MIT Sloan School recently published a fascinating article lauding the wisdom of auditing corporate claims about carbon emissions reductions. The point of the article is that only third-party independent audits can penetrate the greenwashing that often accompanies self-reporting on corporate virtue programs.

How about applying that same logic to academic virtue programs? In particular, MIT’s DEI Leviathan.

How many full-time equivalent employees are working on DEI across MIT’s distributed schools, departments, laboratories, and centers? How much faculty time is devoted to DEI? What are the loaded salary costs for all these people? What are the associated program budgets for the myriad DEI-driven training, compliance, activist, investigation, and preferred identity-group support programs that MIT is running?

That’s the cost side. Now what about the results side?

What are the stated goals of all these programs? How is progress against these goals being measured, and who is doing the measuring? Which programs have been successful against their stated goals, and which need reform or elimination? Have the successes been worth the expenditures? How many of these programs and practices exacerbated the recent identitarian conflicts on campus, as well as the climate of fear that prevails among both students and faculty?

Only an independent, third-party audit can answer these questions with any credibility. If President Sally Kornbluth is serious about reform given the total breakdown of Community and Belonging since last October 7th, she’s going to have to subject the organization she inherited to scrutiny. After all, that’s what her predecessor did over the far less consequential Jeffrey Epstein donation scandal that triggered the meteoric growth of DEI at MIT.