The Diversity Delusion
Page 20
The physics department at UC San Diego advertised an assistant-professor position several years ago with a “specific emphasis on contributions to diversity,” such as a candidate’s “awareness of inequities faced by underrepresented groups.” Social-justice concerns now apparently trump the quest to solve the mystery of dark energy. All five candidates on UC San Diego’s short list were females,7 leading one male candidate with a specialty in extragalactic physics to wonder why the school had even solicited applications from Asian and white men.
Every campus has throngs of diversity enforcers like Sobek. In 2010, as a $637 million cut in state funding closed some facilities temporarily and forced UC faculty and staff to take up to three and a half weeks of unpaid leave, Mark Yudof, at the time the president of the entire university system, announced the formation of a presidential Advisory Council on Campus Climate, Culture, and Inclusion. It would be supported by five working groups of faculty and administrators: the Faculty Diversity Working Group; the Diversity Structure Group; the Safety and Engagement Group; the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Group; and the Metrics and Assessment Group.
Needless to say, the new burst of committee activity replicated a long line of presidential diversity initiatives, such as the 2006 President’s Task Force on Faculty Diversity and the president’s annual Accountability Sub-Report on Diversity.
These earlier efforts must have failed to eradicate the threats that large subsets of students and faculty face. Yudof promised that his new council and its satellite working groups would address, yet again, the “challenges in enhancing and sustaining a tolerant, inclusive environment on each of the university’s 10 campuses … so that every single member of the UC community feels welcome, comfortable and safe.”8 Of course, under traditional measures of safety, UC’s campuses rate extremely high, but more subtle dangers apparently lurk for women and certain minorities.
In April 2012, one of Yudof’s five working groups disgorged its first set of recommendations for creating a “safe” and “healthy” climate for UC’s beleaguered minorities, even as the university’s regents, who theoretically govern the school, debated whether to raise tuition yet again to cover the latest budget shortfall. The Faculty Diversity Working Group called for hiring quotas, which it calls “cluster hiring,” and more diversity bureaucrats, among nine other measures. (California’s pesky constitutional ban on taking race and gender into account in public hiring, which took effect after voters approved Proposition 209 in 1996, has had only a limited influence on UC behavior and rhetoric, as we have seen.)
You would think that an institution ostensibly dedicated to reason would have documented the widespread bias against women and minorities before creating such a costly apparatus for fighting that alleged epidemic. I asked Dianne Klein, the press secretary for UC’s Office of the President, whether any members of the office were aware of any faculty candidates rejected by hiring committees because of their race or sex. Or perhaps the office knew of highly qualified minority or female faculty candidates simply overlooked in a search process because the hiring committee was insufficiently committed to diversity outreach? Klein ducked both questions: “Such personnel matters are confidential and so we can’t comment on your question about job candidates.”
Did UC Santa Barbara’s associate vice chancellor for diversity, equity, and academic policy know of such victims of faculty bias? “It’s hard to prove that qualified women haven’t been hired,” said Sobek. But “people don’t feel comfortable working with people who don’t look like them and tend to hire people that look like them.” Didn’t the high proportion of Asian professors in UC’s science departments and medical schools suggest that UC’s white faculty were comfortable working with people who don’t look like them? “Oh, Asians are discriminated against, too,” replied Sobek. “They face a glass ceiling. People think that maybe Asians are not good enough to run a university.” Sobek’s own university, UC Santa Barbara, has an Asian chancellor (Henry Yang), but never mind.
In September 2012, even as he warned of financial ruin if voters didn’t approve Governor Jerry Brown’s $6 billion tax hike in November, Yudof announced yet another diversity boondoggle. The university was embarking on the nation’s largest-ever survey of “campus climate,” at a cost of $662,000 (enough to cover four years of tuition for more than a dozen undergraduates). The system-wide climate survey was, of course, drearily repetitive. Individual campus “climate councils” had been conducting “climate checks” for years, and an existing UC survey already asked each undergrad if he felt that his racial and ethnic group was “respected on campus.”9 Nevertheless, with the university facing a possible quarter-billion-dollar cut in state funding, Yudof and his legions of diversity councils and work groups felt that now was the moment to act on the 2007 recommendations of the little-remembered “Regents’ Study Group on University Diversity (Work Team on Campus Climate)” and of the “Staff Diversity Council.”
If UC One were launching a half-million-dollar survey of the incidence of bubonic plague, say, among its students, faculty, and staff, it would have assembled enough instances of infection to justify the survey. It might even have formulated a testable hypothesis regarding the main vectors of infection. But UC Two’s campus-climate rhetoric promiscuously invoked the need for “safe spaces” and havens from “risk” without ever identifying either the actual victims of its unsafe climates or their tormentors. These unsavory individuals must be out there, of course; otherwise, UC’s “marginalized and vulnerable populations,” as the president’s office described them, wouldn’t require such costly interventions. But who were these people, and where did they hide? Further, the presence of such bigots meant that UC’s hiring and admissions policies must be seriously flawed. What did UC intend to do about them?
