New Campus Commissar: Departmental Academic Diversity Officer

By Professor Doom



     UMich is currently paying $10.6 million each year(!!!) for its 82 “diversity officers,” MLive reported. Further scholarships and a new $10 million multicultural center are all part of a five-year strategic plan, launched in 2016 to diversify the campus.



--the Vice-Provost alone rakes in over 400k a year…



     I’ve written before of the incredible high price of diversity, and the diversity educrats who make bank pushing their ideology on campus. Now, usually these guys collect their fat checks and sit in glorious palaces on campus, so mercifully most faculty and students don’t have to interact with them except when sent to a re-education camp or the like.


       Making money is all well and good, but it is harder to indoctrinate when you’re sitting in palace. Also, a palace puts a hard population cap on just how many commissars you can have on campus. What to do about these problems?


University of Michigan shares insights from its decentralized diversity accountability structure, in which individual academic and administrative units have their own diversity officers.




     That’s right, UMich has taken the “bold” step of imitating the USSR, and embedding the commissars into each unit. No department is safe, as now one of these guys is looking over the shoulder of whatever goes on there.


       However did universities survive centuries before we ever had such an “innovation”?


       Michigan has had these commissars pushing their thoughts for four years now, so it’s time to see what the results are:


More precisely, the campus’s National Center for Institutional Diversity just published a report on the experiences of these academic diversity officers, or ADOs. Beyond making various recommendations for academic deans and academic diversity officers, the report finds that ADOs require special skills.



“Special skills”? Uh huh. Be advised that this Academic Diversity Officer initiative expands the bureaucracy on campus by a very significant amount ($10 mil a year!), so you can expect the campus to publish a very glowing report about how amazing the campus’ own initiative is.


Based on their backgrounds, ADOs tended to draw on different “logics,” according to the report.




     Ah, the old “different ways of knowing” canard. At least in the USSR, you could count on the Commissar to reliably know quotes from the Communist Manifesto. Granted, that book is still the most common book on campus, so I suppose you still could but…does it bother anyone that this supposedly “correct” ideology is enforced to different “logics” depending on the commissar?


      The logics were basically broken down into four types (a surprisingly large number, from a mathematician’s point of view which holds there is only one correct logic), “community organizer,” “faculty,” “administrator,” and “student.” A quick comment on each type:


Community organizers-turned-ADOs generally valued…some tension to create diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)




      To summarize: the community organizers know they need to justify their position, so instead of the happy campus there was before, they work to increase racial tensions. Hmm. The students/taxpayers are paying for the protests here. 


Faculty ADOs in the sample, meanwhile, worked on issues of representation, such as faculty and student recruitment and retention, and inclusive pedagogical training. They prioritized data collection…




       Again, easily summarized. The faculty tried to figure out what percent of representation would satisfy the ideologues (nothing will, however), tried to reach that, and backed up their claims with objective data. Of course they did, they know this is rubbish, but mandatory, and so did what they could finish up and get back to doing legitimate work.


ADOs from general administration had “latent qualities about methodically addressing issues through structure, processes and rules.”





      Heh, “latent qualities.” This is just a very polite way for the study to say they couldn’t see any benefit to administrators, and past that is just spewing administrative-sounding words.


Student affairs-minded ADOs made personal connections and focused on promoting inclusive communities.





      They made some friends and connections, the better to further their career. Good activity for a student, at least.


      Pop quiz: which of these four types of “logic” actually helps students on campus? (Hint: none).


       They’re spending over $10,000,000 a year on diversity at UMich.  That’s full ride scholarships for a thousand students, more like 5,000 students when actual costs of education are considered. There I go again, thinking like an educator again. It’s just such a colossal waste of money. 


       After 4 years of this, was any improvement shown at all? Nope. Let’s sit back and laugh at all the effort they put into justifying wasting $40,000,000 over 4 years for this:


Whatever their backgrounds, knowledge of DEI concepts, interventions and best practices were “necessary to create change,” the authors found.




     Uh, nope. I could spend $40,000,000 to bulldoze the whole place and turn it into a parking lot. That’s change. Is it good? A matter of opinion, and they don’t even bother to justify if the changes, if any, were any good.


“I feel like we will do DEI work a disservice if people that don’t have proper training come into doing this work, because then it leads to this assumption that anybody can do it, or we can just hire a grad student, and they can lead this charge. When really, I feel like it requires specific skills and competencies.”




