Thursday, November 26, 2015

$1,000,000 To Fix A Nonexistent Hate Crime





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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