From Peak DEI to “Wellbeing, Engagement, Belonging and Support” at MIT

This is the last of our five-part series, “DEI at MIT.” Earlier installments describe the work of MIT Alumni for Accountability (MAFA), a group of MIT alums who became alarmed about unmanaged mission expansion, undocumented administrative costs and unmeasured benefits of DEI and its successors at MIT. In 2023 and 2024, MAFA conducted extensive research, relying on materials available to the public posted on MIT-related websites. They reviewed thousands of pages of information related to DEI and its successor, “Belonging, Achievement, and Composition” (BAC). The work product is found at mafadei.com, which consists of an ideological and historical narrative, the taxonomy schematic consisting of hundreds of entries and in particular an Addendum with estimated cost data updated to early 2026.

MIT’s review of its DEI apparatus had, in fact, begun before President Trump’s second inauguration. In January 2024, President Kornbluth asked Institute Community and Equity Office (ICEO) staff to assess where the university was succeeding in supporting its community and where improvement was needed—an 18-month evaluation process that MIT grad Karl Reid, hired as MIT’s inaugural Vice President for Equity and Inclusion in March 2024, was charged with leading. That process was cut short when Reid announced his resignation on February 7, 2025, amid the new administration’s anti-DEI executive orders and investigations. In an interview with The Tech, Reid cited a desire to return to his professional roots in national STEM pipeline organizations. Upon Reid’s departure, the ICEO temporarily reported to Vice Provost for Faculty Paula Hammond.

A decisive step came on May 22, 2025, when President Kornbluth wrote to the MIT community announcing that the ICEO would be “sunset,” and that the vice-presidential position overseeing it would be eliminated. She also announced the discontinuation of the Strategic Action Plan for Belonging, Achievement, and Composition (SAPBAC), the elaborate institutional framework with thirty-plus metrics and school-by-school action plans that MIT had unveiled in September 2022. In her letter, Kornbluth acknowledged “real appreciation” for existing diversity programs but cited an internal review finding “a broad desire to rethink how this work is done in practice.” She framed the pivot explicitly: “community is best built locally rather than top down,” and introduced the Wellbeing, Engagement, Belonging, and Support (WEBS) nomenclature. A standing committee, led by staff but including students and faculty with “a clear channel to senior leadership,” would replace the central coordinating office.

The serial renaming that has accompanied this institutional history—from DEI to BAC to WEBS—is a textbook instance of what Harvard psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker called the “euphemism treadmill.” Pinker coined the term in a 1994 New York Times essay, writing, “The euphemism treadmill shows that concepts, not words, are in charge: give a concept a new name, and the name becomes colored by the concept; the concept does not become freshened by the name.” The mechanism is straightforward: a contested concept is given a neutral or positive label to reduce friction. Over time, critics recognize that the new label describes the same contested activity and the label itself acquires the same opprobrium as its predecessor until a new label is then sought. At MIT the treadmill has completed three full turns in little more than a decade, yet, as our analysis of the 2026 data demonstrate, the substantive programs and personnel have largely survived each rebranding intact.

As noted in prior articles in this series, “Peak DEI” in June 2024 included approximately 180 full-time equivalent (FTE) personnel devoted to DEI/BAC activities, with an annual personnel cost conservatively estimated at over $36 million. Updated data as of January 2026 show approximately 90 FTEs still devoted to successor activities, at an estimated annual personnel cost of approximately $23 million, broken down as roughly $12.4 million in salaries, $4.2 million in benefits, and $6.6 million in overhead. The apparent reduction from 180+ to 90 FTEs and from $36 million to $23 million requires careful interpretation, for several reasons.

First, the largest source of the FTE decline is the disbanding of SAPBAC committees, councils, and working groups. Under SAPBAC, virtually every MIT school, department, lab, and research center had convened one or more such bodies, comprising numerous faculty members, administrators, and staff who were counted as fractional FTEs for committee service. When MIT disbanded SAPBAC, those units were dissolved and the individuals who participated in them primarily as a SAPBAC obligation do not appear in the 2026 data.

Second, as has been the case at universities nationwide following the Trump administration’s executive orders, MIT significantly reduced the public visibility of DEI-related content on its websites. The Tech reported in February 2025 that the School of Science had removed its “Diversity and Inclusion” page, redirecting visitors to an “Academic Affairs & Community Engagement” site. Similar removals occurred at the Whitehead Institute, McGovern Institute, Koch Institute, and the Biology Department. Our research for the updated dataset confirmed this broadly: many positions cataloged in 2024 carried detailed job descriptions reflecting MIT’s embrace of DEI, but equivalent transparency was commonly absent for personnel identified in 2026.

Another example of program rebranding was the August 2025 merger of the Office of Minority Education (OME) and the Undergraduate Advising Center’s advising and student belonging function into a newly named Office of Academic Community, Empowerment, and Success (OACES). This allowed MIT to rebrand an office that raised legal red flags under the Trump administration’s interpretation of civil rights law, while expanding its stated scope—a textbook illustration of the treadmill at work. Moreover, it appears that a substantial amount of current successor DEI/SAPBAC content is now available only on MIT’s password-protected sites. We cannot determine how much activity continues behind the reduced public footprint; absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Third and most importantly, the data show that approximately 85% of the roughly 34 full-time ICEO professionals listed on the MIT website as of April 30, 2024 remained employed at MIT in early 2026, typically in retitled positions. The ICEO was shut down in May 2025 with 14 staff remaining, 11 of whom appear to still be employed at MIT in redeployed roles. Across the Institute the new vocabulary is revealing: positions formerly titled “DEI Officer” or “DEIB (Belonging) Officer” have become “Community Building and Student Engagement Officer,” “Outreach and Community Engagement Program Director,” or “Wellbeing and Belonging” associate or assistant dean. WEBS, the new label has replaced BAC, just as BAC replaced DEI in 2022, and just as Pinker’s treadmill would predict. If one believes that personnel is policy, it is fair to ask what has fundamentally changed.

Our conclusion is clear: the basic infrastructure for a resurrection of identitarian DEI programs remains in place at MIT in 2026, albeit on a smaller scale than at its 2024 peak. About half the personnel who carried out DEI/BAC functions at MIT remain employed at the Institute, many under different titles but with responsibilities that appear closely analogous to those of the peak DEI era. Given the right political climate, it would not be difficult for MIT to revive identitarian-driven DEI.

Questions regarding the purpose and results of these programs are now sharpened by fiscal reality. MIT faces a roughly $300 million annual funding shortfall attributable in part to Trump administration interventions, and has already instituted hiring freezes and budget cuts. Under these circumstances, a hard look at the costs and measurable benefits of WEBS and its predecessor programs is not merely an academic exercise. The programs have been formally decentralized, with WEBS responsibilities dispersed to local “community” units across the Institute—making aggregate cost measurements all the more challenging. The core questions posed in our original work of mid-2024 remain: Are WEBS initiatives actually making the campus more welcoming for members of the MIT community? Can actual costs be compiled in light of decentralization? And at a time of fiscal stringency, what are these people accomplishing that justifies this expenditure?

Thank you for reading our DEI at MIT series. Please visit MIT Alumni for Accountability for full details on methodology and data for 2024 and 2026. We invite you to dive into the numbers and welcome your comments on the numbers or any further information you have that could inform our analysis.