Category Archives: Race, Equity and Diversity

UVA As a “Maze of Predatory Systems”

by James A. Bacon

If you visit the latest exhibit at the University of Virginia’s Ruffin Gallery, “EscapeRoom,” it takes no more than five or ten seconds for the artists’ message to sink in — the amount of time it takes to read the signage at the entrance:

The University of Virginia (UVA) is a site of reckoning. The legacies of slavery and white supremacy reverberate throughout its built environment. EscapeRoom confronts the frameworks of injustice that contemporary audiences inhabit and inherit in relation to this UNESCO World Heritage Site. … EscapeRoom charts critical routes through a maze of predatory systems.

Inside, the exhibits contributed by multiple artists elaborate upon the white-supremacy theme. Five 3D-printed pieces of porcelain, for instance, are described as giving “materiality, scale and dimension to the many ‘tools’ that mediate state violence visited upon Black victims: horses, batons, guns, tear gas, and more.”

A mobile made of steel sheet metal “examines violence visited upon Black people at the hands of the American state. It attends to the paradoxes of Black life and death in this anti-Black world.”

To set foot in the EscapeRoom is to enter a world of victimhood that would have been entirely justified a century or two ago but seems tragically out of date 60 years after the passage of Civil Rights legislation, the enactment of the Great Society’s war on poverty, and the dramatic transformation of attitudes toward race in America — not to mention the implementation of Racial Equity Task Force recommendations at UVA itself that made the exhibit possible in the first place. Continue reading

What Do All Those DEI Employees Do?

A reader wrote this letter in response to our article highlighting Open the Books’ finding of 235 employees and interns in UVA’s Diversity, Equity & Inclusion bureaucracy. The author asked to remain anonymous. — JAB 

Thanks for sharing this article. I am not surprised at the number of DEI positions at UVA. We have long known that there are more and more people employed at UVA or any university who do not teach, conduct research, garden, cook food, or attend to maintenance. A good chunk of the rise in college costs goes to the increase in the position that are loosely administrative. When I got to UVA in 1995 we had a dean, three or four associate deans and a few counselors in the School of Education. Today we still have a dean, 5 associate deans and at least 15 directors, some of whom do not hold faculty positions. Some of these new positions are related to fund raising development, grant administration and other outreach functions. In 1995 we had 75 to 100 full-time faculty and about 2,000 students. We still have the same number of faculty and students, but we built a new building to hold the administrators.

As I was reading the article and clicking on the links I kept wondering just what do these people do. I suspect they attend a lot of meetings and write a lot of reports, but do any of the students benefit? I did a quick check in 2009 about 8% of the student body was African American, in 2021 about 6%. Clearly these folks are not succeeding at making the place more diverse. The percentage of Hispanic students has ticked up by 2% and Asians by 7%. Continue reading

Why Can’t The University of Virginia Tell The Truth About Its $1 Billion DEI Plan?

University spokesperson Brian Coy misled national media about how much DEI was costing students and taxpayers. Why won’t UVA own its $1 billion plan?

by Adam Andrzejewski

“…a call for us to be the very best version of ourselves and to live our stated commitments to diversity, equity and inclusion to become a better university.”
Dr. James Ryan, President, University of Virginia, September 11, 2020

Recently, our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com found that the University of Virginia (UVA) employed 235 people in roles related to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) costing taxpayers some $20 million for salaries and benefits last year.

Our report broke in the Washington Examiner and made national news. It hit multiple primetime shows on Fox News, the nightly news on the nearly 200 ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox affiliates of Sinclair Broadcast Group, a retweet by Elon Musk, and a hearing by the U.S. House subcommittee on Education and the Workforce. Continue reading

Who Counts As a DEI Employee?

by James A. Bacon

Earlier this month Open the Books, an organization dedicated to government spending transparency, released a study concluding that the University of Virginia employs 235 people, including interns, in roles relating to Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at a payroll cost of roughly $20 million a year. Characterizing Open the Books’ numbers as “wildly inflated,” UVA officials disputed how the group counted someone as a DEI employee. Open the Books fired back yesterday with another broadside, defending its numbers and faulting UVA’s own claim that the University has only 55 DEI employees costing $5.8 million.

In June 2023, the Ryan administration presented numbers to the Board of Visitors that provided the following breakdown:

While Open the Books has been fully transparent, going so far as to publish a list of the employees, titles and salaries it is counting, UVA has not reciprocated with a list of its own. Continue reading

“Rest as Resistance,” the “Nap Ministry,” and Thanksgiving as White Supremacy

Editor’s Note: Today we profile Melody Pannell as an illustration of the intersectional-oppression ideology — colloquially referred to as wokeness — that permeates the University of Virginia. To avoid letting our biases creep into this and other profiles, we let the subjects express themselves in their own words. Sometimes the informally spoken word does not translate well into the written word as seen in a transcript, so we have done our best to render Pannell’s statements more intelligible by means of punctuation and excisions. Readers can judge from the video clips if we have done a fair job. — JAB. 

Meet Melody Pannell, UVA Health’s Director of Diversity & Community Engagement. Her job, says the UVA Health website, is to “cultivate an inclusive community, address social disparities and health inequities, and empower others. She also develops diversity, equity, and inclusion trainings.”

Pannell described herself and the struggles of her work in a video dialogue with Kimberly Barker, the Librarian for Belonging & Community Engagement at UVA’s Health Sciences Library.

