Booming Demand for "Diversity Specialists"

This article summarizes some of the findings of Igor Mandel in an article he wrote in the American Thinker on December 3, 2021. For the full article, please visit here.

Considering the amount of money and time being spent by WCSD on an Equity and Diversity Department, and the directive by McNeill and the Board to research and implement a "social justice" curriculum, we found this information about the nationally booming demand for "Diversity Specialists" interesting and timely. See some excerpts from Igor Mandel's article below:

"In a recent discussion about the "wokeness" situation in American universities, Prof. Kimberly Johnson presented a table showing the salary compensation data for DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) personnel at Michigan State University (MSU) in 2018–2019. It contains 82 full-time positions ranging from a modest $42,000 salary for the administrative assistant to $408,000 for chief diversity officer (that's just above the salary of the POTUS, at $400,000). The total annual compensation for DEI staff at MSU is $10.6 million. Isn't that too much for one university? The number of students at MSU is approximately 50,000; the staff consists of 5,500 academics and 7,400 administrators. So one DEI specialist should ideologically serve, on average, 767 people."

"A check on one of the most popular job search websites, made on November 24–26, 2021, gave the following results (figures show the number of literal matches): "racial equity" - 5,218; "diversity"- 2542; "DEI" - 11,355; "antiracism" - 1056; "anti-racism" - 3,518; "diversity equity inclusion" — 19,800. Many of those terms likely overlap in jobs description, but a safe estimate is about 20,000 unique positions. The number of businesses in the USA with employees over 500 is 42,800. Most likely, only large companies of about that size can afford to open one or two paid positions for DEI cadres. This means that roughly half of large U.S. businesses have open DEI positions right now. (Some companies have more than one open position.) It is clear, though, that demand for 20,000+ DEI specialists is really high — much higher than for "mathematician" (121), "physicist" (1,711), "chemist" (4,304), and even "journalist" (2,530)."

"Now, what are those "DEI specialists" doing? What exactly is their job? Frankly, I cannot imagine the everyday activity of 82 people in MSU, and thousands more in the country, eight hours per day, day by day, month by month, year by year. Racial problems and conflicts cannot just appear from nowhere, going from near invisibility five to ten years ago to a booming market now. When people occupy paid positions without a clear purpose, they should do whatever they can to demonstrate their usefulness and propagate their very existence, as any bureaucracy does. They should invent new "racially charged" situations. How else can that time and money be justified? Assuming they can all add and subtract, they should add all the cases of "inequity" and subtract the cases of "equity" from them in such a way that some inequity will always be present, and they must not care, in the process, what is real and what is not. "

In this time of racially charged politics, it is our hope that WCSD has always, and will continue to unite our community, engage understanding and serve the underserved. What we question is why do we need an Equity and Diversity Department to achieve these goals? And does their work actually go toward achieving these goals?