By Professor Doom
A message of hope
for today, Thanksgiving. The end of most regimes is marked by astonishing
incompetence. Whether it’s the French royalty, the USSR, or take your pick of
any banana republic, the revolt happens after it becomes clear that the people
in power are truly incapable and unworthy of rule. I believe today’s story
shows that, joyfully, the end must be near for higher education.
I do my best not
to pick on a particular college, I do what I can to show that the insanity that
has gripped our campuses is not about the microagression loonyness of California, open
plundering in New York and Illinois, or
spectacular failure in Louisiana, and
that’s not even addressing the endless horrid sex scandals.
Somehow I’ve
managed to miss Delaware in all this. Ok, it’s a small state, so perhaps a forgivable
error on my part, but being small doesn’t exempt it from the madness. Key as
always to the insanity is the oversized and out of control administrative
caste, who can get away with just about anything. There are no checks on their
power, so there’s nothing to stop the insanity referenced in the previous
paragraph, and certainly nothing to stop the madness at University of Delaware:
University Of Delaware Launches $1 Million Diversity Initiative In Response To Hate Crime That Didn’t Happen
Diversity is such
a wonderful topic for an administrator to address. Nobody dares speak out
against anything that might promote diversity, no matter
how ridiculous. Speaking out against any diversity initiative, no matter
how foolish and hypocritical, is only going to put a target on your head.
So, what was the alleged
hate crime? Campus police found nooses hanging from trees. That’s the crime,
except they weren’t nooses. No, they were just some leftovers from a party:
Within a
few hours, police had concluded the “hate crime” was anything but, as the
nooses were really just the remains of paper lanterns from an event held last
summer.
That really should
have been the end of it, but no. Despite the
instructional video showing exactly how the lantern hangers can turn into
“nooses,” people still advanced that there was a hate crime here, and
that the police were covering it up. It doesn’t matter that the “nooses” were
made of wire, it doesn’t matter that only one noose was actually noose-shaped.
It doesn’t matter that nobody says it’s a hate crime, and it doesn’t matter
that there hasn’t been a lynching in half a century or more. Because we have
way too many administrators on campus looking for something to do,
administration leaps into action to address the “hate crime.”
And how to address
this non-problem? By making another fiefdom, another inane department on campus
filled with grotesquely overpaid administrators. I should emphasize: the
million dollars being spent on this non-issue? It will be spent every year from
now until the collapse of higher education (soon, one might surmise…).
A Deanling gets to
bloviate, and always, it’s good for a laugh:
“We have
such a history of diversity issues,” Watson said. “We’ve come a long way, but
diversity has always been a focus.”
No, sorry,
diversity was not “always” a focus of higher education. It’s a shame our
“leaders” in higher education don’t understand that education has always been a focus of higher education, either
education of students, through teaching, or education of the human race,
through research. It’s not called “higher diversity,” after all. These guys are
so clueless, they just don’t
understand what higher education was about. Instead, our “leaders”
just focus on the buzzword du jour, and don’t have enough background in
education to think higher education was anything but the latest buzzword.
“It’s
always been about diversifying the faculty, having more professors and students
of color,” Watson said.
Why, oh why, is it
perfectly acceptable to say this? I’ve been on campuses that give “skin color
bonuses” to hire “of color” faculty. Imagine if there was a campus that gave a
cash bonus only to white people? I’d find that ridiculous, and I’m sure such a
campus would be hit with devastating (and justified) lawsuits and negative news
coverage.
Even simply saying
“we want more white professors” would be viewed as far too racist to be
acceptable. But the dean can say essentially that the campus needs to get more
professors “of color” and that’s fine. “White” (to be more fair, my skin, what
isn’t covered in hair, is more pinkish-brown than white) is a color too, right?
In addition to
being totally racist, the Deanling totally sees this as a springboard for more
looting:
With the
new portion of the budget being set aside to support this new goal, Watson said
he wishes to use this as a basis for the college’s next strategic plan to
tackle the subject. In the coming years, he said he hopes to see change on the
campus through the monetary allowance, though what that change will be he isn’t
entirely certain.
--the
Deanling’s title, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, is only 2.5 times
as long as his name, under my “must get rid of” guideline…
A million dollars
a year for this foolishness. Please, I beg the gentle reader to understand:
that money could have been used for scholarships, lots of scholarships, giving
students a free higher education. Instead, it’ll be pissed away spent on
improving diversity. More accurately, the money will be spent on another floor
filled with overpaid administrators, instead of on education. I sure hope the
people of Delaware understand this the next time there’s a tuition increase
there.
Diversity is just
a wonderful campus fiefdom to be in. You’ll never be successful in having
enough diversity, there will never come a day when your fiefdom will be shut
down. Even if the campus population matches the population of the state down to
a tenth of a percentage point (impossible, since every campus allows for foreign
students), you can just move on to saying there’s not enough gender diversity.
Even if you somehow match that up exactly (again, impossible, especially in
fields where predominantly one gender tends to major), you can just move on to
say there’s not enough homosexuals, transgenders, or whatever.
So, this fiefdom
always, always, fails. The price for the failure? More money. The fiefdom just
says “hey, we don’t have enough diversity on this campus, we should do
something about it” and *bam*, another million a year is committed, because,
hey, nobody wants to look to be against diversity.
Again, this sort
of madness occurs across the country, every day…just imagine how much free
education could be given if our higher education system were free from the
useless administrative caste, and run with even a modicum of responsibility.
As yet another
institution of higher education now promises to spend a million dollars a year,
forever, to “fix” a problem we all agree doesn’t exist, a question comes to mind. How much more
incompetent can higher education get before it finally collapses under its own weight?
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