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UC Two’s pressures on the curriculum are almost as constant as the growth of the diversity bureaucracy. Consider Berkeley’s sole curricular requirement. The campus’s administration and faculty can think of only one thing that all its undergraduates need to know in order to have received a world-class education: how racial and ethnic groups interact in America. Every undergraduate must take a course that addresses “theoretical or analytical issues relevant to understanding race, culture, and ethnicity in American society” and that takes “substantial account of groups drawn from at least three of the following: African Americans, indigenous peoples of the United States, Asian Americans, Chicano/Latino Americans, and European Americans.”10 In decades past, “progressives” would have grouped Americans in quite different categories, such as labor, capital, and landowners, or bankers, farmers, and railroad owners. Historians might have suggested Northerners, Southerners, and Westerners, or city dwellers, suburbanites, and rural residents. Might the interplay of inventors, entrepreneurs, and industrialists, say, or of scientists, architects, and patrons, be as fruitful a way of looking at American life as the distribution of skin color? Not in UC Two.
Naturally, this “American Cultures” requirement, taught in courses across approximately fifty departments and programs, is run by Berkeley’s ever-expanding Division of Equity and Inclusion. Berkeley students have been able to fulfill the requirement with such blatantly politicized courses as “Gender, Race, Nation, and Health,” offered by the gender and women’s studies department, which provides students with “feminist perspectives on health care disparities” while considering gender “in dynamic interaction with race, ethnicity, sexuality, immigration status, religion, nation, age, and disability.”11 Another possibility is “Lives of Struggle: Minorities in a Majority Culture,” from the African American studies department, which examines “the many forms that the struggle of minorities can assume.” It is a given that to be a member of one of the course’s favored “three minority aggregates”—“African-Americans, Asian-Americans (so called), and Chicano/Latino-Americans”—means having to struggle against the oppressive white majority.
Earlier in the decade, the
UCLA administration and a group of faculty restarted a campaign to require all undergraduates to take a set of courses explicitly dedicated to group identity. UCLA’s existing “general-education” smorgasbord, from which students must select a number of courses in order to graduate, already contained plenty of the narcissistic identity and resentment offerings so dear to UC Two, such as “Critical Perspectives on Trauma, Gender, and Power” and “Anthropology of Gender Variance Across Cultures from Third Gender to Transgender.” Yet that menu did not sufficiently guarantee exposure to race-based thinking to satisfy the UC Two power structure.
So even though UCLA’s faculty had previously rejected a “diversity” general-education requirement in 2005, the administration and its faculty allies simply repackaged it under a new title, with an updated rationale. The new requirement would give meaning, they said, to that ponderous Eighth Principle of Community that the Chancellor’s Advisory Group on Diversity had just approved. After the usual profligate expenditure of committee time, the faculty voted down the repackaged diversity requirement in May 2012, recognizing the burdens that any new general-education mandate puts on both students and faculty. UCLA chancellor Gene Block issued a lachrymose rebuke: “I’m deeply disappointed that the proposed new general education requirement was not approved and I’m especially disappointed for the many students who worked with such passion to make the case for a change in curriculum.” As a consolation prize to UC Two, Block ordered his administrators to “bring about the intentions of the failed GE requirement proposal” anyway, in the words of UCLA’s student-affairs vice chancellor.12 And sure enough, in February 2013, the community-programs office rolled out a series of initiatives to provide “spaces for dialogue and education about diversity.” Block kept pushing, however, and in April 2015, the faculty finally voted in the diversity requirement. Jerry Kang crowed that it would be an opportunity to “critically examine … how difference, inequality and community function.”13
UC Two captured the admissions process long ago. As we saw in chapters 2 and 3, this has brought in many underqualified students.
Their presence generates another huge chunk of UC Two’s ever-expanding bureaucracy, which devotes extensive resources to supporting “diverse” students as they try to complete their degrees. Before becoming Sonoma State University president in 2017, Judy Sakaki had long served as student services administrator in the UC system. She traveled a career path typical of the “support-services” administrator, with very little traditional academic expertise or teaching experience. She started as an outreach and retention counselor in the Educational Opportunity Program at California State University, Hayward, and then became special assistant to the president for educational equity. She moved to UC Davis as vice chancellor of the division of student affairs and eventually landed in the UC president’s office, where, according to her official biography, she pursued her decades-long involvement in “issues of access and equity.” As vice president for student affairs, she earned more than $255,000 a year.
Sakaki has dozens of counterparts on individual campuses. UCLA’s Division of Undergraduate Education, with nary a professor in sight, is a typical support-services accretion, funded to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year and stuffed with “retention” specialists and initiatives for “advancing student engagement in diversity.” (The division, which labels itself UCLA’s “campus-wide advocate for undergraduate education,” hosts nondiversity-related programs as well, intended to demonstrate that the university really does care about undergraduate education, despite complaints that its main interest lies in nabbing faculty research grants.) It is now assumed that being the first member of your family to go to college requires a bureaucracy to see you through, even though thousands of beneficiaries of the first GI Bill managed to graduate without any contact from a specially dedicated associate vice provost. So did the children of Eastern European Jews who flooded into the City College of New York in the 1930s and 1940s. So do the children of Chinese laborers today who get science degrees both in China and abroad. Yet UC Two and other colleges have molded a construct, the “first-generation college student,” and declared it in need of services—though it is simply a surrogate for a “student admitted with uncompetitive scores from a family culture with low social capital.”
