Commentary
At the University of Michigan, one of America’s top public research institutions, the average tenured professor makes $93,000 a year, according to data from Salary.com. That’s after a probationary period of around six years as an untenured “assistant professor” proving one’s research and teaching chops—plus the four to seven years it typically takes to complete a Ph.D. program.
At the same University of Michigan, the average “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) staffer makes $97,000 a year, according to data analyzed by Mark Perry, an emeritus professor of economics there. That’s a job that typically requires only a bachelor’s degree in some human resources-related field. And at Michigan, DEI staffers need only a few years—if that—of on-the-job experience. As recently as 2017, the university’s DEI team consisted of 69 people. By the 2022–2023 school year that number had more than doubled—to 142, working on a budget of $18 million. Considering that just a decade ago Michigan’s DEI staff had comprised a mere 17 employees, it’s not surprising that Perry told the Daily Caller that the number of brand-new hires had “metastasized like a cancer.”…