DEI Hard: Ohio State diversity payroll, China funding scrutinized as alum JD Vance becomes veep
January 7, 2025
Ohio State University clobbered top-ranked Oregon in the Rose Bowl Game Wednesday. Now it faces a bigger threat: the Republican-dominated Legislature and alumnus JD Vance, expected to be an unusually powerful vice president in the next administration.
Taxpayer transparency watchdog Open the Books sacked the Buckeyes in a report Monday on its diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucracy, including 201 employees with “DEI-related roles” who last year cost $13.3 million, which it said could pay in-state tuition for 1,000 students.
OSU’s foreign funding includes $15.8 million from China since 2013, which that year snuck a spy into OSU to exfiltrate research funded by American taxpayers. Song Guo Zheng escaped notice until he tried to flee back to China seven years later and went to prison for making false statements to the feds for an “immunology research fraud scheme.”
It also gobbled up more than $3 billion from the feds since 2020 – $2.6 billion as grants, half from the Department of Health and Human Services – for programs and research such as rock climbing for Girls* (female and nonbinary teens), overcoming Western resistance to insect protein and factors behind whether and when people sought COVID-19 vaccines.
It received a National Science Foundation grant for “curating and authenticating information in the presence of misinformation during crises,” through NSF’s Convergence Accelerator for “societal impact” and its Track F for “Trust & Authenticity in Communication Systems,” the subject of a Foundation for Freedom Online report two years ago.