DEI Blitz Reaches Buckeye Nation

OSU Spending Tens of Millions on DEI; Receiving Far-Left Grants and Foreign Donations

As our research has demonstrated over the past year, American universities have been ideologically captured by left-wing radicalism and are promoting anti-American, neo-Marxist notions under the banner of “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI). While we’ve come to expect stories like this in the ivory towers of Harvard or Princeton, state schools have been caught up in the madness, too.

Ohio State University is a Big 10 school, home of the Buckeyes. It operates in what’s now a dark-red state when it comes to politics. Among its famed recent alumni are Patricia Heaton (Everybody Loves Raymond) and our Vice President-elect JD Vance, the author of Hillbilly Elegy.

It’s not exactly where you’d expect to find a hub of DEI-related activity. And yet, after studying ten public institutions in our investigative series, we learned Ohio State is spending the most on payroll for DEI employees.

BACKGROUND

Thanks to transparency, Americans have discovered what’s happening in higher education, and a few states have begun pushing back: According to the Chronicles of Higher Education, DEI offices are now banned in seven public state systems, most recently throughout the University of North Carolina schools. Five additional states have also taken smaller steps to rein in DEI, like banning the use of diversity statements in hiring and admission decisions in state universities. More states have similar legislation pending.

Still, most states around the country continue to pour taxpayer funds and student tuition dollars into salaries for people who push the divisive DEI at institutions of higher learning.

At the same time, foreign funders contribute billions of dollars into American universities, raising questions about how adversarial countries influence research and student life, all while the universities collect billions from U.S. taxpayers.

THE BIG NUMBERS

Ohio State University spent $13.3 million on pay for 201 employees with DEI-related roles last year. That’s the equivalent of full tuition for over 1,000 in-state students at its main Columbus campus.

The highest paid DEI officials are James L. More, vice provost for diversity and inclusion and chief diversity officer at OSU, and Keesha Mitchell, associate vice president for the Office of Institutional Equity, practically tied at just under $300,000 each.

Another 29 people make between $100,000 and $269,000, with titles such as associate dean for diversity, inclusion, and outreach ($269,260), another associate vice president for the Office of Institutional Equity ($226,644), assistant vice provost for diversity and inclusion ($171,889), academic director for diversity and inclusion ($170,435), assistant dean and director of diversity, equity and inclusion ($145,923), among many more.

Various departments have one or a handful of DEI-related staff, while the vast majority of such staff are concentrated in several larger DEI offices.

Ninety people work in the Office of Diversity and Inclusion — 14 work on the Young Scholars Program for high school and college students, another 14 people receive small stipends for the Upward Bound program for high school students.

Thirty-two people work in the Office of Institutional Equity, including Mitchell, the second highest paid of the 201 DEI employees.

Twenty-six professors, lecturers, instructors and academic program services specialists are employed in the area of women’s gender and sexuality studies, with the top two highest paid earning $173,054 and $157,227.

COURSEWORK GOES OFF COURSE

While women’s studies may sound like nothing new, this program has expanded from traditional topics to, in their own words, include study of “gender and sexuality as socially and culturally constructed phenomena that affect our personal lives, artistic expression, social relationships, and the ways we think about ourselves and the world.”

It offers courses like “Sexualities and Citizenship: A survey of cultural, social, and political issues related to historical and contemporary lesbian experience in the United States” and “Queer Ecologies: Gender, Sexuality, & the Environment.” From the latter course description:

“Queer ecologies seek to disrupt the gendered and heterosexual assumptions embedded in how we understand the environment, nature, and bodies (human and animal). From animal studies, queer and feminist social movements for environmental justice, trans*natures, and sexual politics, Queer Ecologies will articulate a commitment to new thinking about the challenges of planetary and climate change.”

Given the funding for – and prevalence of – radical left-wing ideology on campuses, it’s no surprise that following the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, there were antisemitic attacks on students.

Pro-Palestinian OSU students and others at held a series of protests and constructed a “solidarity encampment” in April, during which there were at least 36 arrests.

Protestors also called for the university to divest from Israel.

Protestors at Columbia University, the University of Michigan and the University of California, Los Angeles also had similar divestment demands.

FOREIGN FUNDING SOURCES

Foreign funders and state governments try to buy influence in higher education, with some of the largest donations coming from Qatar, Saudi Arabia and China. Billions of dollars flow from each to American universities nationwide.

All three countries have a track record of human rights abuses and their agendas are often at odds with American interests.

China has come under fire for its lack of transparency surrounding the Covid-19 outbreak, repressing its Uyghur minority population, and stealing American intellectual property through bribery and spying.

