Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by the College Fix on February 4, 2025. With edits to match MTC’s style guidelines, it is cross-posted here with permission.
“Diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) course requirements in at least 30 states cost students and taxpayers at least $1.8 billion per four-year period. Meanwhile, “the current undergraduate population at public universities will spend at least 40 million hours” fulfilling these mandates in order to graduate, a conservative think tank report found.
The author of the Goldwater Institute report told the College Fix that DEI initiatives are costly to taxpayers not only due to the funds diverted to them but also because consultants and faculty profit from these programs.
“One of the reasons DEI is so costly to taxpayers is because its proponents actively enrich themselves as they increase its scope and influence over institutions,” Matt Beienburg, director of education policy at the Goldwater Institute, told the Fix.
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“DEI ‘consultants’ and other ‘gurus’ such as Ibram X. Kendi extract speaking fees from taxpayer-funded public institutions at rates of tens of thousands of dollars per engagement,” Beienburg said.
He also told the Fix:
When it comes to mandatory DEI training and coursework, the faculty and staff hired to deliver this content benefit from bloated budgets of millions of taxpayer dollars that are diverted away from more serious academic uses. Families often have little awareness of the radical political content awaiting their students—content that is buried beneath the upbeat labels of DEI-based programming. And even when they are aware of and object to this ideologically driven content, families who are seeking low-cost, in-state opportunities in higher education often have little choice but to endure these DEI course mandates as the price of obtaining a degree.
The Goldwater report states that, over the course of four years, the University of California, Berkeley put $55 million of tuition revenue and state appropriations toward DEI courses.
It also states that UC Berkeley labels its DEI-infused classes with seemingly “innocuous-sounding” general course titles, such as “American Cultures.”
However, UC Berkeley Assistant Vice Chancellor Dan Mogulof told the Fix, “There are no required DEI courses” at the school.
“At UC Berkeley curriculum and courses are not determined, labelled or described by the central campus administration. Decisions about curriculum content and its description are completely decentralized, and are the responsibility of faculty, department chairs and deans,” he said.
“The university administration has no ability to make a course required. Every course must meet the University of California’s academic standards,” which “are enforced by the university’s Academic Senate,” Mogulof told The Fix.
The Goldwater report also identifies the University of Virginia’s course “‘Hateinnany’: Fascism, Antifascism, and the Global Far Right” as politically partisan because it references “President Donald Trump” in the context of “far-right politics” and “fascism.”
The Fix asked Professor David Walsh for his thoughts on this characterization of his course.
“I have no comment,” Walsh said, “except to say that my syllabi are freely available to anyone who requests them”
He also said the word “Hateinnany” in the title of his course “comes from American Nazi Party leader (and one-time gubernatorial candidate in the Commonwealth of Virginia) George Lincoln Rockwell’s record label—is an attempt, hopefully a successful one, to get students thinking historically about American and global political history in the 20th and 21st centuries.”
This situation, however, is not solely about financial costs and the political content embedded in these programs. Part of this issue may be attributed to misapplied discussions about academic freedom, John Sailer, director of higher education policy at the Manhattan Institute, told the Fix.
“I actually think that the academic freedom framing of some of these issues can lead to mistakes,” Sailer said.
He also said:
Broadly speaking, universities inevitably make strong judgments about what should go into the curriculum. That’s necessary and good. And of course, sometimes curricular requirements do very obviously violate academic freedom, like when professors are required to make certain types of statements on their course syllabi. But usually, the debate shouldn’t be about procedural freedoms. It should be about the merits of the requirements. My objection to these requirements is [their] lazy thinking and worse classes…[T]hey encourage students to think about everything through the lens of race and oppression, and that does them a disservice because it makes it harder for them to understand the world.
Sailer told the Fix he was unconvinced that student interest was driving demand for DEI courses. Rather, universities artificially prop up these departments to demonstrate commitment to diversity and inclusivity.
When asked about the educational merits of DEI course topics, Sailer said, “There are plenty of legitimate lines of inquiry to pursue regarding race, racism, identity, and oppression, so of course it’s worth engaging those topics in class and in scholarship.”
However, “the DEI frame has consistently given special favor to scholars and courses that all point to certain preordained conclusions on those topics. That’s what needs to be ended,” he said.
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To address these concerns, the Goldwater report advocates for states to implement its Freedom From Indoctrination Act, which requires schools to teach the principles, history, and value of America’s government and founding.
In response to questions about these instruction requirements, Beienburg said, “Teaching students the foundations of the American republic—including the principles of the Constitution of the United States and the Declaration of Independence—should be among the basic functions of our education system, both in K-12 and higher education.”
“There is no comparison between ensuring students are introduced to the principles and protections of our constitutional government on one hand, and actively agitating for the thinly veiled policy agenda of DEI proponents on the other,” he said.
Image of “New Horizons in Conservation: Addressing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Challenges Conference” by University of Michigan on Flickr