “advance Berkeley’s public mission and goals of becoming a Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) and an anti-racist campus by boldly establishing new paradigms and implementing strategies and tactics that further embed diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, and justice practices into the fiber of the Berkeley campus.”

The notice further notes the new hire will oversee “30 dedicated academic and administrative department-level chief diversity officers” across the Berkeley campus.

Despite the school’s hefty diversity budget, only 3.7 percent of the undergraduate students at Berkeley in the 2020 school year are African-American. Hispanic students make up 18 percent of the undergraduate student body, while less than one percent of students are Native American or Alaskan Native.

Meanwhile, over 39 percent of the Berkeley undergraduate student body is classified as Asian, a fact left off the job notice.

“We always wonder why conservative media outlets, in particular, have an issue with equity,” Mogulof said. “We believe this is a basic American value as enshrined in the Constitution.”

The Division of Equity and Inclusion also invites students to report “hate” incidents to the University of California’s systemwide “intolerance report” website.

Over the past two years, The College Fix has analyzed thousands of bias incident reports from dozens of public schools around America, but UC Berkeley has declined to release their records, claiming doing so would be a violation of state law.

MORE: UC Berkeley student government accuses Pepsi of ‘violence’ against minorities

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