Dear fellow Patriots:
Last week I reached out to you about a report issued by The Heritage Foundation accusing Virginia, and in particular George Mason University, of “dangerous DEI bloat,” by employing excessive staff and budgets to promote “radical ideologies.” Since then a number of us have looked more closely at the claims, and have confirmed our initial doubts about the basic accuracy, and therefore validity, of the report. This is a great university, filled with inspiring students, faculty, and staff – we deserve better. And I have reached out to The Heritage Foundation with precisely that message, plus an invitation.
Problematic report
Our doubts about the report lie in three main areas:
- Indexing DEI staff to tenured/tenure-track faculty only– The most problematic part of the report is that Heritage would compare DEI staff to one type of instructor – tenured and tenure/track faculty – excluding our term faculty, which number roughly half of our instructors. That course correction alone would cut their ratio of DEI staff to faculty in half, but even that would not explain why Heritage did not compare DEI staff to student populations, whom our DEI mission exists to serve. Any comparison of DEI staff to anyone but students makes no sense, other than to fabricate a result that cannot be produced in any other way. Even if we had 100 DEI staff, when compared to the more than 40,000 students we serve, and that we are a minority-serving institution (a majority of our students are people of color) it’s a really big stretch to call Mason bloated. Factually speaking, we actually serve more students with fewer staff than the other Virginia peers listed in the study.
- Number of DEI staff at Mason– The report grossly overstates the number of DEI staff at 69, and the researcher, Jay Greene, finally tweeted the 69 titles on Monday evening, following our call for some semblance of transparency. We have reviewed those titles and confirmed that, after eliminating outdated positions, double-counted positions, faculty positions that the report said would not be not counted, and an overwhelming number of part-time student positions, the number of DEI staff at this university of 40,000 students sits at less than a third of their claims, as we said last week.
- Focus on Power 5 athletic conference schools… and Mason – The decision to focus on Power 5 athletic conference schools is a bizarre shortcut, particularly, when Heritage then extrapolates the results of their claims across all of higher education. And even given their choice of targets, the obvious must be stated: George Mason University belongs to the Atlantic 10 Conference, which is not among the Power 5. The report suggests that Mason was added for “a more complete picture of Virginia,” but Heritage only looked at three of Virginia’s 69 SCHEV-accredited colleges and universities, excluding 12 of 15 public universities and all community colleges and private universities.
There is always room for serious discussion on how best to make a university open, welcoming, and productive for all citizens, but unfortunately this report – sloppy, methodologically questionable, and simply inaccurate as it is – not only falls short of something we can take seriously, it does damage to our capacity to have such a serious conversation. Quite frankly, it also damages Heritage’s reputation for providing accurate and useful information.
Out of our nearly 5,000 full-time equivalent employees, Heritage has targeted around 20, calling on them to be fired, using inflammatory rhetoric by calling their very existence “dangerous” and “wasteful,” and accusing all of them – right down to the Office Assistant and IT Associate – of pushing “radical ideologies.”
This university deserves better. It deserves a serious conversation. I have invited The Heritage Foundation to campus, either to explain this report more completely, or to take the opportunity to set it aside in favor of a reset conversation about how Mason lives its credo of being an institution of freedom and learning for Virginia and beyond.
If Heritage Foundation researchers and leaders are willing to sit with us and open a dialogue, we will be more than happy to receive them at our Fairfax Campus, offer them an orientation to our operations, and begin a serious dialogue about this report and the larger issues that underlie it.
Fellow Patriots, we have so much to be proud for what we accomplish together every day here as one of America’s top 50 public universities, and a leader in inclusivity, innovation, and social mobility. Our commitment to maintain an ethos of comprehensive inclusivity is both what has made us great, and proven to be difficult to maintain at times like this. It calls us to welcome everyone across all ideologies and walks of life – even, occasionally, those who do not understand us and may wish us reputational harm in pursuit of their own causes.
Thank you for all you do.
Sincerely,
Gregory Washington
President