Said Pannell: “As an activist, accomplice … DEI work, all kind of stuff like that, I’ve had my times where I lean in. … And sometimes I just have to retreat and say rest is resistance. Part of my work is actually making sure that I’m still here.” Continue reading

DEI Scrutiny Spreads

Open the Books’ expose on DEI costs at the University of Virginia is generating loads of attention.

The Daily Mail published a lengthy story here, adding some of its own reporting. The headline: “University of Virginia EXPOSED for $20M annual DEI spend on 235 staff, including $243,000-a-year equity tsar who calls OxyContin deaths payback for the ‘toxicity of whiteness,’ watchdog says.”

Virginia Congressman Bob Good, 5th district, also cited the Open the Books research during a hearing of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. See the clip here.

 

University of Virginia Spends $20 Million On 235 DEI Employees, With Some Making $587,340 Per Year

It takes tuition payments from nearly 1,000 undergraduates just to pay their base salaries!


The Jefferson Council is reposting this article published by Open the Books, a nonprofit group dedicated to transparency in government spending. We are pleased to say that we provided assistance in the research and fact-checking.  Open the Books CEO Adam Andrzejewski will speak at the Jefferson Council 3rd annual meeting April 9. Register now to attend. — JAB

The University of Virginia (UVA) has at least 235 employees under its “diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)” banner — including 82 students — whose total cost of employment is estimated at $20 million. That’s $15 million in cash compensation plus an additional 30 percent for the annual cost of their benefits.

In contrast, last Friday, the University of Florida dismissed its DEI bureaucracy, saving students and taxpayers $5 million per year. The university terminated 13 full-time DEI positions and 15 administrative faculty appointments. Those funds have been re-programmed into a “faculty recruitment fund” to attract better people who actually teach students.

No such luck for learning at Virginia’s flagship university – founded by Thomas Jefferson no less. UVA has a much deeper DEI infrastructure. Continue reading

Healing By Highlighting Racism, Trauma and White Supremacy

February is Black History Month, and to celebrate, UVA Health has organized  activities around the theme, “Racial Healing: The Heart of Racial Equity.”

Racial healing activities include:

  • Kultivate Connection. An emotional wellness break and space facilitating racial healing through a connection with colleagues, shared experiences, and cultivation of authenticity and kinship.
  • DEI Book of the Month Discussion. “The Racial Healing Handbook: Practical Activities to Help You Challenge Privilege, Confront Systemic Racism, and Engage in Collective Healing.”
  • Guest speaker: Jodie Geddes, co-author of “The Little Book of Racial Healing: Coming to the Table for Truthtelling, Liberation, and Transformation.”
  • Guest speaker: Dr. Michael McCreary, president of the New Brunswick Theological Seminary, on “Trauma and Race: a Path to Wellbeing.” The topic covers “trauma-informed counseling for racially traumatized African (Black), Latino/a/x, Asian, and Native (Indigenous) Americans (ALANAs).”
  • Guest speaker. “My Story, My Voice,” featuring Gene Cash, executive director of the Counseling Alliance of Virginia, on racial awareness and sensitivity.

To do his bit to bring about racial healing, Mr. Cash addressed the topic of White Supremacy. In the clip atop this post, he asks participants if they can name the tenets of White Supremacy. He draws mostly blanks, although one lady hesitantly suggests that “perfectionism” is such a tenet. Cash agrees, describing perfectionism as a tool for White control, rule, and the disregarding of “Black and Brown spaces, transactions and interactions.” He goes on to discuss the horrors of slavery and lynching.

— JAB

Great and Good in Action: Counseling for Racial Trauma

by James A. Bacon

President Jim Ryan has rebranded the University of Virginia as “Great and Good.” Great stands for academic excellence which, despite rampant grade inflation, UVA purportedly stands for. Good stands for social justice with a bit of environmental sustainability thrown in. Not only has UVA become a center for the formulation of ever more exotic forms of thinking about intersectional oppression, it is exporting its insights to the community at large.

As we come across examples of Great and Good in action, we will highlight the force that UVA exerts upon the community around it. The Facebook post shown above describes how the Counseling Alliance of Virginia (CAV) partners with UVA’s Federal and Employee Assistance Program (FEAP) to advance FEAP’s work to “enhance racial awareness and sensitivity.”

FEAP, we are told, has expanded its services to include not only UVA but 35 organizations in Charlottesville. Continue reading

“Enacting Racial Change by Design”

by James A. Bacon

The backlash against Diversity, Equity & Inclusion in higher-ed and the corporate world may be gathering momentum across the country, but the University of Virginia is rolling out a new DEI initiative oblivious to the shift in the national mood.

UVA’s College of Arts & Sciences has launched a program this semester entitled, “Enacting Racial Change by Design.” Participating faculty will discuss chapters from the book, “From Equity Talk to Equity Walk” to deepen understanding of “systematic racial inequity in higher education.” Participants will be able to apply for $1,000 grants to implement DEI-related projects.

The rhetoric of the memo announcing the initiative is disconnected from the national conversation now underway. The program shows not the slightest inkling that critics of DEI need be acknowledged much less engaged in dialogue. U.S. Supreme Court ruling on race in admissions? Resignation of the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania? Helloooo? Anyone home?

This is what happens when an academic elite is captive to DEI dogma and there is not enough diversity of thought for anyone to push back.

Here follows the memo. Continue reading