Or, “What do we want? Diversity! When do we want to pay for it? Er…”
Heather Mac Donald discusses academia’s ‘diversity’ bureaucracy, its disregard for evidence and its multiple redundancies:
I was recently at Ohio University and their ratio of administrators to faculty tipped over in 2000. So for the last decade they have had more bureaucrats than faculty. Faculty lines are going unfilled because they claim not to have sufficient funding, and physical maintenance is cut, and yet, in 2009, they too created a new Diversity, Access and Equity Office, with a new provost to run it. Of course it was redundant, with the Office of Institutional Equity and their various ‘diversity’ ombudsmen throughout the university.
University administrators were telling state legislature that they were absolutely cut to the bone when it came to funding for essential functions and activities. UC San Diego was a typical supplicant. They had recently cut an MA programme in electrical engineering, had cut classes in French, German and Spanish, and they’d recently lost three cancer researchers… So this looked grim. And yet – that year – the university had announced the creation of an entirely new bureaucratic sinecure – a Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion. And as is the case with all such new posts, it was incredibly redundant, with an already massive ‘diversity’ infrastructure that extended through the chancellor’s office, into provosts, committees, you name it. The list of names of their ‘diversity’ functions takes up an entire paragraph. […]
This ‘diversity’ infrastructure, and the larger bureaucracy, has made the recent wave of student protests look particularly foolish… There they are protesting against tuition hikes, and my view is, who are you guys protesting against? Take it to the administration, guys. Ask them why they have been bulking up on the ‘diversity’ chancellors instead of creating more introductory chemistry classes. But with their usual perfection of getting things wrong, the students completely missed the boat.
Gibor Basri, the Vice Chancellor of Equity, Inclusion and Diversity at Berkeley, participated in some of these tuition protests and said rising tuition gives him heartburn. Well, if he’s got so much heartburn, how about he starts divesting the seventeen staff in his ‘diversity’ office? He could even give up his own salary [of $200,000] or cut it by half. But instead he’s going to egg the students on to demand what he says “we” believe – that a college education is not a private right but a public good. Basri [with NYU’s “professor of social and cultural analysis,” Andrew Ross, of Sokal Hoax infamy] is spearheading an Occupy movement to demand the forgiveness of federal college loans and ‘free’ college tuition. Which would of course merely fuel the bureaucratic bloat by giving it an endless source of funds [i.e., taxpayers’ money].
Transcribed from this 90-minute video.
If the dysfunction of academia is your thing, you’ll find much to entertain you. From delusions of persecution to protest as a way to get out of class.
Gibor Basri, the Vice Chancellor of Equity, Inclusion and Diversity
What does that even mean?
What do they really do?
What do they do?
…..Suck up your $$$$$ they tell you you’re an A-hole.
theythenI’m personally aware of a local, publicly supported community college which ceased funding its daycare for students with small children because of “budgetary constraints,” then spent 1.27 times the cost of the day care on raises for administrators. Not to mention destruction of whole academic programs, and the ever-increasing use of poorly paid adjunct faculty who receive no job guarantees or benefits. Of course, these same administrators with multiple six-figure incomes, decry the evil Conservative Koch Brother led cabal which seeks to destroy academic freedom and integrity between mouthfuls of their publicly funded foie gras. “F” them, the horses they rode in on, anybody who looks like them and anybody who looks like the horses they road in on.
Whew. Thanks, David. I needed that.
In other news, the University of Michigan hikes tuition, pledges fiscal responsibility, then spends $400,000 to relocate one tree.
What do they really do?
As with so many gratuitous layers of bureaucracy, it’s often difficult to tell. But they seem to spend quite a lot of time cossetting identitarian narcissists, vetting new hires for the approved pigmentation and genitals, and lowering standards to comply with their tribal bean-counting. Oh, and promoting racial segregation. Ms Mac Donald explains some of their functions in the video. (See, for instance, 4:40 – 9:44.)
