May 01, 2014
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Higher up the campus hierarchy will be a network of well-paid administrators dedicated to ensuring successful outreach. Heather MacDonald tells of how in 2012 the cash-strapped University of California hired a vice chancellor for equity, diversity, and inclusion at a starting salary of $250,000, plus perks. During the previous year UCLA hired an assistant dean for “campus climate,” tasked with “maintaining the campus as a safe, welcoming, respectful place.” This expensive nonsense is hardly atypical.
But rest assured, all this bloat will not cleanse the campus of perceived hate, let alone ensure that every minority student graduates with a bona fide academic degree. In other words, this is meant as permanent, benefit-rich, and lucrative employment which will likely grow as long as ever more marginal students are admitted to redress historic inequalities.
Let me stress that it is not minority students alone who justify this bloat. Rather, it is any struggling, often troublesome subpar student whose presence instigates the hiring”and chronic failure justifies even more hiring. Failure is the new success, at least with today’s approach to overcoming racial inequality. Thus understood, rolling back campus affirmative action would bring relative austerity; I suppose our $250,000-a-year Dean of Diversity and Inclusion would be lucky to get a private job paying half of that princely sum.
No doubt, the beneficiaries of today’s racial alchemy, of the quest to turn marginal students into accomplished scholars, sense the public’s growing disenchantment with racial preferences. These functionaries can also see how courts have gradually curtailed naked racial quotas while voters increasingly doubt the value of top colleges enrolling ill-prepared students to achieve “social justice.” The gravy train may be coming to a halt, and the beneficiaries will not go quietly.
