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‘Staff titles have changed, and some diversity programs and offices have been rebranded, but much of UM’s commitment to advance DEI campus-wide remains robust’
Despite the University of Michigan shutting down its diversity, equity, and inclusion office and discontinuing its campuswide DEI 2.0 Strategic Plan one year ago, Michigan’s public flagship institution will spend $15.3 million this school year to support the salaries of 162 employees who continue to work on diversity-related efforts on campus, according to an analysis.
The university essentially rebranded the former Office for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, renaming it the Access and Opportunity Office, and 71 employees continue to work in five core diversity-related units headed by the new access office, the analysis found.
What’s more, there are 91 employees who work mostly full-time for diversity-related units on campus that do not report to the Access and Opportunity Office, but whose missions continue to advance diversity efforts, such as the LGBTQ Spectrum Center, Multi-Ethnic Student Affairs division, Trotter Multicultural Center, and the Center for the Education of Women.
“When UM announced last March that it was discontinuing campuswide DEI programming, including abandoning its DEI 2.0 Strategic Plan, some expected diversity staff layoffs at UM and cost savings from a reduced diversity bureaucracy that could be redirected elsewhere,” said economist Mark J. Perry, who conducted the analysis and provided his results to The College Fix.
However, Perry said, for the 2025-26 school year there have been no staff layoffs of what he calls “diversicrats” at the macro level, nor have there been associated cost savings resulting from a shrinking diversity bureaucracy.
“Staff titles have changed, and some diversity programs and offices have been rebranded, but much of UM’s commitment to advance DEI campus-wide remains robust, perhaps just less visible to the public than before,” said Perry, a retired University of Michigan-Flint professor.
Most of the four diversity units that reported to the former DEI office last year have either maintained or increased their staffing levels, Perry told The College Fix.
Of the 26 ODEI staff members last year, 11 now work for the Access and Opportunity Office and 11 other ODEI staff have been reassigned to various diversity-related units, including Wolverine Pathways, the Center for Educational Outreach, and the National Center for Institutional Diversity, now the Bowman Center.
Perry said he did find that some DEI efforts have been scaled back.
His faculty contacts at UM tell him the biggest change they see is that they no longer receive regular emails from campus leadership about various diversity initiatives, which also encouraged them to get involved promoting DEI.
Campus brass also discontinued the DEI 2.0 diversity plan, a five-year ambitious effort to integrate DEI into every aspect of the university, he said; each of the institution’s 51 units are no longer required to pursue their mandated DEI plans.
“And yet, some academic units, like the Michigan Law School, continue to publicly state on its website a ‘commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion as central to our mission as an educational institution,’ so the reduced emphasis on DEI at the unit level may vary across units at UM,” Perry said.
“Other examples include Michigan Library’s ‘commitment to diversity’ and actively working ‘to ensure that tenets of diversity and antiracism influence all aspects of our work.'”
Perry’s comments underscore a February 2026 College Fix report detailing how many of the university’s departments, schools and colleges continue to tout DEI.
Yet the diversity Titanic is slowly turning, Perry said.
While administrators blamed the Trump administration’s federal mandates when it shut down the DEI office and shuttered the DEI 2.0 Strategic Plan, the decision also came after a scathing report by the New York Times in October 2024 that detailed growing frustration among faculty and students over identity, oppression, critical race theory, racial preferences, and racial and social justice programs fermenting at the school.
“To the extent that Michigan’s new diversity-related efforts are now directed to help all students, faculty, and staff without regard to race, ethnicity, sex, gender identity, or sexual orientation, those efforts will move the university forward in a positive direction,” he said.
“Overall, I’m hopeful that the University of Michigan has learned its lesson regarding the shortcomings, failings, and unpopularity of traditional DEI, and a future New York Times article about Michigan will report a positive rebound at the state’s flagship public university following the discontinuation of DEI 2.0,” he said.
University of Michigan’s media relations division did not respond to requests from The College Fix seeking comment.
MORE: DEI remains strong at UMich a year after president promised to gut it
