James G Martin Center for Academic Renewal: UNC Colleges Spend Big Bucks on Woke Workshops, but ‘Diversity trainings may actually enhance politicization and racial bias on campus’

RALEIGH – A new gravy train has been chugging along these last few years of social justice pushes, with ‘Diversity Trainers’ charging big bucks for indoctrinating corporate teams, employees, or students with critical race theories and Woke dogma. And where better to get your bread buttered than at the very institutions that birthed this toxic grift in the first place?

The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal reports that taxpayer-supported colleges and universities in the UNC System have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on said ‘diversity programs’ and have very little to show for it. In fact, it appears the high-priced seminars have only created more racial tension, not less.

Gee, imagine that.

From Anthony Hennen at the James G. Martin Center:

“[…] Since the police killing of George Floyd, colleges have issued apologetic statements about institutional racism and made grand resolutions to become “anti-racist.” It seems that spending on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives will continue to rise as they have in recent years.

A Martin Center analysis has found that, at some of the largest UNC schools, money to outside organizations keeps flowing for diversity-related software and trainings.

In the past, colleges would hire diversity lecturers to give an hour-long speech here and there. Now, the trainings are more in-depth and expensive. North Carolina State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, UNC-Wilmington, UNC-Greensboro, and East Carolina University have spent at least $276,090 since 2016 on third-party diversity programs, according to public records. […]”

That’s a lot of money these people made to essentially tell white students and faculty that they’re inherently racist, culpable, and at a moral deficit to other select groups and society at large because of the color of their skin.

If you haven’t noticed, college campuses are already a cesspool of social justice warriors, Woke professors, and radical student groups. If only the administrators could pay someone from the outside thousands of dollars to come rile these groups up with even more false indignation and collective guilt in need of ‘fixing,’ things would get better.

Unsurprisingly, things have not gotten better. More from Hennen:

“Diversity trainings may actually enhance politicization and racial bias on campus and teach moderate liberals and conservatives to keep their heads down—without benefiting minority students. The existing evidence on how effective diversity trainings are at reducing racism is not encouraging.

The largest spending has come from NC State: $129,800. In 2019, it signed a one-year contract with DiversityEDU for $15,800 for diversity training. Then, it committed to a $114,000, three-year contract with Everfi for student diversity training to cover 2020-2022.

UNC-Chapel Hill is close behind with $75,125 in third-party diversity contracts. The vast majority of them went to the Racial Equity Institute, an organization based in Greensboro that offers training to schools, businesses, and non-profit organizations. REI ran a number of two-day workshops and virtual trainings at Chapel Hill in 2019 and 2020 and served as a “key instructor” for a seminar course entitled “Leading for Racial Equity: Examining Structural Issues of Race and Class” at UNC’s Gillings School of Global Public Health. […]

The spending is likely to grow to show a commitment to “anti-racist” action. At UNC-Chapel Hill alone, 13 separate entities on campus had published diversity statements by September. They pledged to do more for non-white students, condemned the systemic racism of society at large, or called for more action to promote racial equity on campus.

Even before those statements, the campus diversity apparatus was experiencing an economic boom. “Average dollars dedicated to DEI budgets increased by 33.7 percent from 2014-2015 to 2018-2019,” a pro-diversity analysis on Insight Into Diversity noted.

That growth has benefited private companies and non-profit groups alike. For example, DiversityEDU is a private training company that sells colleges a license to use its software “for engaging students, faculty, and other academic professionals in growing diversity and inclusive culture within their institution,” according to a three-year contract UNC-Greensboro signed in 2018. NC State signed a similar agreement.

In fact, DiversityEDU cited NC State as a positive case study for its cultural competence training for faculty, which made one faculty member “aware of microaggressions” and helped him “discuss sensitive but important topics” with new people. […]

“Very little empirical research has been conducted to actually substantiate the ubiquity of microaggressions, to catalog the harm they cause, or to refine the authors’ initial taxonomy,” Musa al-Gharbi, a sociologist at Columbia University, argues. […]

The uncritical acceptance of diversity trainings also carries the risk of undermining genuinely worthwhile diversity goals. After running through the research on diversity-related training, al-Gharbi argues that the outcomes of training are “terrible:”

• • They don’t accomplish their stated goals
  • They reinforce bias
  • They actually increase biased behavior and minority turnover
  • They reduce employee morale
  • They distract from more important actions

For the substantial sums that UNC schools put into diversity training and initiatives every year, the actual benefits may be non-existent. […]”

We submit that while the ‘actual benefits’ maybe non-existent from the perspective of students and campus harmony, the benefits are accruing rapidly for the critical theorists, collectivists and grifters that are pushing it all in the first place. Destabilizing culture, from campuses to corporate boardrooms, to the country at large, IS their goal.

Read more about the diversity grifters pushing us toward that end from the James G. Martin Center.