      Too bad the report just demonstrated anybody can do it, because every ADO could do whatever he wanted, all versions of “logic” are legitimate, and all “change” is apparently good.


DEI work is “complex, difficult, always changing and rigorous,” reads the report. “The hiring process and ongoing professional development necessary to sustain and increase DEI competency should be encouraged by supervisors of ADOs.”




     Again, no…it’s already been demonstrated anyone can do this. The cry for “ongoing professional development” is particularly noxious, as already far too many of our administrative staff go on long distance junkets, all expenses paid, for “job training” for jobs which used to be temp positions changed out every couple of years.


Establishing “legitimacy” for their positions and in the eyes of colleagues concerned ADOs interviewed. The officers generally found two ways of building it: connecting with their units through a shared discipline, or by being a faculty member -- what the authors call "academic standing legitimacy."



      I agree, establishing legitimacy should be tough, since it’s clearly not legitimate and a massive, massive, waste of funds. Why is there no consideration at all of what that kind of money could have done to help students?


These officers also rely heavily on interpersonal skills. That’s regardless of their academic backgrounds. They respond to individuals’ needs and concerns,




      The above could apply to nearly every job on the planet. I again point out this money could have given full scholarships to thousands of students. I bet the taxpayers would have preferred that by a wide margin. Any legitimate study of installing diversity commissars in every department should have weighed the benefits (none found) against free higher education for thousands of the citizens paying for it (questionable, but probably better than “none found”).


       In the coming years, based on this study, expect other schools to adopt this new method of instilling commissars in every department and fiefdom on campus…



www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

Professor: Grading and Grammar Are Racist

By Professor Doom

     Our institutions of higher learning are massively oversized. While in general I disagree with the levels of growth which allowed this to happen there is one benefit to a large institution: resistance to change. Back when our institutions were merely huge, this benefit occurred quite often as the universities tended to not fall into fad “learning” scams like “new math” or “common core” or whatever, but somehow along the way to achieving truly immense size the institutional resistance to change vanished.

       The reason for this, of course, relates to the student loan scam, which made size, and not education, relevant to a school’s status. This led to the worst sorts of people getting control of our universities, and these kind of people, edu-fascists, concentrated power. Just as the Emperors of Rome could single-handedly achieve broad changes in society with an edict, so too can a university Poo-Bah dramatically change the character of an institution.

       The concept of “best practices” allows other Poo-Bahs to follow suit, and quickly, and so whenever some institution changes its rules to cause even further growth beyond all reason, the other “leaders” quickly follow to do the same.

      This growth has been achieved by allowing a great number of people to come on campus who have little interest in learning, and are merely there to collect their share of student loan money (after the university takes quite a bit more than lion’s share, of course). Trouble is, these students do tend to fail classes, and do tend to drop out after so many failures. In the last few decades, the rules have long since been changed so that failing doesn’t occur quite so much, and that dropouts due to failure are likewise less common than before.

      But, we still have students failing and dropping out. Whatever shall we do? Cry RACISM, of course:

Professor says grading, good grammar are examples of white supremacy

     The professor referenced above, I covered before at American University. It’s the same spiel as always:

‘Grading is a great way to protect the white property of literacy in schools’

      Before going further, I must highlight how incredibly stupid the above is, and give the reader fair time to laugh. Please, gentle readers, call friends and family members over to whatever device you use to read this, and call their attention to the above quote. They deserve a good laugh as well.

      Now that this lunatic professor has infected American University with this madness, he’s travelling the country spreading it to other schools, with Ball State University next.  He gives his speech there, hosted by the Office of Inclusive Excellence (I can’t make these names up, and our schools are bloated with such goofy-named fiefdoms).

       When I was at a corrupt community college, every semester we had people coming in telling us basically the same thing as this professor, at least in terms of results: don’t fail students. The only difference is this guy’s rhetoric plays the race card more often than the Kentucky Derby:

We are all implicated in white supremacy,” Inoue said during his presentation…“This is because white supremacist systems like all systems reproduce themselves as a matter of course,” he said.
“This includes reproduction of dominant, white, middle-class, monolingual standards for literacy and communication.”


