Colleges and universities--another way they waste our money

Since I'm involved in higher education, I read anything I can find about the troubles (and a few successes) in this field. The other day I saw something that shocked and dismayed me. It had to do with diversity on college campuses.


UC Berkeley’s Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion declared that the rising tuition at California’s public universities is giving him “heartburn.” What's ironic and irritating is that Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion Gibor Basri and his fellow diversity bureaucrats are a large cause of those skyrocketing college fees, not just in California but nationally.


A little background here is important. Basri commands a staff of 17 whose job it is to make sure that fanatically left-wing UC Berkeley is sufficiently attuned to the values of “diversity” and “inclusion”; his 2009 base pay of $194,000 was nearly four times that of starting assistant professors.


These kinds of silly jobs are not peculiar to Berkeley. For the last three decades, colleges have added more and more tuition-busting bureaucratic fat; since 2006, full-time administrators have outnumbered faculty nationally. UC Davis, for example, includes a Diversity Trainers Institute, staffed by Davis’s Administrator of Diversity Education; the Director of Faculty Relations and Development in Academic Personnel; the Director of the UC Davis Cross-Cultural Center; the Director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Resource Center; an Education Specialist with the UC Davis Sexual Harassment Education Program; an Academic Enrichment Coordinator with the UC Davis Department of Academic Preparation Programs; and the Diversity Program Coordinator and Early Resolution Discrimination Coordinator with the Office of Campus Community Relations. The Diversity Trainers Institute recruits “a cadre of individuals who will serve as diversity trainers/educators,” a function that would seem largely superfluous, given that the Associate Executive Vice Chancellor for Campus Community Relations already offers a Diversity Education Series that grants Understanding Diversity Certificates in “Unpacking Oppression” and Cross-Cultural Competency Certificates in “Understanding Diversity and Social Justice.”


Then there's the University of California, San Francisco, which created a Vice Chancellor for Diversity and Outreach earlier this year at the height of the state’s budget crisis. But this position was redundant with UCSF’s existing Office of Affirmative Action, Equal Opportunity and Diversity, the Diversity Learning Center (where you can learn how to “Become A Diversity Change Agent”), the Center for LGBT Health & Equity, the Office of Sexual Harassment Prevention & Resolution, the Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on Diversity, the Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on Disability Issues, the Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Issues, and the Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on the Status of Women.


Closer to home, there's UC San Diego. It recently announced the creation of a Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion , even as the campus was losing three prestigious cancer researchers to Rice University and was cutting academic programs. Needless to say, UCSD’s Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion replicated an equally fearsome mountain of diversity functions.


I'll take a deep breath and stop here. More on this obscene waste of money at your local university in the next blog.

And in this corner . . .

This is a short note, but I'll add another blog this weekend. There's a debate coming up at UCSD in early March. The title is pretty simple: "Is Religion the Problem?" The subquestions are the following: "Is belief in God a menace to civilization, as the new atheists contend?" "Would a secular world be a more rational, peaceful, and decent world?"

Arguing against the question will be Dinesh D'Souza, president of The King's College. I've read some of his works before--a very solid thinker. Going up against him will be Dan Barker, American Atheist activist. I don't know much about him, but he's the author of a provocative book called Losing Faith in Faith; From Preacher to Atheist.

The debate is on Monday, March 7th at 7 p.m. on the campus of UCSD in the Price Center West Ballrooms. It's free and open to the public.

By the way, Emmanuel Faith Community Church will be hosting Greg Koukl on April 1st at 7 p.m. to hear his presentation on the new atheists. Greg will be arguing that science, morality, and logic is actually on the side of the Christians, not the atheists.

It's healthy to have open discussions like this. I say that knowing that Christianity can hold its own in a rational discussion.