Walter Williams has pointed out on many occasions that many government programs and initiatives exist primarily for the benefit of the bureaucracy, and he coined the phrase “poverty pimps” to describe the folks who get comfortable government jobs to operate programs that don’t help – and often hurt – disadvantaged populations.
We may need a new term, “diversity pimps,” to describe the people who get plush appointments to oversee the array of government-imposed racial and sexual preferences. Heather McDonald has a story at the City Journal that exposes how this absurd scam is undermining college education in California.
Even as UC campuses jettison entire degree programs and lose faculty to competing universities, one fiefdom has remained virtually sacrosanct: the diversity machine. Not only have diversity sinecures been protected from budget cuts, their numbers are actually growing. The University of California at San Diego, for example, is creating a new full-time “vice chancellor for equity, diversity, and inclusion.”
But what’s really remarkable is how this new office will be just one of many that exist to provide jobs for the diversity pimps.
This position would augment UC San Diego’s already massive diversity apparatus, which includes the Chancellor’s Diversity Office, the associate vice chancellor for faculty equity, the assistant vice chancellor for diversity, the faculty equity advisors, the graduate diversity coordinators, the staff diversity liaison, the undergraduate student diversity liaison, the graduate student diversity liaison, the chief diversity officer, the director of development for diversity initiatives, the Office of Academic Diversity and Equal Opportunity, the Committee on Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation Issues, the Committee on the Status of Women, the Campus Council on Climate, Culture and Inclusion, the Diversity Council, and the directors of the Cross-Cultural Center, the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Resource Center, and the Women’s Center.
Not surprisingly, since resources are finite, all this fluff is causing collateral damage.
UC San Diego is adding diversity fat even as it snuffs out substantive academic programs. In March, the Academic Senate decided that the school would no longer offer a master’s degree in electrical and computer engineering… At the same time, the body mandated a new campus-wide diversity requirement for graduation. …This week, in light of a possible cut of $650 million in state financing, the University of California’s regents will likely raise tuition rates to $12,192. Though tuition at UC will remain a bargain compared with what you would pay at private colleges, the regents won’t be meeting their responsibility to California’s taxpayers if they pass over in silence the useless diversity infrastructure that sucks money away from the university’s real function: teaching students about the world outside their own limited selves. California’s budget crisis could have had a silver lining if it had resulted in the dismantling of that infrastructure—but the power of the diversity complex makes such an outcome unthinkable.
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So, private school or homeschool up through 12th grade and then encourage them to go votech, join the military, or if they absolutely must be a doctor, study abroad. Got it.
DIVERSITY IS OUR STRENGTH. DIVERSITY IS OUR STRENGTH. This is the mantra of the Bushee/liberal/progressive/neocon/movementcon “New World Order.” Your casting aspersions on the valiant efforts of the government of the State of California to enforce this policy is regrettable.
I wish this were the only problem with higher education.
To me, the biggest problem is that some time ago schools of education decided to offer the Ed.D.(education doctorate) in “Higher Education Administration”; now, more and more of these administrators are coming from the school of education background, which is to say, a non-academic background. They are trying (and succeeding so far) to apply the principles that have destroyed our public schools to higher ed, and as they do succeed the results will be similar.
The worst locations are the large public universities. I would have said that if you want your kid to get a good education send them to a small, private Christian college, but the Ed.D.s are starting to take them over, too.
Of course, the “accrediting” agencies have a hand in this, and more and more of these agencies are being dominated by the Ed.D.s.
What’s the federal government’s role in all this? You kid can’t get a federally backed student loan unless the school s/he’s attending is accredited, and student loans from private sources are now unavailable, unless you’re from (what state is it?) North Dakota or something.
We’re going somewhere in some kind of basket.