Richard Spencer

March 18, 2009

Some things never change:

The college diversity racket is immune to economic downturns. Harvard University has announced its latest diversity dean for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Any rational budget analyst would mark this deanship for the ax, since it overlaps with the senior vice provost for faculty development and diversity?and with the cochairpersonships of the Standing Committee on Women. Yet it would appear that no financial meltdown, no matter how great, can shake academia?s manic and irrational pursuit of a creature as imaginary as a unicorn: an even remotely qualified faculty made up of proportional numbers of blacks, Hispanics, and women.

One recognizes the author immediately?Heather Mac Donald. If the Slim Times had any balls, it would have hired her, and not the Pro-Life social democrat Ross Douthat, as its new conservative critic. Heather?s a New Yorker, and she?s fearless when it comes to the politically incorrect. 

Anyway, when I was at college and grad school, I witnessed lots of right-wing high jinks on campus, much of it sponsored by The Leadership Institute: ?Catch an Illegal Immigrant Day,? ?Affirmative Action Bake Sales,? etc. etc.  I always wanted to organize a campus prank entitled ?Kidnap a Diversity Counselor Month.? Now, when I say ?kidnap,? I?m not recommending violence. To the contrary, the diversity counselors would be put up at a nice hotel and given access to food, facilities, and movies on-demand. (Obviously, one would need a rich sponsor to pull this one off.) And I imagine that with the promise of even more comforts then the diversocrats already receive as university employees, we?d get volunteers.

And of course, it wouldn’t be hard to find any participants, as professional managers of diversity are in bounteous supply on every campus in the country. When I was a PhD student at Duke during the lacrosse hoax days, I was at first amazed at the speed and alacrity at which only days after the event hit the news, public statements were published and major committees formed to combat racism and ?whiteness? on campus. But then I realized that, alongside the race & gender-obsessed humanities faculty, there were actually 12 full-time employees in the university bureaucracy whose sole job it was to obsess about this stuff.

Back to the prank. It would, of course, be a little experiment. We?d try to determine exactly what terrible, horrible things might happen if the officers of Institutional Equity vanished for a month. Would diversity on campus collapse? Would ?hate? run wild? Would anyone notice anything amiss whatsoever? Let’s see! 

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With the credit crunch on, there?s been a major contraction in student loans, and thus a major contraction in universities? incomes. One would hope that a happy outcome of all this would be the forcing of universities to shed all their bureaucratic parasites and obnoxious organizations and institutes; something like ?the Office of Institutional Equity,? it would seem, could only exist during the Bubble years, not the down times. Well, it’s now becoming clear that the diversocrats will be the last ones to be let go. ?Education? has become the central locus of social engineering in America, and the school presidents would rather their institutions go bankrupt than give up on their social mission.