For the most part, the Office of Cultural Diversity is an employment program for aging leftist activists without marketable job skills like Susana Pelayo-Woodward.
At the end of September, while engaged in public campus outreach at University of Minnesota-Duluth, a conservative activist handing out Constitutions was both threatened by a self proclaimed Black Panther and harassed by the Director of the Office of Cultural Diversity, Susana Pelayo-Woodward. The Black Panthers are, in the grand scheme of things, small timers who rely on intimidation by street activists but don’t have much of any real influence on society. Susana Pelayo-Woodward is another matter, an administrator with an entire bureaucracy behind her. The question is what are Minnesota taxpayers getting out of this?
Susana Pelayo-Woodward is employed by the taxpayer-funded University of Minnesota-Duluth and scheduled to collect $77,046 this year. This is in addition to the generous health care, retirement, and other benefits available to employees in the University of Minnesota system. The total benefits paid to Office of Cultural Diversity employees this year is $122,260, apportioned evenly by salary, this adds $27,724 to her pay; giving her a total six-figure pay & benefits total of $104,770. Remember, this is out in Duluth, Minnesota: this is the equivalent of $168,778 in New York City, which would put her in the top 5% of income earners in the country: dangerously close to that ‘top 1%’ currently being protested by college students unable to pay off their student loans.
Overall, the Office of Cultural Diversity at the University of Minnesota-Duluth, a branch campus of the University of Minnesota with less than 10,000 undergraduates, has a budget of $656,770 for this year. $32,572 of this amount is taken from students in the form of mandatory student fees they must pay on top of tuition costs, and nearly all of the rest comes from Minnesota taxpayers. Only $1000 came from private gifts and donations, or .15% of the budget. This is, however, an increase from last year, when private gifts & donations only made up $500, or .08% of the budget. If nobody wants to voluntary donate to this project, why are students and taxpayers forced to pay for this massive entity?
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