Are you sure you’re not just a weeny bit heteropatriracist?
Joanna Williams review of “The Imperial University, Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent”
“The authors of this volume deride as ‘sanctimonious liberals’ those who ‘invoke high-minded principles such as “academic freedom” when it suits them’. They argue that the university has been ‘tainted by Enlightenment-based projects of knowledge production and structuration that perform heteropatriracialities’, and that it must instead be ‘imagined as a site of solidarity with those engaged in struggles against neoliberal capitalism’. Call me a sanctimonious liberal, but this sounds to me like sour grapes from those unable to make a convincing case based on the intellectual merit of their arguments.”
http://www.spiked-online.com/review_of_books/article/academics-against-knowledge/15580#.U-hlm6Lngwo
Ian,
Are you sure you’re not just a weeny bit heteropatriracist?
I will of course report to the correction booth for 30 cycles of electronic scolding.
But I think we’ve reached the point where, if I were a parent and my child was reckless enough to pursue a degree in the humanities, where the mindset above is typically concentrated, I’d feel obliged to issue a warning. Specifically, that they were about to enter a pathological environment, in which some quite damaged people would try to damage them.
Is what we’re seeing here not simply the fourth of Milton Friedman’s four ways to spend money, i.e. spending somebody else’s money on somebody else? The seriously stupid people in this are the students, who should be shopping around and looking to see how much of their tuition fees are being spent on this shit.
‘………Equity, Inclusion and Diversity
What does that even mean?’
Special treatment, exclusiveness, and monoculture.
Ah, I see, they’re hired to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.
This is all very confusing for me. You see, my wife is preparing to start her PhD in analytical chemistry. I’ve often been to her department to pick her up, or keep her company while she prepares experiments. I’ve met and/or seen most of the people in the department. Almost all of them are studying abroad in New Zealand. There are Thai, Jamaicans, Arabs, Iranians, Indians, and a couple of Europeans studying abroad. I think there is ONE, just ONE white student of local descent in the department. The supervisors are mainly local (a previous generation). If there were to be some kind of affirmative action at work, it must surely be tailored to accommodate the evil white hegemony of New Zealand (and Maori, I guess) in order to be fair.
I would rather my wee ‘uns joined the circus than did a humanities degree. At least circus folk have jobs.
“heteropatriracialities”.
This is such a bigoted phrase, coated in microaggressions and tears. It should be “heteropatriracialicissexualistexplialidocious”.
Ms. Mac Donald’s talk has made me feel unsafe. I demand compensation.
Incidentally, I do like Ms Mac Donald’s proposed experiment (around 1:06:55). In which a pair of very similar universities are used, with similar demographics, and one indulges its every ‘diversity’ whim, with affirmative action, segregated “safe spaces” and the cultivation of identitarian victimhood, while the other does none of that. Nothing at all. After four years, which campus might have the least balkanised, least whiny, least racially fixated graduates?
The only way to get genuinely free education is for teachers/lecturers and profs to receive no pay (which would be on a par with the value the majority of them add).
The primary reason for all this redundancy in academia’s administrative offices is, the new layers are intended to buffer the older layers from budget cuts.
The first thing any new bureaucrat realizes is that she is one committee vote away from ‘redundancy,’ or termination. She needs a layer of ‘skin’ between her and the financiers’ knives. And the easiest way to grow this integument is to hire a couple three people to work under her.
That way, when the knives fall, she can fire her redundant hires and tout the resultant salaries saved as budget-saving frugality. It’s basic self-preservation manifesting itself as bureaucratic bloat.
There’s nothing glamorous or mystical about it. Now, if only word would get out among the clerks and grunts in university administrative support jobs that they are dispensable pawns in the Regents’ haughty games, maybe they’d poke their masters where they’ll feel it.
After four years, which campus might have the least balkanised, least whiny, least racially fixated graduates?
And most employable, probably.
Speaking of children running things:
Owen Jones wants to nationalise the mobile phone networks
Captcha for the above post was “isorari choice”, which I think may well prove the existence of God.