     If I was in China, taking a course in Mandarin, I would fully expect the teacher of that course to grade my use of Mandarin. It wouldn’t occur to me that this would be “supremacist,” I would expect a “monolingual” standard for a country. Yes, I know China has many native languages, but despite this reality it still mandates “one language” that all educated people there must know. Bottom line, mandating a proper use of a single language isn’t “white supremacist,” it’s a matter of nationalism, and our planet has seen endless countries arrange themselves linguistic lines far more than along physical characteristics.

     There is absolutely no winning with these people, who are never satisfied:

“Your school can be racist and produce racist outcomes,” Inoue said. “Even with expressed values and commitments to anti-racism and social justice.”

      It doesn’t matter what you do, you’re still vulnerable to the RACIST charge. This suits both sides of the edu-fascist cabals running our schools: admin is happy to add yet another fiefdom to rule over, and the ideologues are thrilled to be ever in pursuit of ever louder virtue signaling.

During his presentation at Ball State University, Inoue said that in order to succeed in even the most liberal and forward-thinking institutions of higher education today, a person of color has to act, think and sound white to some degree.

     Rubbish. Honest, there are universities in China where “sounding white” will not help you at all, and in many institutions in Africa, sounding white could easily be a detriment.

      Ultimately, it comes down to one selling point:

      …writing teachers should “calculate course grades by labor completed and dispense almost completely with judgments of quality when producing course grades.”

      The above is the primary reason this professor gets so much traction with his ideas. He’s advocating for course grades not to be about quality or knowledge, but simply a claim of effort. Much as admin continuously brought in educationists to “suggest” I allow more cheating in my classes (because that keeps more students on campus and provides admin with bigger checks), the professor’s above advice is given for different reasons to be sure, but is promoted for the same reason as other educationists.

       While the educationists pumping this crud decades ago could only have a low impact on schools with tenured faculty who weren’t going to change their ways, the classes of today are largely taught by de-professionalized faculty who have no choice but to follow the Poo-Bah’s whims or be dismissed.

        And so I assure the gentle reader that Ball State will become converged and achieve educational irrelevance in short order as this professor’s ideas are followed. The only question which remains is what school will be destroyed next?

       The comments section is filled with people who rightfully laugh with scorn at the professor’s racist ideas, but they’re not the edu-fascists running the schools, alas.

      The double-lung surgery failed, and finding that out was delayed a few weeks because they ignored my reminder to do a tumor marker test.  MDA's biopsy shows I have a met to my femur. So, next thing is surgery. They told me to wait for the call from the surgeon's office for set up the meeting to get the go-ahead for the surgery appointment.
   
       It's been a week waiting for that phone call. MDA in Houston is the #1 cancer treatment center, and one thing I can say from this ordeal: the #2 cancer treatment place must be absolutely wretched.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

                                           

Ohio State Gets Anti-White Discrimination Lawsuit

By Professor Doom



      You needn’t sit long in an ideological class on campus or in re-education seminar before you’re told something along the lines of “you can’t be racist against white people because they have all the power.” Obviously, that “all the power” part is rubbish for anyone paying attention to politics or the world, but it’s the former I want to dispute today, with the following news which received so little coverage:

Ohio State U. faces anti-white discrimination lawsuit



      My own eyeballs, and a post or two on this blog, see anti-white discrimination to be quite blatant on many of our campuses, from job positions advertised basically as “no whites need apply,” to diversity fiefdoms with a constituency composed of strictly non-whites (this type of thing has often been shown as RACIST in the against “under-represented” minority groups many times, so turnabout should be fair), to departments where it’s very clear you simply cannot get position if you happen to white.


       Of course, raising objections to any of the previous immediately gets you branded as RACIST, and defending yourself against the charge is hopeless because it’s basically an axiom: there’s no such thing as anti-white discrimination.


      Or so they say. But you can’t exactly have a lawsuit charging a fundamentally impossible activity. That said, an accusation doesn’t mean much, what kind of case is there against Ohio State?


The suit, filed by Mary Faure in federal court Monday, claims that despite “positive performance and teaching evaluations” she was discharged from her position as director of the Engineering Technical Communications Program within the Department of Engineering Education.




     Interesting, the case is being brought forth by a female. I’d comment on the very significant anti-male discrimination on our campuses but that’d be a distraction (and, of course, something we’re also often told is impossible).


