Very Clever Humor about Elizabeth Warren, a.k.a., Soul Woman

Elizabeth Warren is a left-wing hack running for the United States Senate in Massachusetts. For a while, her only claim to fame was that she got statists all excited when she asserted that rich people only became wealthy because of government.

Professor Russ Roberts of George Mason University demolished that silly claim, pointing out that the vast majority of federal government spending is not for genuine public goods that help a market economy function.

And who can forget the hilarious parody showing what Warren’s redistributionist philosophy would mean if applied to attractive women.

But now Ms. Warren has become infamous for a different reason. It seems that she lied about having American Indian heritage in order to gain preferential status for teaching positions at law schools. This has generated new displays of humor, including this wicked video (featuring a cameo appearance by Anthony Weiner!).

This video was made by some Republicans, so they obviously have a partisan agenda, but there’s a very good point about Warren exploiting indigenous people for personal gain.

Indeed, there was something vaguely familiar about this entire kerfuffle. And then it hit me. Elizabeth Warren is the 21st Century version of “Soul Man”!

As you can see from this movie trailer, “Soul Man” was a 1986 film about a white kid who pretends to be black to gain a scholarship to Harvard Law School.

I don’t want to spoil the film, but I will say that the kid learns a very important lesson and gives up his scholarship to a real black person. Sadly, Elizabeth Warren does not have the same moral character. So in this 2012 version of the film, “Soul Woman” has dug in her heels (moccasins?) and is refusing to behave honorably and resign her position and apologize.

I suppose there’s a lesson in this story about racial preferences, particularly the way they have corrupted higher education.

But that’s secondary. This is an issue of individual integrity. If we assume that Harvard Law School wanted to hire a minority to satisfy the diversity crowd, then Elizabeth Warren did take a job that otherwise would have gone to someone else. The same is true about her previous teaching positions.

Hollywood, at least in the 1980s, knew that was wrong and made a movie mocking that kind of scam.

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The Diversity Racket in California: Good for Bureaucrats, Bad for Education

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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