Yale’s college council has come up with a bright idea: it endorsed a call for each of the twelve residential colleges on campus to have two diversity coordinators. The relentless expansion of what Claremont McKenna professor Frederick Lynch calls “the diversity machine” is not exactly breaking news. Diversity is a restless quasi-religion whose missionaries are ever on the move. Yale already has an impressively vast diversity bureaucracy headed by Nydia Gonzalez, the new chief diversity officer. She is working on a long-term plan, “Diversity Yale 2010 and Beyond.” Each school has its own system of diversity apparatchiks. There’s even a Yale library diversity council with 10 to 16 members and a three-year diversity program. Now Yale’s Coalition for Campus Unity (CCU) is encouraging the residential colleges to create “some kind of diversity-awareness position or board.” A board of, say, ten members in each college would add 120 new officials – another diversity gusher. Last February, Yale continued its long-term program to segment the student body into ever smaller ethnic and sexual groups. It hired a new assistant dean for Native American affairs. Can anyone say that a provost for the transgendered is somehow out of the question?
Why does Yale, or any university, need to keep creating more diversicrats? Undergraduate Robert Sanchez says his group, CCU, “thought most Yale students lacked sufficient cultural awareness,” i.e. a high enough degree of enthusiasm for the diversity movement. Sanchez, according to the Yale Daily News, seems distressed that “when we have these forums and panels we are preaching to the choir because only a certain demographic of students attend the event.” This certainly sounds familiar. I grew up Catholic, and while everybody went to Sunday mass, the nuns and priests frequently would express their anguish that few parishioners bothered with daily mass. Perhaps unwisely, the parish neglected to address the crisis by naming a few dozen boards of pro-mass officials.
Sanchez called attention to two offensive graffiti discovered a month ago on campus. Everyone knows that most campus graffiti, even the hoaxes and pranks, provoke calls for more diversity. You are not allowed to simply erase the scrawls and dismiss their authors as morons. No, you must behave as Yale did. The deans of the college and the graduate school sent emails to all, stressing how appalled they were. “We Shall Overcome” was sung at a Rally Against hate. Four major panel discussions covering the history and sociology of hate were scheduled. Yale decided to coordinate all of its multicultural centers to create a campus-wide team to addresses the graffiti. Yale will develop a new “protocol” for coping with hate speech on campus.
What an impressive display of diversity mongering. Imagine the uproar if three graffiti had been discovered instead of just two.
Robert wrote:
think one of the first questions every parent and soon-to-be college student should ask when looking at prospective schools is “are my tuition dollars going toward a real education or are some of them wasted on silly programs like ‘diversity awareness’?” Colleges that do get scratched off the list.
Yep. Also: some ‘programs’ like this are funded by student activity fees. For public universities and colleges, write the state legislature or the board of regents, and lobby to have student activity fees payable on a voluntary basis only.
Both my wife and I recently earned Masters degrees from a small, mid-western private university that agressively seeks international students for both its undergrad and graduate programs. I forget exactly how many countries are represented in the student body but they come from every continent. There are several university-sponsored foreign student associations and clubs, and the adminstration has officials who deal with tuition, visa, housing and other issues foreign and low-income resident students encounter, but as far as I know there are no “diversity counsels” or other insipid, psuedo-scientific indocrination groups. Why not? Simple. We don’t need them. Everyone gets along just fine. In the rare instance when someone says or does something rude or insensensitive, the students tend to act like the young adults that they are and deal with it on their own.
I think one of the first questions every parent and soon-to-be college student should ask when looking at prospective schools is “are my tuition dollars going toward a real education or are some of them wasted on silly programs like ‘diversity awareness’?” Colleges that do get scratched off the list.
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/state/s_540767.html
Taking diversity to the next level. Do you have enough hiv positive workers?
Undergraduate Robert Sanchez might be on to an epiphany when he says his group, CCU, “thought most Yale students lacked sufficient cultural awareness”. Of course the lack of cultural awareness might be that associated with American culture and creed, rather than, well, some foreign culture, which while important to some, is not particularly relevant to an American. As Victor Davis Hanson stresses, our society can survive as multi-ethnic, but it must have one culture endorsed by all.
Unfortunately Sanchez veers off in the wrong direction with his inferred solution when he observes, “when we have these forums and panels we are preaching to the choir because only a certain demographic of students attend the event.” Such a statement implies mandatory attendance. The totalitarian impulses of these sorts of folks is breathtaking–but not especially surprising. Sad.
