Does Hiring Diversity Officers Increase University Diversity?

It is easier for universities to hire administrators than to engage in meaningful change.

A new study in the Southern Economic Journal suggests that university efforts to enhance diversity by hiring DEI executives to oversee diversification efforts were largely ineffective. Specifically the study, "The Impact of Chief Diversity Officers on Diverse Faculty Hiring," finds that hiring CDOs had no effect on faculty diversity.

The abstract reads:

Racial diversity among faculty, students, and administrators is increasing at universities in the United States. These changes have been uneven, with growth in underrepresented students exceeding that of faculty diversity. To address these and other inequities, a growing number of universities have established an executive-level chief diversity officer (CDO). Our study offers a first empirical examination of this effort at selected 4-year U.S. universities from 2001 to 2019 using unique data on the initial hiring date of a CDO and publicly available demographic data. We provide a comprehensive overview of demographic trends within our data and find confidence intervals around the estimated instantaneous average treatment effect for an executive-level CDO on diverse hiring tightly contain zero. Estimated treatment effects are small and lack statistical significance within 4 years of a CDO position being established. We discuss other possible factors that explain trends toward higher diversity on campus and several possible constraints.

Should the paper's results be surprising? Not particularly. It is relatively easy for a university (or any large, bureaucratic institution) to hire administrators and adopt superficial policies. Actually changing hiring practices, on the other hand, can be quite difficult, and changing the composition of a faculty can be quite slow. If a university faculty is resistant to hiring people of different backgrounds (or viewpoints), hiring a few administrators is unlikely to change things very much.

None of this means that hiring DEI administrators has no impact. There are certainly anecdotal accounts suggesting that some such efforts can affect university culture (and perhaps in quite negative ways--as seems to have occurred at the University of Michigan). The point is that such investments do not appear to produce the sorts of changes that they promise.