http://www.city-journal.org/2011/cjc0714hm.htmlLess Academics, More Narcissism
The University of California is cutting back on many things, but not useless diversity programs.
by Heather Mac Donald
City Journal
14 July 2011
California�s budget crisis has reduced the University of California to near-penury, claim its spokesmen. �Our campuses and the UC Office of the President already have cut to the bone,� the university system�s vice president for budget and capital resources warned earlier this month, in advance of this week�s meeting of the university�s regents. Well, not exactly to the bone. Even as UC campuses jettison entire degree programs and lose faculty to competing universities, one fiefdom has remained virtually sacrosanct: the diversity machine.
Not only have diversity sinecures been protected from budget cuts, their numbers are actually growing. The University of California at San Diego, for example, is creating a new full-time �vice chancellor for equity, diversity, and inclusion.� This position would augment UC San Diego�s already massive diversity apparatus, which includes the Chancellor�s Diversity Office, the associate vice chancellor for faculty equity, the assistant vice chancellor for diversity, the faculty equity advisors, the graduate diversity coordinators, the staff diversity liaison, the undergraduate student diversity liaison, the graduate student diversity liaison, the chief diversity officer, the director of development for diversity initiatives, the Office of Academic Diversity and Equal Opportunity, the Committee on Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation Issues, the Committee on the Status of Women, the Campus Council on Climate, Culture and Inclusion, the Diversity Council, and the directors of the Cross-Cultural Center, the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Resource Center, and the Women�s Center.
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UC San Diego is adding diversity fat even as it snuffs out substantive academic programs. In March, the Academic Senate decided that the school would no longer offer a master�s degree in electrical and computer engineering; it also eliminated a master�s program in comparative literature and courses in French, German, Spanish, and English literature. At the same time, the body mandated a new campus-wide diversity requirement for graduation. The cultivation of �a student�s understanding of her or his identity,� as the diversity requirement proposal put it, would focus on �African Americans, Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, Hispanics, Chicanos, Latinos, Native Americans, or other groups� through the �framework� of �race, ethnicity, gender, religion, sexuality, language, ability/disability, class or age.� Training computer scientists to compete with the growing technical prowess of China and India, apparently, can wait. More pressing is guaranteeing that students graduate from UCSD having fully explored their �identity.� Why study Cervantes, Voltaire, or Goethe when you can contemplate yourself? �Diversity,� it turns out, is simply a code word for narcissism.
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Since much of what goes on in American schools and colleges is an expression of teachers' and administrators' political beliefs and has nothing to do with education, I favor budget cuts and a general reduction of the government's role in education.
