America’s Largest And Most Expensive DEI Program Is About To Go Up In Flames

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Jaryn Crouson

The University of Michigan’s (UM) multi-million dollar diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) program may soon be dismantled.

The university’s board of regents has reportedly asked UM president Santa Ono “to defund or restructure” the DEI office amid growing criticism and public pressure, according to emails shared on X. The board is expected to vote on the matter on Dec. 5.

“I write to share information with you about impending threats to the University of Michigan’s DEI programming and core values of diversity, equity, and inclusion,” Rebekah Modrak, faculty senate chair, wrote in an email to faculty senate members. “It has been confirmed by multiple sources that the Regents met earlier this month in a private meeting with a small subgroup of central leadership members, and among the topics discussed was the future of DEI at UM, including the possibility of defunding DEI in the next fiscal year.”

Calls for the university’s DEI program to come to a close surfaced after The New York Times exposed its failures and the vast amount of money being thrown at it.

“In recent years, as D.E.I. programs came under withering attack, Michigan has only doubled down on D.E.I., holding itself out as a model for other schools,” the NYT wrote in an October article. “By one estimate, the university has built the largest D.E.I. bureaucracy of any big public university. But an examination by The Times found that Michigan’s expansive — and expensive — D.E.I. program has struggled to achieve its central goals even as it set off a cascade of unintended consequences.”

Despite UM investing $250 million into DEI since 2016, students and faculty have reported a deteriorating campus climate since the program began and are less likely to interact with people of a different race, religion or political ideology, though these are “the exact kind of engagement[s] D.E.I. programs, in theory, are meant to foster,” the article stated. Attempts to create a more diverse campus also fell flat, with black enrollment at the university remaining a steady 5%.

The program also created a “culture of grievance,” with the office’s conception coinciding with an “explosion” of complaints on campus involving race, gender and religion, the NYT reported. Meanwhile, nearly 250 university employees were engaged in some form of DEI efforts on campus.

Modrak in her email referenced the article, calling it a “tendentious attack” that was “not well researched,” and claiming that the author “cherry-picked” examples of UM’s failures.

DEI staff cost the university approximately $30.68 million annually, with the average salary reaching $96,400, according to Mark Perry, an American Enterprise Institute scholar. Several DEI employees are paid more than $200,000 a year, while the department’s head makes upwards of $400,000.

“I think that across the ideological spectrum both regular citizens and policymakers have really shifted on issues of identity politics,” John Sailer, senior fellow and director of higher education policy at the Manhattan Institute, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “I think a lot of people who would have at some point, probably just as a matter of knee-jerk reaction, supported diversity initiatives, have started to really reconsider what these initiatives are actually doing, and reconsider whether everything that falls under the name of DEI is actually something that they support. And so there was already the slow burn.”

The major catalyst of this change, Sailer explained, was the series of fiery protests that ravaged college campuses across the country after Hamas’ deadly Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel, which were “absolutely a big part of the story.”

“A lot of people were already skeptical of DEI,” Sailer said. “A lot of people were already of the opinion that these policies, even though they purport to be about diversity, in practice really have been about a particular ideological vision for higher ed. Then on October 7, I think a whole different part of the American electorate and a whole different constituency, many more people from the professional world looked at universities and thought, What on earth is going on? What is the problem here?”

The University of Michigan, like many other schools, was overwhelmed by violent protests that resulted in several arrests and criminal charges being filed against 11 students and alumni.

“It became clear that a part of the problem was we have these massive bureaucracies that should ostensibly promote treating people well,” Sailer continued. “And it was in fact a lot of people most involved with the DEI complex who were supporting these kind of radically anti-Israel, radically anti-West, at times, rudely antisemitic demonstrations.”

The reelection of former president Donald Trump on Nov. 5 likely played no small role in this shift either.

“I think now every elected official is aware that there’s something of a popular mandate to reform higher education, and that mandate existed before Trump was elected in 2024, but there’s also a kind of popular rebuke of the progressive identity politics,” Sailer said. “I have to think that the conversation that the University of Michigan’s regents are having about DEI would be different if there had not been this nationwide rebuke of identity politics that the election of Trump seems to represent.”

Trump has promised many reforms to the education sector, including abolishing the Department of Education entirely. The president-elect has also vowed to bring peace to Israel and Gaza and said that such efforts would help curb the rise in antisemitism in the U.S.

While several other schools have begun to dismantle DEI offices across the country, some in response to state laws barring the departments and policies, the case at the University of Michigan is unique. Most efforts thus far have been led by Republican lawmakers, such as in Texas and Florida, but in the blue state of Michigan, the university’s highest governing body is comprised almost entirely of Democrats.

“The fact that University of Michigan is an institution controlled by elected Democrats, the fact that its Board of Regents would consider doing something like this, I think it signals a broader shift,” Sailer said. “It’s a huge deal for the University of Michigan to even have this kind of reform on the table. It’s a huge deal because the University of Michigan is the exemplar when it comes to DEI. If the University of Michigan makes this decision, that marks a big shift.”

This move by the university could signal others to follow suit.

“It could be just a massive step towards broader higher education reform,” Sailer told the DCNF.

UM and the Board of Regents did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.

Related Topics:#DailyCaller JarynCrouson UniversityOfMichiganDEI USDEI

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ESG Is Collapsing And Net Zero Is Going With It

Published on January 12, 2025

Todayville

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By David Blackmon

The chances of achieving the goal of net-zero by 2050 are basically net zero

Just a few years ago, ESG was all the rage in the banking and investing community as globalist governments in the western world focused on a failing attempt to subsidize an energy transition into reality. The strategy was to try to strangle fossil fuel industries by denying them funding for major projects, with major ESG-focused institutional investors like BlackRock and State Street, and big banks like J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs leveraging their control of trillions of dollars in capital to lead the cause.

