ABC’s Chancellors for Equity and Inclusion, 1985-1988

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I have recently written on the moral implications of growing tuition costs and the resulting student loan debt (here). One factor I did not explore in depth was the reason for rising tuition costs, which, adjusted for inflation, have more than doubled since the 1980s. No doubt, there are many factors that have contributed to this, but George F. Will of the Boston Herald points to one possible cause: bureaucratic sprawl under the auspices of promoting diversity. Despite rising costs for students, Will writes,

UCSD found money to create a Vice Chancellorship for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion. UC Davis has a Diversity Trainers Institute under an Administrator of Diversity Education, who presumably coordinates with the Cross-Cultural Center. It also has: a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Resource Center; a Sexual Harassment Education Program; a Diversity Program Coordinator; an Early Resolution Discrimination Coordinator; and Cross-Cultural Competency Certificates in “Understanding Diversity and Social Justice.” California’s budget crisis has not prevented UC San Francisco from creating a new Vice Chancellor for Diversity and Outreach to supplement UCSF’s Office of Affirmative Action, Equal Opportunity and Diversity, and the Diversity Learning Center (which teaches how to e “a Diversity Change Agent”), and the Center for LGBT Health and Equity, and the Office of Sexual Harassment Prevention & Resolution, and the Chancellor’s Advisory Committees on Diversity, and on Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Issues, and on the Status of Women.

Personally, I think that fair treatment of all and appreciation of cultural heritage is a good thing, but do we really need more and more administrators to ensure it? Indeed, Will notes, “In 2009 the base salary of UC Berkeley’s Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion was $194,000, almost four times that of starting assistant professors. And by 2006, academic administrators outnumbered faculty.” Surely there must be a more efficient (not to mention ethical) way.

After all, Millennials like myself do not need help valuing diversity. They already do, likely due more to G.I. Joe, Captain Planet, Care Bears, Power Rangers (actually full of rather embarrassing stereotypes), and Star Trek than to any administrative programs. We have been culturally saturated with it since childhood and do not need more debt and less education to achieve it, thank you very much.

Indeed, there is nothing more fortable and evidently insecure to me than an organization that is always trying to be more “diverse.” These are precisely the organizations to which I would be ashamed to bring any friends of minority groups; it sends the ing message that they are not there because of their value to me as friends and persons, but rather in order that they can be a statistic for an organization over-worried about how diverse they are perceived to be. The United States has a legal system whereby issues of hate crimes and sexual harassment, for example, can be dealt with, so why do schools need to spend so much (passing the cost on to students) to try to do for us what Saturday morning cartoons, after school programs, student led organizations, and the criminal justice system have already done? I suppose, at the very least, they are providing jobs for the growing number of minority-studies majors, but that economic advantage, upon closer scrutiny, is non-existent. Paying people for wholly unproductive work does not produce wealth, it saps it.

What we need are better and less costly educations; we are getting the opposite. And this, of es at the great cost of lost opportunity: double the cost, double the loans, double the debt, more of our resources going simply to paying interest, not to mention paying for dumbed-down educations—an economic and moral failing caused in part by trying to fix a problem that the Care Bears already had covered.