The DIEing Higher Ed Budget

What price diversity, inclusion, and equity?

Turns out, that price is pretty fucking eye-watering.

My friend Eric Hammer¹ has been a bit quiet lately, and it turns out this is because he’s been working on something important.

When I first started writing on Substack, I published a five-part series looking at all the ways our civilization’s higher education infrastructure has been monkeywrenched by ideological subversives and otherwise sabotaged by general incompetence. One major theme in this clown show has been the rise of Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity – an order for those murky weasel words that is quite deliberate, because DIE is far more appropriate to the death cult than their own preferred DEI. DEI sounds a little bit too much like God to me, which I’m absolutely positive is some kind of NLP trick. Hence, my inaugural post The DIEing Academy, followed up by The Price We Paid For the DIEing Academy, Academia DIEs, Students Suffer, The DIEing Academic Job Market, and The DIEing Prestige of the Academy².

One very reasonable question that could be asked by very reasonable people such as economists such as our Dr. Hammer is, how much do all the Deanletss of Diversity, Vice Associate Provostlings of Inclusion, and Senior Director’s Minions of Equity actually cost? Over the last few years, and especially following the Summer of Hate commemorating Saint Floyd of the Fentanyl Overdose, the size of the DIE bureaucracy has grown like the fast-acting brain tumour that took out Bill Hicks. But what does this mean in dollars and cents?

Dr. Hammer has spent the last few months digging into the public records of the various universities and colleges of the state of Virginia in order to produce the answer, and Should Virginians Pay for University “Diversity” Leftism? “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” and Leftist Ideology at Virginia Universities has just been published. He announced it on his own Susbtack³, and the direct download link to the full pdf report can be found here.

The Cost of DEI in VA Public Universities

Across all schools in 2020, DIE admin cost taxpayers a cool $15 million. Note that that’s the most conservative estimate the authors could come up with: it counts only admin salaries, and leaves out associated costs such as benefits, administrative overhead, office space, various administrators who are devoted to DIE initiatives but don’t have job descriptions that are obviously DIE in nature, etc. That’s to say nothing of all the time wasted by faculty and students on tedious diversity training seminars, defending themselves in star courts against spurious charges brought by anonymous accusers to the bias response teams, and all the rest of the petty nonsense these odious limpets get paid (by you, if you pay taxes or tuition) to inflict. Worse, for the short list of institutes for which Hammer et al. were able to find 2021 data, administrative DIE payrolls metastasized by 80%. If the same holds true across other schools, in 2021 the Virginia taxpayer forked over a whopping $27 million to ideological commissars whose sole purpose in life is to make everyone’s lives miserable.

Some back of the envelope math indicates that, if Virginia is representative of US states, and the amount spent on DIE admin averages out to Virginia’s rate, then across the 50 states taxpayers are lavishing an incredible $1.35 billion on these fattened leeches. If we include the 10 provinces of America’s Hat⁴, which is if anything even more earnestly enthusiastic about this culture-destroying nihilism, North Americans are currently pouring $1.6 billion every year into this black hole of gender confusion and racial resentment.

And remember: that’s the lowball conservative estimate. The full costs inflicted by this zombie horde are almost certainly far, far higher.

Also remember: the economy is absolutely fuckwhipped right now. We cannot afford this. We can’t afford it culturally, and we sure as shit don’t have the spare cash lying around to afford it financially. Not with inflation screaming along, the housing market wrecked, the supply chain a snarled mess, and all the rest of the shambolic debacle the professional-managerial class has made of everything.

One of the report’s suggestions I particularly liked was to place firm limits on the faculty to admin ratio. I’ve been saying this for years. Tell the schools that if they want to be eligible for grants, student loans, and all the rest, they have to hold the percentage of the budget spent on administration at some unreasonably low, nicely painful level. Say something like 5%: enough that the vast majority of the useless people doing bullshit jobs can be thrown out on their obese posteriors to do something more socially useful. Panhandling, for instance. I don’t care at this point.

If there was one criticism I would make of this truly excellent report, it’s that it leaves students somewhat out of the picture. The authors do note a few times that the money spent on the brain-eating amoeba in humanoid form staffing the DIE zampolit could be used to hire 10 professors at every single institution of higher learning in Virginia. In other words, an entire academic department.

However, that money could also be used to give full-ride scholarships to somewhere between 900 and 3375 students, depending on whether you assume the $30k charged by private institutions or the $8k typically inflicted on in-state students at state universities. The latter figure is the size of the entire student body at a small community college, or about 10% of the student body at a mid-size university. In my opinion this is a lost rhetorical opportunity. Full-ride scholarships usually go (or should go) to talented kids from low socioeconomic status backgrounds, so the tax-eaters infesting the DIE administration are essentially consuming the funds that could be used to help the very minorities they supposedly care so very, very much about.

That’s a quibble, though. This report is a quantitative wake-up call, a giant steaming turd of numerical what-the-fuck that’s been dropped in the punch bowl of the DIE demons’ party.

If you live in Virginia, you should be asking your representatives some pointy questions about why you’re paying for this.

And if you live anywhere else, you should be asking exactly the same questions, because I guarantee you it’s the same shit everywhere.

Oh and don’t forget to give the good Doctor a sub.

You can get Telegrams From Barsoom, and you can also follow me on Twitter @martianjohn1

1. And how dare he have a name that badass. Even worse is that it’s a fucking aptronym: he’s an economist by day, but a no-shit blacksmith in his spare time, knocking out spear-heads and seaxes in preparation for the day the molemen invade from their beachhead in the Shenandoah Caverns.

2. Yes, I’m bad at titles. And yes, I really did get that much mileage out of that acronymic pun.

3. Which you should really subscribe to.

4. i.e. Canada.