By Professor Doom
It’s so funny how
often official policy is ignored; in particular, every campus I’ve been on has
had policy regarding equality, that everything is open to everyone without
concern for ethnicity, gender, orientation, or anything else. Despite such policy,
I’ve seen faculty and administration chosen based on race and gender, and I’ve
seen faculty and administration refused promotion or hiring based on being the
wrong race and gender. It’s really weird how once a position is occupied by a
female, it remains occupied by a female forever afterwards.
Because
administration has gotten away with bigoted and sexist hiring for years, it
only makes sense that we’ll now see programs in
explicit violation of written policy:
Claremont
McKenna College is set to offer a program restricted to non-white individuals
who feel they have experienced race-related stress. The college is officially
funding the program, and its administration announced this week in a message
directed to the students and faculty.
It’s so weird that
there’s no money for so many things on campus today, but there’s always money
for yet another pointless fiefdom. Let’s hear the administrative description
for this lunacy:
“Dear CMC
community, The Cultural Influences on Mental Health Center at CMC is offering a
FREE 8-week compassionate meditation program for ethnic minority students to
learn how to heal from racism- and race-related incidents,” wrote Vince Greer, Assistant Dean of Students for Diversity and Inclusion.
Before going any
further, I want to talk a bit about Vince Greer. Did you catch that title,
“Assistant Dean of Students for Diversity and Inclusion”? We really do have so
many administrators on campus today that “Dean” just doesn’t cut it anymore.
They have to award themselves ever more splendiferous titles. It’s been some
time since I’ve mentioned a guideline for improving higher education: fire
every administrator whose title is more than twice as long as his or her name.
In this case, the title is some five times as long, so safely in the “close
this position” rule. I know, it’s an arbitrary, ridiculous, unfair rule…but
I’ve spent my entire career surviving in this system, seen many faculty careers
ruined by arbitrary, ridiculous, unfair rules. It really is time for admin to live
by such rules.
If such a rule is
just too unfair, do keep in mind that the Assistant Dean of Students for
Diversity and Inclusion just argued for an 8 week program that is racist on the
face of it. He even has the audacity to call it “FREE” though I promise the
gentle reader that, follow the money long enough, and you’ll see it comes from
the student loan scam.
Please understand,
this position is so ridiculous on the face of it that Vince Greer realizes,
every day, that his job is in jeopardy. The only way he can keep his job is to
create as much racial strife as possible, to show how necessary his position
is. I’m not picking on Greer here; our
campuses are loaded down with administrators with goofadelic titles trying to
figure out some way to justify their jobs. Without this weird position of
Assistant Dean of Students for Diversity and Inclusion, there’d be nobody whose
job it (actually) is to create strife on campus, and nobody to advocate for
racist programs to create strife.
Ok, the admin
didn’t say the program was racist, but the entrance requirements are clear
enough:
“Students must identify as an ethnic
minority, must have experienced race-related stress, and must have attended one
of the Claremont Colleges for at least one semester.
The requirements
are ridiculous. I grant that being a student for at least one semester is fair
enough, but how do you even determine the other requirements? Seriously,
“race-related stress”? Is there a precise definition for such a thing? Heck,
I’m pretty sure I’m feeling race-related stress just by reading this madness.
I’d love to know for sure if my feelings satisfy the appropriate definition.
And, of course,
that very first requirement rather restricts white people from entering the
free program. I guess there’s a grey area there, since anyone can “identify” as
anything, right? The sustained goofiness is just too much to consider.
In any event
there are already student protests against this idiocy. That Vince, he’s pretty
good at his job, no?
You know, there
used to be a time when courses and programs had to be determined to be
legitimate before they could be foisted on students. Apparently there still is,
though I don’t understand how the review board didn’t see any problem here at
all:
The review really is supposed to consider
carefully, i.e., “review” the program in light of what’s going on elsewhere on
campus. For example, if the campus
already has a course called “Calculus,” the board would review a new course
called “Calculus” and determine if it was a good idea (usually, such redundancy
would be denied).
In this case, the
review board should not have approved this program, because the school clearly
has a racist element in it, an element that has already used exclusion to
advance their cause:
So, one
anti-white safe space is filled in, and now the college wants to open up
another? How did the review board miss this detail? How they could they
possibly approve of this new program knowing exactly who’s going to use it, and
what it’ll be used for?
In times past,
such review boards were filled with faculty, people that actually wanted peace
on campus, so they could pursue the true goals of higher education: education
and research. Now, review boards, and
every other committee on campus, are under the thumb of administration. Do we
have any reason to think administration wants more strife and protests?
Let’s see what the
Poo Bah has to day:
President
Hiram Chodosh wrote publicly that “We must ensure that each of our students shares a deep
sense of belonging to the CMC community. Thus, I am committed to developing a
thoughtful, productive, and responsible inclusion strategy, where every student
is fully engaged and valued… No student or group on our campus should live and
learn in isolation.”
We really at the
point in higher ed where “inclusion” means having programs that exclude white
people. I assure you, no administrator, and certainly no faculty, on this
campus (or any other) would dare to try to correct the Poo Bah.
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