On their own, universities aren’t always transparent about their foreign funders, necessitating federal law to require colleges to report foreign-sourced gifts and contracts worth at least $250,000 in a calendar year.

OSU has reported $203.5 million from foreign sources since 2013.

Most of the foreign donations come from countries friendly to the United States, but China gave $15.8 million to the university.

Ohio State runs a “China Gateway” program that helps connect students and alumni with career opportunities in East Asia. The university holds a China Career Fair each year, and the Fisher College of Business helps students secure Chinese internships.

In 2021, Ohio State researcher Song Guo Zheng pleaded guilty in Ohio to fraud for spending a $4.1 million grant from the National Institutes of Health on immunology research for China. Zheng — a member of the Thousand Talents Program, through which China recruits foreign researchers — never disclosed his Chinese affiliations to Ohio State when he was hired in 2013.

He was sentenced to 37 months in prison and fined $3.8 million for lying on applications and using the grants to develop China’s expertise in the areas of rheumatology and immunology.

“For years the defendant concealed his participation in Chinese government talent recruitment programs, hiding his affiliations with at least five research institutions in China. Zheng greedily took federal research dollars and prevented others from receiving funding for critical research in support of medical advances.” - Alan E. Kohler Jr., Assistant Director, FBI Counterintelligence Division.

Ohio State has also accepted $7.7 million from Saudi Arabian sources. The school has its own Alumni Club of Saudi Arabia, which gathered for a celebration in Riyadh last year.

Japan gave $24.6 million, Switzerland gave $17.7 million, The Netherlands gave $17.4 million, England and Germany each gave $14.1 million, among other countries.

ROCK CLIMBING, BUG EATING, AND MISINFO FIGHTING

Since 2020, OSU has received over $3 billion in federal tax dollars from grants and contracts. Funds average about $700 million a year.

Most funding — around $2.6 billion — came in the form of grants.

The Department of Health and Human Services is by far the top spender at $1.3 billion. The Department of Education is a distant second with $447 million.

While the list goes on and on, these are a few examples of federal funds run amok at OSU:

• $445,600 from National Science Foundation for the Girls* on Rock program, which seeks to make the geosciences more diverse by providing “16-18-year-old girls and nonbinary individuals with immersive, hands-on experiences in the geosciences, combined with elements of artistic expression and technical rock climbing in the Rocky Mountains, Colorado.”

• $717,000 from Department of Agriculture to solve “cultural resistance in the USA and Europe [that] impedes the acceptance of insect proteins as food sources.” The grant states that “to overcome cultural barriers, a multidisciplinary research initiative seeks to develop sustainable extraction methods for obtaining protein, lipids, and valuable components from insect meal.”

• $749,999 from National Science Foundation for “actionable sensemaking tools for curating and authenticating information in the presence of misinformation during crises”

• $885,000 from Department of Health and Human Services for a project titled “Vaccine Hesitancy: Exploring the Role of Temporal and Cross-country Variation in Covid Rules, Vaccine Media Coverage, and Public Health Policy Consistency”

Other grants came from the National Science Foundation (over $323 million), Department of Defense ($197 million), Department of Agriculture ($155 million).

But the university also contracted with the federal government to provide services — it got almost $29 million from the Department of Labor, almost $16 million from DoD, $8.4 million from HHS, $3 million from Veterans Affairs and $1.4 million from National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

These funds don’t include government-backed student loans or tax breaks on OSU’s $7.9 billion endowment.

Despite OSU’s extreme wealth, the university also took nearly $225 million in federal Higher Education Emergency Relief Funds to offset expenses incurred by COVID-19 lockdowns and related economic uncertainties.

Other wealthy universities including Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton and Northwestern, turned down COVID-related congressional funds.

DEI: A TWO-WAY STREET

We’ve demonstrated how OSU uses its cash reserves on an internal DEI infrastructure, but capturing the culture requires a give and take.

The university spent over $46,500 last year on organizations with a DEI purpose, according to its vendor spending records.

It gave $25,000 to National Center for Faculty Development & Diversity, and $4,500 to the National Diversity Council for workshops and other programs, even as the company is preparing to shutter.

Trenton-based Salvation and Social Justice, “the leading organization in New Jersey for racial justice issues,” also received $16,500.

Records do not reflect whether services were provided or if these were simple grants for aligning with OSU’s values.

CONCLUSION

All told, OSU has a mountain of public and private funds at its disposal. As a public institution, taxpayers are investing with the expectation that OSU turns out graduates ready to contribute to their state and nation, growing our economy and advancing our society.

But the DEI worldview has proven divisive and costly in the real world outside academia, as private companies find themselves tangled in lawsuits over discrimination. For the sake of state and federal taxpayers, Ohio should get with the new program and step away from the DEI craze.