By Professor Doom
Identity politics
has been an issue on campus for as long as I’ve been in higher ed. It used to
be primarily in hiring, where we were “motivated” to hire people with certain
genitals or skin color, on the basis that there “weren’t enough” of such in
associated positions.
I confess for
some time I at least sipped the Cool-Aid. At first, when I was on the hiring
committee, I went along with ruling out certain types of genitals or skin
color, or more accurately restricting the hiring options to certain genitals or
skin color. I was young and stupid, far too concerned with academics to sit and
think through the consequences of going along with administrative directives in
this regard.
After around 20
years in higher ed, and starting to see that I had just reinforced the glass
ceiling above my head…I began to ask questions. Admin considered them
impertinent and I was punished for asking things like “how do we know that a
female will definitely be the best choice for this job?” and “by what metric is
a certain minority under-represented?” and “what evidence do we have that
diversity in the deans will make a better school?” among other questions.
I doubt I was the
only one expressing such concerns, but my worries were all brushed aside in the
name of identity politics. Higher ed has been doing this for decades now, and
so I’m not as surprised as most when seeing what is only the natural
consequence of making higher education more about identity politics than
education.
Cal Poly University
in California is obsessed with race, and a recent report
from them highlights their dementedness:
In 2011,
the campus was 63 percent Caucasian; in fall of 2017, it was less than 55
percent. Applications from underrepresented minority students doubled between
2008 and 2018, while overall applications during that time increased by just
half that much. Progress is being made — and the university is more diverse now
than at any time in its 117-year history — but there is still much work to do.
It doesn’t matter
that there’s no evidence that education and research will be improved by more
“diversity,” they only want more. Despite their “progress” in that regard, they
still only want more. There is no end here, at least no good end for
non-Diverse people.
There are
over 100 historically black colleges in the United States today. These
schools obviously don’t match the demographics of the United States and…so?
They also don’t have any “initiatives” to add white students to their campus.
Again, I don’t care, they can do whatever they want.
It’s the
hypocrisy I care about, and these black colleges are rightfully never asked to
change. I see only hypocrisy in Cal Poly’s stated goals:
In it, administration details a multi-year effort with dozens
of initiatives, including ones to further lower the percentage of white
students on campus and increase the number of faculty of color.
Consider how
blatantly racist the above “effort” is. The “increase the number of faculty of
color” outrage has been going on with a wink and a nod for years, it’s only
recently that this level of racism has been so acceptable that they can now put
it in writing.
“Lower the
percentage of white students” is a bit of a problem: California college student
populations were soaring in prior decades, so many schools have been at
capacity. Granted, that may not be true today (I can’t find recent stats), but
the idea that some kid will be denied the chance to go to college because his
skin is white sickens me, sickens me just as much as if he were denied because
his skin is black.
Shouldn’t
scholarship, or at least demonstrated potential, be part of admissions
requirements?
For students, the school plans on recruiting applicants
more heavily based on race. For instance, the school has recently implemented
several new scholarships “aimed at recruiting more African-American and other
underrepresented minorities.”
How, exactly, is the above not racist?
It’s also working to recruit low-income and first-generation
students by partnering with high schools that enroll a high percentage of these
students, according to the report.
By “first-generation
students,” they’re referring to students from families who have never sent a
child to college. I always find these programs sinister, since many schools do
this for the same reason crocodiles prey on the young herd animals coming to a
river for the very first time: they make easy victims.
But back to the
identity politics aspect of this:
And the college announced its intention of forcibly increasing diversity in
“traditionally male-dominated majors” such as STEM and Architecture and
Environmental Design, according to the document.
--emphasis added.
Is anyone else
creeped out by the idea of forcibly
increasing diversity? How good could this idea be if you have to force people to do it? At least this is
more sexist than racist…or is that not an improvement? Why isn’t anyone on
campus standing up to this idea, an idea they know is so atrocious they’re just
going to force it?
Some of
these initiatives are well known — such as the university creating an Office of
University Diversity and Inclusion (OUDI) and hiring its first-ever vice
president and chief officer for diversity and inclusion — and others less
known, including the recruitment of senior-level administrators in the colleges
and divisions to lead diversity and inclusion efforts.
Oh goody,
another huge fiefdom to piss away all that student loan money, extracted from
kids who don’t know how they’re being screwed because they’re coming from first
generation families, with no parents to warn them they’re getting a fake
education.
This fall campus leaders will “require a diversity statement
from candidates for all faculty and staff searches,” the report states. It adds
that search committees will now be made up of diverse membership and Academic
Affairs has “set [an] expectation that search committees will be based on best
practices regarding diversity.”
And
here comes the chokehold: whites won’t be on the hiring committees if at all
possible. All hiring past this point will be identity based, and they’ll
literally use the racist and sexist hiring policies which got them on campus as
“best practices” to keep using racism and sexism in their hiring policies.
Addition of
diversity-related course requirements in many of the majors in CLA
An education used to be about academic
subjects, like mathematics, science, and history. More and more, these
requirements are being removed, and instead students are being required to take
diversity courses, i.e., indoctrination courses. Again, where is the evidence
that removing academics and replacing it with indoctrination will help
education and research?
A decade from now, when we have many
thousands of graduates from this college with worthless degrees, deep debt, and
no way to pay any of it off, it would be nice if the people who suckered those
graduates into coming to this trap of a college were forced to pay off those
loans, but I know that’s just crazy talk.
But considering how much crazy talk is in
this report, I hardly feel out of place saying it.
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