A Racialist Boondoggle

The following is an article published in The American Thinker:

By Thomas Lifson 8 30 06

The University of California, which has been raising tuition at an extraordinary pace for years, is throwing millions of dollars a year at a racialist boondoggle. The San Francisco Chronicle’s Matier and Ross report the creation of a new post:

...vice chancellor for equity and inclusion—a job that not only has an impressive title, but an equally impressive salary of between $182,000 and $282,000 a year.

Plus an office budget in excess of $4 million.

The mission is:

The goal isn’t so much to recruit more minorities but rather to ensure students, faculty and staff are “fully respected for their individuality and what they represent,” [UC Berkeley Chancellor] Birgeneau said.

Birgeneau said the aim is “to prize our diversity and learn from it and to appreciate people for being part of the whole but also for what they as individuals bring to Berkeley.” [....]

... “we decided we needed to create a new organizational structure which will look at issues of equity and inclusion holistically—that is, not just students, not just staff and not just faculty, but all, all together.”

This is startlingly illiterate, even incoherent. Translation: propaganda pap, thought control diversity training, hectoring, and thumb-on-the-scale preferences in hiring and promotion. And the effort is slated to grow:

The total $4.5 million budgeted for the new vice chancellor’s office might just be the start because, according to spokeswoman Janet Gilmore, the university “hopes to increase substantially the funding available to further equity and inclusion initiatives through fundraising.”

The whole edifice rests on doublespeak because the aim is to help certain groups at the expense of other groups. And nobody can tell the truth about it because it is both unpalatable and premised on a false picture of California’s and UC’s population [as well as illegal].

There is no majority population in California. Whites are a plurality, but they are under half of the population. So the euphemism “underrepresented minority” is employed. Falsely. You see, because Asian-heritage students excel at academics, they now outnumber whites at the top UC campuses. Caucasians account for a substantially smaller share of UC enrollment at the elite campuses than their share of the California population.

That means that whites are by definition an underrepresented minority! But you will never see UC including whites in the various schemes to benefit groups on the basis of race. Nor will they admit that the net effect of their efforts at racial engineering, should they succeed, would be to penalize hard-studying members of a racial minority.

California voters passed an initiative banning the state from preferences based on race. So the bureaucrats are forced to resort to nonsense language and stealth to implement their agenda. In the process, they damage the university, penalize those who work hardest to achieve, and waste time and [tax] money.

"...respected for their individuality..." At Berkeley? A true oxymoron.


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