Posted on 10/12/2018 8:39:54 AM PDT by reaganaut1
By the time a homeowner discovers a termite infestation, chances are that the destructive pests have already caused serious structural damage. So it is with “campus diversity officers,” a category of academic bureaucrat that didn’t even exist until fairly recently. Within a short period, diversity apparatchiks have taken root on most college campuses, and in many cases expanded into sprawling bureaucracies with multimillion-dollar budgets. Diversity departments have become a common campus amenity, like gourmet dorm food, climbing walls, and lazy rivers. Unlike lavish recreational facilities for students, which turn college campuses into an expensive Club U, administrative bureaucracies breed inertia. With size and resources come power, and, in keeping with Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy, a continual quest for aggrandizement.
It’s no wonder, then, that campus diversity officers have already formed a rent-seeking trade association, the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education (NADOHE), complete with annual conferences, self-serving “standards for professional practice,” a political agenda, and—since this is academia, after all—a pseudo-scholarly publication, the quarterly Journal of Diversity in Higher Education (priced at $681 per year for institutions). A typical article is entitled “The Influence of Campus Climate and Urbanization on Queer-Spectrum and Trans-Spectrum Faculty Intent to Leave.” Hundreds of universities, public and private, large and small, are members of NADOHE, including Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and my alma mater, the University of Texas at Austin. NADOHE finances its activities with hefty membership dues for institutions ($1,250 per year), while offering individual and student memberships at lower cost.
“Diversity and inclusion” is the latest obsession in higher education, and elite schools compete with one another to see who can field the largest and best-paid team of diversity bureaucrats (diversocrats).
(Excerpt) Read more at city-journal.org ...
The education-industrial complex, and the armies of parasite leftist academics it supports, is a massive bubble, funded by huge government spending and massive student debt.
This bubble will pop soon when low-interest rates end.
Division is our strength.
Diversity and inclusion. Students who look different but all think alike.
This division seems to be multiplying with any additional benefits.
One big reason why tuitions are through the roof and the universities have become cess pools.
One of the ways that these departments further hurt academics is that when money is scarce, funding of legitimate departments gets reduced, but these departments manage to grow and consume an ever larger amount of resources. When you have an entire department that is based on the grievance industry, trying to take money away is like trying to pet a rattlesnake. It is far easier to go after other departments, such as engineering. They don’t bite. I wonder, if the analysis was ever provided, much of recent increases in tuition are due to the need to feed the diversity educational complex?
Diversity is just another name for mediocrity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparatchik
describes an apparatchik as “a man not of grand plans, but of a hundred carefully executed details.”
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.