Diversity Thursday

Harmless, low cost Diversity initiatives - right? What's the harm? Via Heather MacDonald;

... last Friday, UC Berkeley’s Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion declared that the rising tuition at California’s public universities is giving him “heartburn.” It should, since Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion Gibor Basri and his fellow diversity bureaucrats are a large cause of those skyrocketing college fees, not just in California but nationally

....

Basri commands a staff of 17, allegedly all required to make sure that fanatically left-wing UC Berkeley is sufficiently attuned to the values of “diversity” and “inclusion”; his 2009 base pay of $194,000 was nearly four times that of starting assistant professors. Basri was given responsibility for a $4.5 million slice of Berkeley’s vast diversity bureaucracy when he became the school’s first Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion in 2007;
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UC Berkeley’s diversity apparatus, which spreads far beyond the office of the VC for E and I, is utterly typical. For the last three decades, colleges have added more and more tuition-busting bureaucratic fat; since 2006, full-time administrators have outnumbered faculty nationally. UC Davis,... offers the usual menu of diversity effluvia under the auspices of an Associate Executive Vice Chancellor for Campus Community Relations. A flow chart of Linnaean complexity would be needed to accurately map all the activities overseen by the AEVC for CCR. They include a Diversity Trainers Institute, staffed by Davis’s Administrator of Diversity Education; the Director of Faculty Relations and Development in Academic Personnel; the Director of the UC Davis Cross-Cultural Center; the Director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Resource Center; an Education Specialist with the UC Davis Sexual Harassment Education Program; an Academic Enrichment Coordinator with the UC Davis Department of Academic Preparation Programs; and the Diversity Program Coordinator and Early Resolution Discrimination Coordinator with the Office of Campus Community Relations. The Diversity Trainers Institute recruits “a cadre of individuals who will serve as diversity trainers/educators,” a function that would seem largely superfluous, given that the Associate Executive Vice Chancellor for Campus Community Relations already offers a Diversity Education Series that grants Understanding Diversity Certificates in “Unpacking Oppression” and Cross-Cultural Competency Certificates in “Understanding Diversity and Social Justice.”
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In 2005, Harvard created a new Senior Vice Provost for Diversity and Faculty Development, responsible for $50 million in diversity funding, and six new diversity deanships. Whereas Harvard’s previous diversity bureaucrats collected mere diversity data about faculty hiring and promotions, the new SVP for D and FD would be collecting “diversity metrics.” Yale already has 14 Title IX coordinators (not enough to stave off a specious Title IX investigation by the Office of Civil Rights in the federal Education Department), but it nevertheless recently put a Deputy Provost in charge of assessing the “campus climate” with respect to gender and overseeing the 14 Title IX coordinators. All these new bureaucrats in campuses across the country — nearly 72,000 non-teaching positions added from 2006 to 2009 — cost $3.6 billion, estimated Harvey Silverglate in Minding the Campus earlier this year.
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The Big Lie of the campus diversity industry has been that without constant monitoring by diversity bureaucrats, faculty and other administrators would discriminate against minority and female professors and students. In fact, anyone who has spent a day inside a university knows that the exact opposite is demonstrably the case: Hundreds of thousands of hours and dollars are wasted each year in the futile pursuit of the same inadequate pool of remotely qualified underrepresented minority and female applicants that every other campus in the country is chasing with as much desperate zeal. The hiring process has been thoroughly corrupted. Faculty applicants are brought onto campus who have no chance of being hired, either because the hiring committee incorrectly assumed from their names or résumés that they were the right sort of minority (East Asians don’t count) for a position set aside for just such a minority, or because, although they were the right sort of minority, their qualifications were so low that their only purpose in being interviewed was to fill an outreach quota.

Diversity Industry - indeed.

There are two important things to keep in mind - in the Navy we have the same problem. Take all the manpower documents and add up all the full-time Diversity BA/NMP. Include the multiple "Gender Advisors" as well. That represents a huge opportunity cost.

Then you need to add up all the money we spend on travel to all the various racialist "Affinity Group" awards and recognition efforts. All documented here over the years - that includes the millions spent on race specific recruiting and consultants at Annapolis - again all documented under the Diversity tag below.

Still, none of it actually does anything to go after actual discrimination or racists. No, it is more often than not a talking club and an effort of inoculating the Navy against the overseers and supporters of the diversity industry.

Especially for the younger generations - none of this reflects their day to day experience. It is always 1971 in someone's head.

People wonder why our budgets just don't seem to get much bang for the buck - why Staffs are so bloated. Part of the reason is that there are a lot of jobs that exist only to create things that justify their own existence. They define their requirements in such a way that if anyone ever tries to take the job away - either their job isn't done (because it is defined such that its work is never done) or if you try anyway ... you are a racist, bigot, etc.

Meanwhile we send exceptionally talented Sailors with 16 years and millions of dollars of technical training out the door via ERB/PTS with nothing but the taste of bile in their mouths.

Tuition at universities are high for the same reason - they are spending too much money on things that add nothing to the intellectual product they are there to produce. Just pet projects for pet theories that cannot exist outside the university or guv'munt lifelines.

Administrators and managers? They don't care - after all - it is other people's money.