I never said 1. so that you're just pulling that out of your head.
Passthepotatoes said it, as I noted in the quote box (you might want to read more carefully
).
FWIW, this board has a moderator, and I don't think we need anyone but him deciding what's appropriate and what's not here. Some topics are contentious and appropriate, and I think it's best to be objective when discussing them instead of rushing to take offense. If I don't like a topic, I just don't read it. If I disagree, I say so, and I try to use data to support my claims rather than getting emotional.
But I also know that what reaches the press is not always what it seems so I'm not just going to be up in arms about these diversity hirings without knowing more about the UC system.
I agree. I did some extra reading and googled " 'vice chancellor' diversity." All of the top hits were at UC schools. I also found an Office for Diversity at Harvard's School of Public Health (I noted before that I figured that the private universities have these positions too).
The original post concerns over-emphasizing diversity-related positions while abandoning courses in other areas. One can argue that it makes sense to jettison courses that don't have lots of students taking them, but the same logic can be applied to gifted (and especially highly gifted) kids: there aren't many of them,making demand low. So we shouldn't devote precious resources to them.
It's a good thing to end practices that deliberately exclude people because of their religion (e.g. Jews and Asians faced quotas at US universities in the past) or gender (e.g. no women allowed at Dartmouth or Yale!) or whatever. But that doesn't mean we need to go over the top and spend millions of dollars on various offices and vice presidents of diversity and so on at the expense of real courses while also making UC unaffordable.
There's a point at which ideology takes over from a good idea; I believe that the OP (plus Austin's addition plus the search results I found) highlight a practice that appears to have reached that point at UC. If I'm wrong, that's fine. Just show me evidence.