But a funny thing happened on the way to a green Nirvana: It turned out that the chosen rent-seeking industries — wind, solar and electric vehicles — are not the nifty plug-and-play solutions they had been cracked up to be.

Even worse, the advancement of new technologies and increased mining of cryptocurrencies created enormous new demand for electricity, resulting in heavy new demand for finding new sources of fossil fuels to keep the grid running and people moving around in reliable cars.

In other words, reality butted into the green narrative, collapsing the foundations of the ESG movement. The laws of physics, thermodynamics and unanticipated consequences remain laws, not mere suggestions.

Making matters worse for the ESG giants, Texas and other states passed laws disallowing any of these firms who use ESG principles to discriminate against their important oil, gas and coal industries from investing in massive state-governed funds. BlackRock and others were hit with sanctions by Texas in 2023. More recently, Texas and 10 other states sued Blackrock and other big investment houses for allegedly violating anti-trust laws.

As the foundations of the ESG movement collapse, so are some of the institutions that sprang up around it. The United Nations created one such institution, the “Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative,” whose participants maintain pledges to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 and adhere to detailed plans to reach that goal.

The problem with that is there is now a growing consensus that a) the forced march to a green energy transition isn’t working and worse, that it can’t work, and b) the chances of achieving the goal of net-zero by 2050 are basically net zero. There is also a rising consensus among energy companies of a pressing need to prioritize matters of energy security over nebulous emissions reduction goals that most often constitute poor deployments of capital. Even as the Biden administration has ramped up regulations and subsidies to try to force its transition, big players like ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, and Shell have all redirected larger percentages of their capital budgets away from investments in carbon reduction projects back into their core oil-and-gas businesses.

The result of this confluence of factors and events has been a recent rush by big U.S. banks and investment houses away from this UN-run alliance. In just the last two weeks, the parade away from net zero was led by major banks like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and, most recently, JP Morgan. On Thursday, the New York Post reported that both BlackRock and State Street, a pair of investment firms who control trillions of investor dollars (BlackRock alone controls more than $10 trillion) are on the brink of joining the flood away from this increasingly toxic philosophy.

In June, 2023, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink made big news when told an audience at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Aspen, Colorado that he is “ashamed of being part of this [ESG] conversation.” He almost immediately backed away from that comment, restating his dedication to what he called “conscientious capitalism.” The takeaway for most observers was that Fink might stop using the term ESG in his internal and external communications but would keep right on engaging in his discriminatory practices while using a different narrative to talk about it.

But this week’s news about BlackRock and the other big firms feels different. Much has taken place in the energy space over the last 18 months, none of it positive for the energy transition or the net-zero fantasy. Perhaps all these big banks and investment funds are awakening to the reality that it will take far more than devising a new way of talking about the same old nonsense concepts to repair the damage that has already been done to the world’s energy system.

David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.

Fraser Institute

Trudeau’s legacy includes larger tax burden for middle-class Canadians

Published on January 11, 2025

Todayville

From the Fraser Institute

By Jake Fuss and Grady Munro

On Monday outside Rideau Cottage in Ottawa, after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told Canadians he plans to resign, a reporter asked Trudeau to name his greatest accomplishments. In response, among other things, Trudeau said his government “reduced” taxes for the “middle class.” But this claim doesn’t withstand scrutiny.

After taking office in 2015, the Trudeau government reduced the second-lowest personal income tax rate from 22.0 per cent to 20.5 per cent—a change that was explicitly sold by Trudeau as a tax cut for the middle class. However, this change ultimately didn’t lower the amount of taxes paid by middle-class Canadians. Why?

Because the government simultaneously eliminated several tax credits—which are intended to reduce the amount of income taxes owed—including income splitting, the children’s fitness credit, children’s arts tax credit, and public transit tax credits. By eliminating these tax credits, the government helped simplify the tax system, which is a good thing, but it also raised the amount families pay in income taxes.

Consequently, most middle-income families now pay higher taxes. Specifically, a 2022 study published by the Fraser Institute found that nearly nine in 10 (86 per cent) middle-income families (earning household incomes between $84,625 and $118,007) experienced an increase in their federal personal income taxes as a result of the Trudeau government’s tax changes.

The study also found that other income groups experienced tax increases. Nearly three-quarters (73 per cent) of families with a household income between $54,495 and $84,624 paid higher taxes as a result of the tax changes. And across all income groups, 61 per cent of Canadian families faced higher personal income taxes than they did in 2015.

The Trudeau government also introduced a new top tax bracket on income over $200,000—which raised the top federal personal income tax rate from 29 per cent to 33 per cent—and other tax changes that increased the tax burden on Canadians including the recent capital gains tax hike. Prior to this hike, investors who sold capital assets (stocks, second homes, cottages, etc.) paid taxes on 50 per cent of the gain. Last year, the Trudeau government increased that share to 66.7 per cent for individual capital gains above $250,000 and all capital gains for corporations and trusts.

According to the Trudeau government, this change will only impact the “wealthiest” Canadians, but in fact it will impact many middle-class Canadians. For example, in 2018, half of all taxpayers who claimed more than $250,000 of capital gains in a year earned less than $117,592 in normal income. These include Canadians with modest annual incomes who own businesses, second homes or stocks, and who may choose to sell those assets once or infrequently in their lifetimes (when they retire, for example). These Canadians will feel the real-world effects of Trudeau’s capital gains tax hike.

While reflecting on his tenure, Prime Minister Trudeau said he was proud that his government reduced taxes for middle-class Canadians. In reality, taxes for middle-class families have increased since he took office. That’s a major part of his legacy as prime minister.