It’s unclear how much these retention bureaucracies actually accomplish. What has improved minority graduation rates, though UC Two refuses to admit it, is Prop. 209.
The costs of all these bureaucratic functions add up. From 1998 to 2009, as the UC student population grew 33 percent and tenure-track faculty grew 25 percent, the number of senior administrators grew 125 percent, according to the Committee on Planning and Budget of UC’s Academic Senate.14 The ratio of senior managers to professors climbed from 1 to 2.1 to near-parity of 1 to 1.1. University officials argue that hospitals and research functions drive such administrative expansion. But the rate of growth of nonmedical-center administrators was also 125 percent, and more senior professionals were added outside the research and grants-management area than inside it.
It’s true that UC isn’t wholly responsible for its own engorgement, since government officials continue to impose frivolous mandates that produce more red tape. During the first term of his second stint as governor, for example, Jerry Brown signed a bill requiring the university to provide the opportunity for students, staff, and faculty to announce their sexual orientation and “gender identity” on all UC forms. A hurricane of committee meetings ensued to develop the proper compliance procedures.
But most of UC’s bureaucratic bulk is self-generated. And expanding its own bureaucracy isn’t the only way that UC Two likes to spend money. After becoming UC San Diego chancellor in 2012, Pradeep Khosla announced that every employee would get two hours of paid leave to celebrate California Native American Day, a gesture that, under the most conservative salary assumptions, could cost well over $1 million. Around the same time, the vice provost of UCLA’s four ethnic studies departments announced that five professors would get paid leave to pursue “transformative interdisciplinary research” regarding “intersectional exchanges and cultural fusion”—even as the loss of faculty through attrition was resulting in more crowded classrooms and fewer course offerings. (Yes, UCLA’s ethnic studies departments boast their own vice provost; the position may be UC Two’s most stunning sinecure.) UCLA’s Center for Labor Research and Education even tried to launch a “National Dream University,” an online school exclusively for illegal aliens, where they would become involved in “social justice movements” and learn about labor organizing. Only after negative publicity from conservative media outlets did UC cancel the program, while leaving open the possibility of reconstituting it in the future. The Center continues to fund, in its words, an “immigrant rights movement grounded in justice, equity, inclusion, and power,” however, by underwriting political activism by illegal aliens and their allies.
UC Two’s constant accretion of trivialities makes it difficult to take its leaders’ recurrent protestations of penury seriously. In January 2018, UC president Janet Napolitano complained that the nearly $9 billion in state funding that UC was slated to receive in the 2018–2019 budget was inadequate. This objection did not sit well with legislators, since a 2017 state audit had revealed that Napolitano’s Office of the President had squirreled away $175 million in previously undisclosed funds by overestimating the cost of programs and keeping the surplus. Napolitano claimed that only $38 million of the fund was for truly discretionary spending and that in any case, the fund was intended to cover crucial matters such as increased support for illegal-alien students, a Sexual Violence and Sexual Assault Task Force (which received nearly $9 million from 2014 to 2016), and a presence in Mexico.
Napolitano’s predecessor Yudof regularly cited the addition of a tenth campus to justify UC’s need for more taxpayer support. Indeed, for an institution not known for its celebrations of capitalism, the university shows a robber-baron-like appet
ite for growth. The system announced plans to add a fifth law school back in 2006, notwithstanding abundant evidence that California’s twenty-five existing law schools were generating more than enough lawyers to meet any conceivable future demand. Initial rationalizations for the new law school focused on its planned location—at UC Riverside, in the less affluent and allegedly law-school-deficient Inland Empire east of Los Angeles. But even that insufficient justification evaporated when movers and shakers in Orange County persuaded the regents to site the school at well-endowed UC Irvine, next door to wealthy Newport Beach. Following the opening of Irvine’s law school in 2009, California’s glut of lawyers and law schools has only worsened.
UC’s tenth campus, UC Merced, which opened in 2005, is just as emblematic of the system’s reflexive expansion, which is driven by politics and what former regent Ward Connerly calls “crony academics.” Hispanic advocates and legislators pushed the idea that a costly research university in California’s agricultural Central Valley was an ethnic entitlement—notwithstanding the fact that UC’s existing nine research institutions were already more than the state’s GDP or population could justify, according to Steve Weiner, the former executive director of the Accrediting Commission for Senior Colleges and Universities. And now that the Merced campus exists, UC’s socialist ethos requires redistributing scarce resources to it from the flagship campuses, in pursuit of the chimerical goal of raising it to the caliber of Berkeley, UCLA, or UC San Diego.
Smaller-scale construction projects continue as well. UC Irvine’s business school got an opulent new home in 2015, though its older facility—an arcaded sandstone bungalow nestled among eucalypti—was perfectly serviceable. The new building boasts white-noise cancellation technology, as well as Apple TV and iPads in every classroom. Like the new law school and the new UC campus, this doesn’t paint a portrait of a university starved for funds.