- Podcasts
Podcasts - Videos
Videos - Policy Issues
Policy Issues - About
About
Audit of UW's DEI System
One of the heads of the legislature’s audit committee says he wants to see what the rest of the investigation into the University of Wisconsin’s DEI program brings.
Sen. Eric Wimberger, R-Oconto, on Monday said the first look at the auditors’ work is telling enough.
That work, according to UW-Madison leaders, led to LaVar Charleston being replaced as the director of the Division of Diversity, Equity and Educational Achievement.
“Dr. LaVar Charleston, who has led the division for the past three years, will leave his role as vice chancellor and return to his backup appointment as a clinical professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis in the School of Education. The change is effective immediately. Isbell will serve as acting director of DDEEA until an interim director is appointed,” the university announced in an email last week. “An ongoing internal review of DDEEA’s finances has revealed areas of concern about financial operations and fiscal judgments in the division. On Jan. 7, the unit’s leadership was notified that fiscal authority of DDEEA would be shifting to the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Finance and Administration.”
“This revelation highlights exactly why I, and legislative Republicans, voted to audit DEI government-wide,” Wimberger said Monday. “Not only is DEI harmful as it reinforces negative stereotypes by design, it’s also a slush fund of waste for grifters to profit off government funding.”
No one is saying just what the auditors found in their review of UW-Madison’s DDEI office, or specifically what “concerns” were unearthed.
Wimberger and other Republicans at the Wisconsin Capitol ordered a UW system-wide DEI audit last May. At the time, Wimberger called DEI “state-sponsored discrimination.”
“I don’t accept the premise of DEI,” Wimberger said last year. “I’ve not given up on a colorblind society. I choose to see others as peers who happen to have inconsequential physical traits and not as an intersectional mix of immutable characteristics for social management.”
On Monday, Wimberger said the full UW DEI audit should be available in a “couple of weeks.”
Interested in the content of this Article?
Reach out to the MacIver Institute to aquire more information