      Another digression: “Department of Engineering Education”? Why, what, how, is “Education” here? I hope they have an Engineering department at this campus so people can learn Engineering, but I can’t help but worry.


      So far, just a disgruntled employee, perhaps, taking one last swing at her employer. She’ll need more than a firing despite good evaluations. Does she have it?

According to The Columbus Dispatch, Faure alleges her boss, Monica Cox, “frequently made ‘racist statements'” and that Cox’s “racist attitude had infected her employment decisions.”

“I despise white people,” Cox allegedly told Faure at their first meeting following the former’s hiring in 2016. Faure said Cox also complained about the “many old white men” in her department and noted that one of them, whom Cox nicknamed “Colonel Sanders,” would “have to go.”

     Well, those are certainly claims of racism, far stronger than the usual crap levied at our current President. Isn’t it interesting that we have two bosses in higher ed, both female, in something that sort of sounds like engineering? 


     Our cultures gives something of a pass to people making racist statements against their own race. What race is Monica Cox?



Black female chair of Ohio State’s engineering department calls it ‘very male, very white’




     Ok, she’s black, female, and, of course head of the supposed engineering department. And she has a history of racist (and sexist) behavior. Not looking good…although again I feel the need to point how odd it is that the “leadership” of department, clearly identified as mostly white and male…doesn’t have white male leadership. Am I really so alone in noticing how consistently this happens?


     Curiously, while there are “bias response teams” on campus, this type of racism doesn’t go there, instead it goes to Human Resources (a fiefdom on campus which my own eyeballs also seem to show having some bias issues…). They laugh at her and let her know if she complains about her boss, it’ll only make things worse:



Faure reported Cox’s comments to human resources officials on multiple occasions and attempted to make a formal complaint. But the human resources director cautioned Faure against making a formal complaint, said the allegations “could come back” against Faure and that the allegations would be “your word against hers,” the lawsuit says.




      The lawsuit is all accusations and alleged and so forth…but these types of complaints need to be documented. If Faure has the documentation, and HR has magically “lost” it (I’ve seen the like a few times), that sure won’t look good for OSU.


       I’m hardly the only one to find the claims credible:


For anyone in academia, this isn't surprising at all. Anti-white, and increasingly anti-asian, attitudes are prevalent and institutionalized in hiring/promotion policies, awards, and grants. Here we have a black female professor involved in engineering education. Engineering is dominated by men and non-blacks. I wouldn't be surprised at all if this black professor is a racist and has discriminated against whites (and probably men and asians as well) in her professional decision making. It's sad that influential blacks have completely destroyed the vision and gains of the civil rights movement with their embrace of racial hatred and scapegoating.




     I reiterate that, much like the above poster, I find these claims credible not because of logic, reason, or evidence, but because I’ve seen the like multiple times with my own eyes. 


      That there is such anti-white racism at OSU, “if” there is such, is not the story here. The story is, after years of such activity on our campuses, the victims are finally not wasting their time on the internal kangaroo campus court system, and instead simply taking it to our “real” court system. We’ve seen more than enough times a university getting creamed in the real courts, because the “leaders” of the schools actually believe their own lies. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if their defense against these charges of racism summarizes to “we didn’t do it because it’s impossible to be racist against white people.”


       I hope that’s exactly what they try, as it’ll amuse me greatly when it fails greatly.



www.professorconfess.blogspot.com









    

Cambridge Assigns Commissars To White Academics

By Professor Doom



     In Soviet Russia, there was real concern that the guys with guns, i.e., the army, might someday turn on the ideologues who were running the show. One of the solutions (beyond the Leftist favorite of “mass murder”) was the new military position of Commissar, who kept a close eye on the officers and troops, to be sure they were sticking with the pogrom program.


     These days, nearly everyone has guns (legal or not), and with the internet, it’s ideas, not guns, which hold a better chance of changing things. And so the Commissars are on campus, one of America’s better sources of ideas. I’ve written before of the “bias response teams” of Commissars which seek out and punish faculty who engage in wrongthink.


     In a previous century, our system of higher education was imitated throughout the world, due to its considerable success both in research and in educating the intellectual elite of the population. Today, our system has been thoroughly corrupted by the student loan scam and the Leftist takeover. Sadly, that corruption is being copied across a world that somehow has not learned of what has happened here.