Owen Jones wants to nationalise the mobile phone networks
Snork!
I can’t think of anything in the world less failed than mobile phones. Who nowadays uses a land-line?
Is what we’re seeing here not simply the fourth of Milton Friedman’s four ways to spend money, i.e. spending somebody else’s money on somebody else? The seriously stupid people in this are the students, who should be shopping around and looking to see how much of their tuition fees are being spent on this shit.
I would see it more as spending somebody else’s money on oneself, or at least one’s group. If one is a diversity administrator, increasing the power of the diversity administration in general, even if the specific money allocated goes to a different branch, still increases the power of all the administrators. It also provides a handy ‘you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours’ arrangement for budgetary discussions.
Owen Jones wants to nationalise the mobile phone networks
Ah, but Young Mr Jones, our forward-looking socialist visionary, wasn’t around to experience the endless delights of the state-owned, union-strangled socialist telecom system of the 1970s. Which presumably makes romanticising the notion of it so much easier.
Snork!
Wow. It’s eerie.
I would love to see a mobile phone produced by the equivalent of British Leyland.
It would be huge and unwieldy and unreliable, probably using Soviet valve technology and only available in hearing-aid beige or that weird burnt orange colour that Spacehoppers used to come in. And there would be a three-year waiting list and the signal would be turned off on Sundays, or whenever somebody needed to use Jodrell Bank for its intended purpose.
“F” them, the horses they rode in on, anybody who looks like them and anybody who looks like the horses they road in on.
I like that.
Kudos.
Who nowadays uses a land-line?
I do.
For the DSL. I don’t have or want cable.
I also never call anyone and vice-versa.
I also never call anyone and vice-versa.
Ah. A woman of mystery.
[ dicentra deploys smoke-bomb earrings, vanishes in confusion. ]
For the DSL. I don’t have or want cable.
I also never call anyone and vice-versa.
I finally got around to getting a still barely used cell phone, mainly ’cause the phone booths were disappearing, and where the land line and the cell phone are still pretty much interchangeable for the amount of use.
The DSL got yanked a few months ago because the copper was being upgraded to fiber, most of what little commentary I do is mainly by email . . .
British Leyland phone:
http://www.gizmonews.ru/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/iphone-russian-368×550.jpg
Ah, but Young Mr Jones, our forward-looking socialist visionary, wasn’t around to experience the endless delights of the state-owned, union-strangled socialist telecom system of the 1970s. Which presumably makes romanticising the notion of it so much easier.
Everything will be better if we make it more like the 1950/60/70s. And he thinks that’s progressive?
I’m still processing Young Mr Jones’ belief that customer service (among other things) will be dramatically improved by creating a vast state monopoly from which the supposed customer simply can’t escape, ever, regardless of how unsatisfactory the service on offer is. And yet, says he, “The case… is actually pretty overwhelming.”
http://www.gizmonews.ru/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/iphone-russian-368×550.jpg
http://www.yourprops.com/movieprops/original/yp4fc561993bcba5.45256573/Logan-s-Run-Sandman-Follower-1.jpg
So sorry, friends across the pond, that you’re awakening to Robin Williams’s death.
Right now, Twitter is trending all Robin Williams films.
Devastation. Word is he was extremely generous and kind but plagued by the demons of depression.
Somebody misses the 1970s.
Powercuts Lots of them, so you had to go and buy coal, and candles. Really bad cars that fell apart even before they had the chance to rust. Trying to call home from a telephone box that stank of urine, and you always ran out of coins anyway. Everybody was always on strike, and even if you wanted to buy something you couldn’t, because the shop was closed or they were on strike and Shirley Williams was outside on a megaphone banging on about something or other. It was all shite- trust me, I lived through it.
Apparently I didn’t do my chemistry homework by candlelight, then (I didn’t do it anyway out of sheer laziness, but that’s not the point).
