Michigan State Renamed Its DEI Office to Duck the Feds —
Then Kept Paying Five “Inclusion” Staffers $879,000.
Five employees of Michigan State University’s rebranded diversity office — now called the “Office for Inclusive Excellence and Impact” — cost the university $879,194.81 a year in salaries, according to public records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by Campus Reform and published this month. The office employs eighteen people. MSU disclosed salaries for five.
The man at the top of the ledger, Vice President and Chief Inclusion Officer Jabbar Bennett, earns $383,721.15 — roughly 2.4 times the $159,300 that Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) is paid to run the entire state. Bennett was hired in September 2020 at $315,000; his pay has since climbed about 22 percent, a raise of nearly $69,000.
The records landed the same summer MSU’s board approved a 3.99 percent tuition hike, a 5 percent housing increase, and a 9 percent budget cut over two years to plug a $12 million deficit — and eight months after that same board, seven Democrats and one Republican elected on partisan ballots, voted to strip the word “diversity” from the office’s name and Bennett’s title while promising, in a trustee’s words, that “the work will remain.”
- $879,194.81 — combined annual salaries of the five disclosed staffers in MSU's rebranded inclusion office · Source: Campus Reform FOIA; PJ Media; Legal Insurrection
- $383,721 — Chief Inclusion Officer Jabbar Bennett's salary — 2.4 times Gov. Gretchen Whitmer's (D) $159,300 · Source: Campus Reform FOIA; Ballotpedia
- 13 staffers — additional employees in the 18-person office whose salaries MSU did not disclose · Source: Campus Reform
- 3.99% — the tuition increase MSU's board approved in June 2026 while cutting 9% from the budget over two years · Source: The State News
- ≈50 — in-state freshman full-year tuitions ($17,656 each) that the five salaries alone would cover · Source: The State News; Civic Intelligence calculation
The salary records came out of a Freedom of Information Act request filed by Campus Reform, which published the figures in early July; Legal Insurrection independently corroborated all five salaries and Bennett’s original 2020 contract on July 2, and PJ Media carried the numbers on July 11. The five names MSU disclosed are not the whole story — they are the fraction of it the university was willing to put on paper. The Office for Inclusive Excellence and Impact lists eighteen employees; the other thirteen salaries were simply not provided.
Jabbar Bennett, Vice President & Chief Inclusion Officer — $383,721.15
Deborah Johnson, Diversity Research Network Director — $239,309.12
Florensio Hernandez, Outreach & Engagement Manager — $91,710
Micaela Flores, Assistant Director, Diversity Research Network — $89,304.14
Lisa Fuentes, Staff Assistant — $75,150.40
Total: $879,194.81 — for five of the office’s eighteen employees. The remaining thirteen salaries were not disclosed. Source: Campus Reform FOIA, corroborated by Legal Insurrection and PJ Media.
For scale: as recently as June 2024, The College Fix counted more than 140 MSU employees working on 222 separate DEI “action items,” at a payroll cost it put around $18 million. The five disclosed salaries are a keyhole view of a much larger apparatus — one MSU has now renamed twice in four years without shrinking.
The office has existed since 2007, when it was the “Office for Inclusion and Intercultural Initiatives.” On January 17, 2022, MSU renamed it the “Office for Institutional Diversity and Inclusion” — and Bennett, announcing the change on the university’s own website, said the school was focused “now more than ever” on “advancing DEI strategic priorities” at an institutional level. That was the branding when diversity was an asset.
By October 31, 2025, with Washington openly hostile to campus DEI, the branding became a liability. MSU’s Board of Trustees voted to rename the operation the “Office for Inclusive Excellence and Impact” and to remove “diversity” from Bennett’s vice-presidential title. Trustee Rema Vassar (D) voted no; Dennis Denno (D) abstained. The trustees themselves described the change candidly — as a change of label, not of substance.
“The work we do will not change, and the work will remain.”
Trustee Renee Knake Jefferson (D), MSU Board of Trustees, October 31, 2025 — via The State News
“Just really tired of running away from the word diversity.”
Trustee Dennis Denno (D), abstaining on the rebrand — via The State News
Bennett’s own launch of the university’s DEI strategic plan — 222 action items, unveiled in 2021 — is preserved in MSU’s official video, in the office’s own words, under the office’s previous name.
The salaries would be a curiosity in a flush year. This is not a flush year. In June 2026, MSU’s board approved a 3.99 percent tuition increase on a 4–2 vote — Rema Vassar (D) and Mike Balow (R), the board’s lone Republican, voted no — alongside a 5 percent housing increase and a 9 percent budget cut spread over two years to close a $12 million deficit. WKAR, the university’s own public broadcaster, framed the cuts as an $85 million reduction in September 2025; the board-confirmed figures are the 9 percent and the $12 million.
