Of course, DEI bureaucracies are not the only reason why so many universities are weighed down with more administrators than students or faculty. Far from it. The main reason is that universities, like all institutions, must comply with a tangle of complex federal regulations, nearly all of them established, implemented and enforced by yet another set of bureaucrats —those in Washington.

The result is a pervasive regulatory web on every campus, requiring hundreds of administrators to ensure compliance and provide the federal government with data to prove it. That web is even thicker at university research hospitals, which grew out of the biological sciences and soon became profit centers in their own right.

For now, there is little hope of significantly reducing this blob of government regulations and the bureaucracies associated with them. But there is one important exception: programs involving DEI and affirmative action. Opponents of those programs now believe they can be cut. Supporters see the same trend and fear it means the loss of opportunities for historically-disadvantaged groups.

[Yes, units with explicit DEI missions are in the process of getting culled out of schools and corporate America, and that’s a step in the right direction. However, the people in charge show every indication of pursuing DEI outcomes through other means, ANY other means, as long as no one stops them. Even where state legislatures explicitly bar DEI, such as Texas, schools like UT-Austin are trying to just rename those units to continue the same policies. The idea that DEI is on life support seems very optimistic at the moment. — Ed]