STUFF YOU CAN'T MAKE UP – AT 8:20 A.M. ET:  As we contemplate the economic crisis before us, and we hear the whining of those whose comfortable fiefdoms are being disturbed, we turn our eyes toward, what else, the University of California, where budgets are being cut.  Well, some budgets.  What choices are being made in a time of austerity?  As they say, you can't make this stuff up.  From the great Heather Macdonald at City Journal: 

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.

COMMENT:  Dearies, do you remember when students were just called students?  Maybe we just didn't understand.  But a lot of people are going to be doing a lot of understanding when they have to pay much more to attend UCal, while stuff like the above is being fully funded.

It doesn't take a committee or a special office to be fair to students.  It takes common sense, good will, and a set of standards that applies equally to all. 

Does this make me a racist?

July 15, 2011