Run the arithmetic against what students pay. An in-state freshman’s tuition is $8,828 per semester — $17,656 for the year. The five disclosed inclusion-office salaries, $879,194.81, would cover roughly fifty of those freshman years. Bennett’s salary alone covers about twenty-two. Even his raise since 2020 — roughly $69,000 — equals four students’ full-year tuition, granted while the university was cutting programs and raising the price of showing up.
The state money is getting harder too. MSU’s appropriation stands at $333.7 million; Gov. Whitmer (D) proposed a 1 percent increase, but in April 2026 the Republican-controlled Michigan House passed a budget cutting $208.8 million — roughly 62 percent — from MSU’s line, with DEI spending among the stated grievances. Pending a final deal between the chambers — opening bids like the House’s rarely survive conference intact — the university says it is budgeting conservatively, at around $324 million. Against that backdrop, an eighteen-person inclusion office paying five people $879,000 — with thirteen salaries still unaccounted for — is not a rounding error; it is a choice.
The federal pressure MSU was reacting to is real, but it is worth stating precisely. Executive Order 14173 in January 2025 targeted federal DEI spending; the Department of Education’s February 14, 2025 “Dear Colleague” letter warned schools off race-based programming; and in March 2025 the department opened two waves of investigations — a 60-university antisemitism list and a 45-institution Title VI probe of PhD Project programming. The University of Michigan is on both lists. Michigan State is on neither. MSU’s named federal exposure is a March 2025 civil-rights complaint by Young America’s Foundation over racially segregated “affinity” housing spaces — which, as the American Enterprise Institute documented, the university first concealed, then walked back.
The contrast with Ann Arbor is instructive. On March 27, 2025, the University of Michigan — which Regent Jordan Acker (D) said had spent roughly $250 million on DEI since 2016 across some 163 positions — closed its DEI offices outright and ended its strategic plan. Yet by April 2026, Legal Insurrection found U-M still employing 162 diversity-related staffers. If the school that shut its office down kept the people, what should anyone expect from the school that only changed the sign on the door?
The stakes of the renaming game were set from the top. On October 12, 2025, President Donald Trump (R) opened his administration’s higher-education compact — federal funding preferences in exchange for commitments on merit-based admissions and hiring — to every American college, framing it bluntly on Truth Social. Education Secretary Linda McMahon (R) had already drawn the legal line under the Title VI investigations.
…much of Higher Education has lost its way, and is now corrupting our Youth and Society with WOKE, SOCIALIST, and ANTI-AMERICAN Ideology…
via Inside Higher Ed / Time, October 2025
“Students must be assessed according to merit and accomplishment, not prejudged by the color of their skin.”
Education Secretary Linda McMahon (R) — U.S. Department of Education, March 2025
Every one of these decisions traces to named, elected people. MSU’s eight trustees run statewide on partisan ballots, and the current board is seven Democrats and one Republican: Brianna T. Scott (D), chair; Renee Knake Jefferson (D), vice chair; Rebecca Bahar-Cook (D); Dennis Denno (D); Sandy Pierce (D); Kelly Tebay Zemke (D); Rema Vassar (D); and Mike Balow (R). The votes are on the record: Vassar opposed the rebrand and the tuition hike; Balow joined her against the tuition hike; Denno abstained on the rebrand while saying the quiet part — that the rename was about running from a word, not changing a program. Bennett, who runs the office, is unelected staff hired by the administration.
Presiding over all of it is President Kevin Guskiewicz, who announced on May 27 that he was leaving for Clemson — citing trustees “pursuing personal agendas” — then reversed course on July 6 and stayed, telling Bridge Michigan the university faces “tough decisions” ahead. So far, the tough decisions have fallen on students, in the form of a 3.99 percent tuition hike, and on academic budgets, in the form of a two-year 9 percent cut. They have not fallen on an eighteen-person inclusion office whose five disclosed salaries alone would fund fifty freshman years — and whose board says, on the record, that the work will remain.
Michigan State renamed its diversity office twice in four years — the second time, in October 2025, to get the word “diversity” out of federal view — while a FOIA request shows five of its eighteen staffers collecting $879,194.81 and the other thirteen salaries undisclosed. The same Democratic-majority board that approved the rename raised tuition 3.99 percent, raised housing 5 percent, and cut 9 percent over two years to plug a $12 million hole. The chief inclusion officer out-earns Michigan’s governor by a factor of 2.4. A trustee said it plainly: the work will remain. The bill for it, evidently, will too.