Owen really misses those nylon-carpeted days of K-Tel-product-led-tartan-flared-trousered bleughness, because (even though they were awful) they were the “people’s” awful.
I never ever want to go there again.
[ Fixed. DT ]
I’m sorry David, I was quite drunk when I posted that last comment. It needs editing.
Devastation. Word is he was extremely generous and kind but plagued by the demons of depression.
He will be missed. I’m shocked that it seems he took his own life. I know how his family feels.
Don’t go reading threads hanging off the articles about his death. Just don’t. Especially not at the right-wing places. Apparently, Williams was a man of the left and so that’s what made him kill himself.
Not bipolar disorder, which has jack-all to do with politics. He was just a selfish leftist who offed himself because that’s what leftists do.
People are such pukes sometimes.
Lancastrian Oik,
I’m sorry David, I was quite drunk when I posted that last comment.
I work on the assumption that happens a lot. Not just you, of course.
It needs editing.
Or fire. But yes, the Seventies also tug at the hearts of the Guardian’s resident Stalin groupie Seumas Milne and his hero, union honcho Len McCluskey. In Mr McCluskey’s case, I suspect the nostalgia has quite a lot to do with it being a time when goons such as himself could bring the nation to a halt and exert real power over other people’s lives. And taxpayers’ wallets. According to Seumas, whose aversion to reality is always entertaining, “there’s nothing backward” about a return to Seventies-style industrial relations posturing from a man who likes to quote Ernesto “Che” Guevara, who champions Cuba and Venezuela as models of socialist triumph, and who expects a “final victory” over capitalism any day now.
. . . that’s what leftists do.
Oh yeah, ah, Right . . .
Fire is fine.
Australian Shiraz does not engineer profundity.
They’ve all gone a bit quiet recently when it comes to Venezuela.
Fire is fine.
To clarify, it wasn’t a comment on your comment. Just the length of time it took me to figure out how you’d mangled the link. I quite like the term bleughness.
Australian Shiraz does not engineer profundity.
You take that back.
The Graun is currently suggesting that the 70s was a golden age for football. Ignoring the violence, the racism, the dangerous and delapidated stadiums and so on. The players got paid less, and that’s what’e important.
It srikes me that football is everything a socialist should want from an industry. Most of the money it makes goes to the people who do the actual work, i.e. the players. But when the workers actually manage to control the means of production, the lefties turn against them.
The Graun is currently suggesting that the 70s was a golden age for football.
I know almost nothing about football, but I’m fairly sure that trying to please Guardian columnists (and their readers) is a futile exercise. It would violate the laws of physics.
The Graun is talking complete and utter bollocks, as one might expect.
I was (and still am) a regular matchgoer at the Lancashire club I have supported since boyhood. The 70s and early 80s were an abysmal era for football lovers. The games themselves weren’t actually all that bad, but there was the constant threat of violence from pissed-up idiots, all-pervading stupidity in the form of vile racist chants, being treated as though we were all untermensch by heavy-handed coppers… it was unremittingly awful.
Owen Jones and now Ed Vulliamy- what is this, some sort of nostalgie de la boue thing?
However, given what Miliband and McCluskey are proposing, if Labour win next year then those who did not get to suffer 1970’s Britain first time around will have a sort of half-arsed “Stars In Their Eyes” version cooked up especially for them. Owen will love it.
A local story I thought might interest you:
http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2014/08/portland_apple_store_customer_1.html
People who have worked at Apple stores or similar retail are saying that most likely the employee typed in “f” then “g” to fill in a mandatory email field to expedite the transaction. The letters are next to each other on the keyboard and most likely the employee did not think about how the @ symbol could be read as “A” and make a swear word.
But the demands for firing, “sensitivity training” for the whole corporation, and more are loud and relentless. Since I highly doubt an employee at the hippest store in downtown Portlandia deliberately entered a slur on a receipt, I can’t help but feel sorry for the poor slob who is going to get thrown under the bus by corporate to make this go away.