Diversity on college campuses--part 2

My last blog dealt with increasing bureaucracy at colleges and universities. I want to continue this sad story for one more entry today.

This exploding diversity bureaucracy is not confined to public universities. Here are more depressing examples. In 2005, Harvard created a new Senior Vice Provost for Diversity and Faculty Development, responsible for $50 million in diversity funding, and six new diversity deanships. Can you imagine the cost for all these people? Don't forget to count the cost of adding whole new staffs to help these deans. Then there's Yale. This school already has 14 Title IX coordinators (14!), but it nevertheless recently put a Deputy Provost in charge of assessing the “campus climate” with respect to gender and overseeing the 14 Title IX coordinators. Ah yes, it needed more than 14. After all, we can't get enough information from a mere 14 coordinators. All these new bureaucrats in campuses across the country — nearly 72,000 non-teaching positions added from 2006 to 2009 — cost $3.6 billion, estimated Harvey Silverglate in Minding the Campus earlier this year. And we wonder why college costs are soaring. Well, here's one reason.

Of course this is only one problem that has added to rising tuition costs. Unfortunately, there are plenty of other reasons. First, there's the rest of the burgeoning student-services infrastructure. Then there are the salaries of professors who teach one course a semester, the arms race of ever more sybaritic dorms and social centers, and the absolute monarchies of the football and basketball programs. Of course, a major figure in the soaring costs is the federal government--are you surprised? Its easy loans allow colleges to jack up their tuition even further.

Of course, all this brings into focus a key question--do colleges need such a growing diversity bureaucracy? The clear answer is no. The exact opposite is the case. Hundreds of thousands of hours and dollars are wasted each year in the futile pursuit of the same inadequate pool of remotely qualified underrepresented minority and female applicants that every other campus in the country is chasing with as much desperate zeal. The hiring process has been thoroughly corrupted. Faculty applicants are brought onto campus who have no chance of being hired, either because the hiring committee incorrectly assumed from their names or résumés that they were the right sort of minority (East Asians don’t count) for a position set aside for just such a minority, or because, although they were the right sort of minority, their qualifications were so low that their only purpose in being interviewed was to fill an outreach quota. It's a sad state of affairs.

I haven't seen as much of this because I am at a community college, but it does exist. One time when I was on a hiring committee, we were told by the administration to select different people to interview because our selections were not diverse enough. Never mind the fact that English majors tend to be of incorrect diversity. Is this situation going away at any time? Nah, too much power, prestige, and money is on the line for these colleges.