Which DEI Positions Did UT-Austin Eliminate?

On Monday, a laundry list of left-leaning groups held the “Rally for our UT! Stop the Purge” protest to air their grievances against the state’s new commonsense law to curtail DEI programs at colleges and universities. The assembly of aggrieved—which included the Texas State Employees Union, the American Association of University Professors-UT Branch, NAACP, Texas Students for DEI, Underpaid at UT, the Austin Justice Coalition, the Transgender Education Network of Texas (TENT), and the Austin chapter of Students for a Democratic Society—seemed particularly miffed that, as a result of the new law, “the University of Texas, the state’s flagship school, dismissed 66 people who’d worked in DEI departments.”

Interested to know which positions in particular were on the university’s DEI dismissed list, I submitted a Public Information Act (PIA) request to the University of Texas’ open records department last month seeking to learn: “The job titles and salaries for those DEI-related employees terminated by the University…” In response, officials returned the list below of 49 discontinued positions and salaries.

Of course, it’s unfortunate when anyone loses their job; however, these positions were never appropriate or defendable since they “discriminate[d] against students based on their race, ethnicity, or gender.” As such, it is to the public’s gain that UT-Austin finally eliminated these positions, thereby moving its system in a better direction and saving taxpayers $4.1 million annually, excluding benefits.