      Canada has long since fallen, but it’s been interesting watching the UK’s system follow in our footsteps. Oxford is now debasing itself for diversity, and now Commissars are becoming a thing on UK campuses as well:



Cambridge to assign white academics an ethnic minority mentor to combat racism and assist 'institutional change’




      Institutional change? Cambridge is over 800 years old…are we sure it should adopt this ideological fad? I know, maintaining tradition isn’t necessarily a good thing, but shouldn’t there be some deliberation here? I strongly suspect the faculty don’t want commissars looking over their shoulder, but much like in the US, faculty are no longer allowed meaningful input in education.


      Under the project, white senior academics and management staff are assigned one of their black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) colleagues as a mentor in order to encourage “institutional change” at the university.




     For now, the Commissars will be other faculty on campus but I strongly suspect that will change soon enough. The gentle reader should note that only white academics will be assigned these overseers.


      Let’s turn this around as a thought experiment. If I were an academic in China (don’t laugh, I considered this years ago), and I were suddenly assigned to “mentor” a senior Chinese academic I’d…try to reason with the lunatics doing this, though I suspect that would fail. The mere fact that I was already faculty on the campus would indicate the “racism” wasn’t particularly foul, and I’d be hard pressed to offer much criticism—how much racism could there possibly be in my senior’s discussion of mathematical concerns? If anything, I suspect my onerous presence would only increase racial tensions, and it wouldn’t surprise me if my senior started to avoid any but forced contact with the “white devil” looking over his shoulder.


      And so my thought experiment bears fruit: this plan will only exacerbate such problems as might possibly already exist. I assure the gentle reader that this is exactly what the ideologues on campus want, as I’ve observed many times on campuses here in the U.S.


      What prompted this lunacy?

Indiana Seresin, 26, said that as a white student she had “benefited from the structural racism” of the university and felt she had an “imperative” to leave.

She said she has witnessed an “accumulation” of racist incidents during her time at the university, and went on to describe an incident where an English lecturer “repeatedly read aloud the n-word during our class discussions”.

       So, a single student complained. Note the phrasing above, the lecturer was “reading aloud.” Was the lecturer, perhaps, reading some of the works of Mark Twain? It’s so demented that Twain used that word in his works to emphasize how dehumanizing it was…and now his works are being censored because of his ideas, but I digress.


     Ms Seresin told how this incident, as well as the lack of black lecturers and postdoctoral researchers at Cambridge, left her convinced of the university’s racism.




       Once again the edu-fascism, the merger of administrative and ideological interests, comes to campus. A single student complaint will now lead to heightened racial tensions on campus, allowing an expansion of bureaucracy (in theory, to reduce such tensions, in practice to make them worse), enhancing the power of both ideologues and administration.


A university spokesman said that the reverse mentoring scheme, which has run as a pilot for the past academic year, has been a success and is likely to be rolled out on a wider scale next year.




      Well of course admin says it’s a success. Any faculty who complained would be summarily removed from campus; it’s why every administrative scheme (note the word) is always ruled a success.



One project that has  won funding was proposed by the Sedgwick Museum, the university’s geology museum founded in 1728, which hopes to transform itself into a “more welcoming and accessible space for BAME people”.



--BAME stands for “Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic”…when whites are a minority in a generation or so, don’t expect it to include them, however.




      And just like that, a boring old geology museum is removed to make place for a spiffy new Diversity Fiefdom. Yeah, that’ll fix the problem of people reading Mark Twain for sure!



 Cambridge has also introduced a new leadership programme for staff, which includes training on race awareness and implicit bias, and every College now has a Discrimination and Harassment Contact whose duty is to oversee “a culture of continuous improvement”.




     Hey, look, it’s the Bias Response Team, but with longer words. Please, God, spare us the theme of “continuous improvement,” as it ultimately just means the admin will perpetually ask for MOAR.


Another change introduced in the past year is that BAME students can now request to see a BAME councillor and new staff recruitment guidelines have been developed to help attract and recruit applicants from a diverse range of backgrounds.  



      Look at all the bureaucracy which has sprouted up like the vilest of weeds in only the past year! This is what edu-fascism promises, and delivers, every time.



Student loans 'heading for trillion pounds'




      Much as here, the student loan debt system is heavily supported by the government. It’s nice that they’re not over the trillion units of currency yet but they’re predict that’ll change within the generation.


      Only if they continue to copy our corrupted system.



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