Diversity for its own sake is not necessarily a good idea. Consider, for example, the current crop of Democratic candidates and leaders in Congress. They can rightly claim diversity – diversity of gender, of color, of faith.
Yet they all think almost exactly alike.
There was an article within the past few months, of a study of diversity. They found that diversity in the workplace was a good thing, but in cities and towns, not so much so.
The University of Delaware was recently in an embarrassing position – they decided that entering resident students had to attend “diversity awareness” classes, and only backpedalled a little under the glare of publicity.
If diversity is essential to education, how will people become educated once all our descendants are racially mixed?
Pretty clearly, society’s interest in an educated populace requires us to support the return of anti-miscegenation laws.
“Diversity is divisive.”
Umm, I think you didn’t pay attention in class. Unity is divisive! As they say when streaming across the border, Juan for all and all for Juan. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses. We’ll put them on diversity committees, provided they never learn to speak english.
Why do they need to add so many diversicrats? Because graduates in diversity studies can’t do anything else, and per-existing diversicrats can’t bear to have these useless slugs sit around unemployed, because that would expose the uselessness of the entire enterprise.
They’re not interested in ensuring that all political views are in residence.
It’s simply “derma-diverstity”.
“Why does Yale, or any university, need to keep creating more diversicrats?”
Where else are all those fraudulent minority Studies majors going to get jobs that don’t require them to ask “Would you like fries with that”?
Administrative bloat has been going on for decades, and this is just the latest example. You can just look at university telephone directories since the 1960s to see how listings for “administration” have doubled and tripled while student and faculty numbers have remained constant. PC is but only one source of this expansion but perhaps the most dangerous. An especially important, but largely invisible growth occurs in housing. In fact, many courses (credit and non-credit) are now offering by “housing” and these seminars are probably among the most PC on campus. (My impression many are taught by radical graduate students unable to have regular academic careers.)
A cynic might suggest that this bloat reflects the burgeoning number of middle-aged divorced liberal women in search of a respectable job other than selling real estate. They are an excellent source of cheap, smart labor for these positions�the femi-proletariat, so to speak.
Actually, universities outside major cities have a difficult time finding decent jobs for faculty wives, and administrative positions easily solve these problems. This has become very important as young professionals are two-career families. In many instances a job for the wife is the necessary price to be paid for recruiting a man.
“Four major panel discussions covering the history and sociology of hate were scheduled. Yale decided to coordinate all of its multicultural centers to create a campus-wide team to addresses the graffiti. Yale will develop a new “protocol” for coping with hate speech on campus.”
This is what happens when the best people really hate hate.
Not too long ago, Purdue University was lauded as having the largest contingent of foreign students in the country. A few weeks before, the campus newspaper ran an article concerning student opinions on how PU needed to improve itself and, of course, the most popular answer was “increase diversity”. This new religion and its partner, global warming, have become something akin to the old beauty contestant desire for ‘world peace’.
And they call their critics divisive.
Of course there is never enough. If you are developing a police state, there are never enough police men. Same principle. Criminalizing thought requires eternal vigilance.
Diversity is not enough! We need University!
Oh, wait…
explain to me how you can have diversity and unity all at the same time in their world. Would that be different races and ethinicities all united with a single thought? How droll.
I attended Michigan State University from 1993 to 1997. At that time, the diversity curriculum was somewhat on the periphery. It wasn’t radical, but it wasn’t mainstream. But you could see where it was headed. Now it’s very much mainstream and twice as ridiculous.
It’s a brainwashing program(and an expensive one!). Yet almost every parent I know simply dismisses it as inconsequental to their kids education or embraces it as forward thinking, lest they be seen as racist or ignorant. But it’s antithetical to the American creed.
Thank God for FIRE.
Diversity is the polar opposite of unity. Diversity is divisive. It is profoundly unAmerican.
But don’t you understand, it’s baiting. By undergoing this sort of ritualistic overkill, it makes 3 graffiti next year more likely. Even morons can get offended.
I can’t help wondering whether these almost hysterical reactions to the actions of what were probably the actions of a few drunk teenagers are motivated by genuine concern for the poor, frightened minorities on campus, or a fear that if they don’t appear to be outraged enough, someone will call them out on not being concerned enough about intolerance, a fate worse then death for many academics involved in the so called social disciplines.