One blunt instrument with which the U of C is imposing this tyranny is the Intergroup Relations Office on the UCLA campus. But that's by no means the only weapon at its disposal:If Albert Einstein applied for a professorship at UCLA today, would he be hired? The answer is not clear. Starting this fall, all faculty applicants to UCLA must document their contributions to “equity, diversity and inclusion.” (Next year, existing UCLA faculty will also have to submit an “equity, diversity and inclusion statement” in order to be considered for promotion, following the lead of five other UC campuses.) The mandatory statements will be credited in the same manner as the rest of an applicant’s portfolio, according to UCLA’s equity, diversity and inclusion office.A contemporary Einstein may not meet the suggested evaluation criteria. Would his “job talk” — a presentation of one’s scholarly accomplishments — reflect his contributions to equity, diversity and inclusion? Unlikely. Would his research show, in the words of the evaluation template, the “potential to understand the barriers facing women and racial/ethnic minorities?” Also unlikely. Would he have participated in “service that applies up-to-date knowledge to problems, issues and concerns of groups historically underrepresented in higher education?” Sadly, he may have been focusing on the theory of general relativity instead. What about “utilizing pedagogies addressing different learning styles” or demonstrating the ability to “effectively teach and attract students from underrepresented communities”? Again, not at all guaranteed.
Intergroup Relations is just the tip of the bureaucratic diversity iceberg. In 2015, UCLA created a vice chancellorship for equity, diversity and inclusion, funded at $4.3 million, according to figures published by the Millennial Review in 2017. (The EDI vice chancellor’s office did not have its current budget “at the ready,” a UCLA spokesman said, nor did Intergroup Relations.) Over the last two years, according to the Sacramento Bee’s state salary database, the diversity vice chancellor’s total pay, including benefits, has averaged $414,000, more than four times many faculty salaries. Besides his own staff, the vice chancellor for equity, diversity and inclusion presides over the Discrimination Prevention Office; BruinX, the “research and development arm of EDI”; faculty “equity advisors”; UCLA’s Title IX office; and a student advisory board. Various schools at UCLA, including medicine and dentistry, have their own diversity deans, whose job includes making sure that the faculty avoid “implicit bias in the hiring process,” in the words of the engineering school’s diversity dean.
These bureaucratic sinecures are premised on the idea that UCLA is rife with discrimination, from which an ever-growing number of victim groups need protection. The Intergroup Relations Office scours the horizon for “emerging social-identity-based intergroup conflicts,” according to its website. It has been hiring undergraduates and graduate students to raise their peers’ self-awareness of their “experiences with privilege and oppression.” These “diversity peer educators,” whose internship salaries come out of mandatory student fees, will host workshops on “toxic masculinity” and “intersectional identities” this fall. If UCLA is putting a comparable effort into organizing campus-wide workshops on the evolution of constitutional government or the significance of Renaissance humanism, it is keeping the effort out of sight.
Reality check: UCLA and the University of California are among the most tolerant, welcoming environments in human history for all races, ethnicities and genders. Every classroom, library and scientific laboratory is open to all qualified students on an equal basis. Far from discriminating against underrepresented minorities in admissions, UCLA and UC have sought tirelessly to devise surrogates for the explicit racial preferences banned in 1996 by Proposition 209. UCLA’s proportion of black undergraduates — 5% in 2016 — is less than one percentage point below the black share of California’s public high school graduates.
In 2016, 4% of UCLA’s faculty were black, 6.6% were Latino, 66% were white, and 18.6% were Asian. This distribution reflects the hiring pipeline, not hiring bias.
Blacks made up 4.7% of all doctorate recipients nationwide in 2006, 4.9% in 2010, and 5.2% in 2016, according to the National Science Foundation. But black PhDs have historically been concentrated in education; in the sciences, which make up a large proportion of the UCLA faculty, less so. In 2016, for example, 1% of all PhDs in computer science went to blacks, or 17 out of 1,659 doctorates, according to the Computing Research Assn. Many fields — nuclear physics, geophysics and seismology and neuropsychology, for instance — had no black PhDs at all.
Given such numbers, it is unrealistic to assume that every academic department at UCLA will perfectly mirror the state’s demographic makeup, absent discrimination. And yet the equity, diversity and inclusion office puts every member of a faculty search committee through time-consuming implicit bias training.
Of course, that's absolutely intolerable to these creatures.
This is the level on which post-America is most definitely not in fine shape.
In fact, it's being warred upon, and its enemy must be defeated. There is no other outcome if freedom is not to be irreversibly snuffed out.
One has to wonder how much of this is defensive in nature because of the assaults by the uber-litigious nature of an incessantly advertising Plaintiff's bar. In essence we have become a nation of lawyers, not men. They win a case, they get half the judgment.
ReplyDeleteEven if so, the underlying reason is this s—-
ReplyDeleteThe underlying reason is federal legislation.
ReplyDeleteNo, the underlying reason is hard leftists who will not let normal Americans regard each other as individuals about whom their ethnic and racial makeup is so insignificant as to be negligible. The hard leftists could not stand for that to truly take hold. The hard leftists' main message - that there is a particular demographic at some kind of top of society keeping all other demographics under its thumb - would fall apart, and the hard leftists would lose all their power.
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