The University of Massachusetts at Amherst is not a happy campus. Even the Chancellor, John Lombardi, laments a “pattern of balkanization that often results in a disconnection of students of color from the general campus community.”
The most recent set of problems derive from one of the ways “diversity” often plays out on campuses these days. A student running for in an election for speaker of the Student Government Association “had opposed a quota system that would have guaranteed a set number of senate seats for minority students.” In reply, a minority student group opposed the anti-quota candidate of racism, and he lost the election. Later, photos surfaced of the losing candidate and friends drinking beers by “a caricature of one of the leaders as a Ku Klux Klan grand wizard.”
“The students intended the caricature to represent a parody of the election campaign,” but the university predictably experienced a paroxysm of guilt-induced self- flagellation, followed by the creation of the mandatory commission to study how to improve “diversity” on campus.
The commission issued its report two weeks ago, and the recommendations, and response to them, were surprising only in the size of the “diversity tax” that will be required to pay for them.
The University of Massachusetts at Amherst will hire a new associate vice chancellor for student affairs and campus life and create a center for student development as part of a multitiered initiative to improve race relations and boost minority student achievement, according to a proposal outlined by Chancellor John V. Lombardi yesterday.
Lombardi’s draft initiative would cost more than $1 million. Of that, about $800,000 would come from a special chancellor’s tax, which would allow him to redirect money from the existing budgets of a broad range of university departments.
Lombardi’s proposal follows an 86-page report released two weeks ago by the Commission on Campus Diversity, an independent panel, which found that UMass-Amherst lacked centrally coordinated, diversity-building initiatives and at times failed to provide adequate academic advising for minority students. The panel also criticized the university for lacking a strategic plan to increase minority enrollment at a time when the numbers of minority students and staff are dropping.
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Lombardi’s plans include revamping undergraduate advising, increasing the number of minority students who participate in the university’s honors program and rewarding departments that succeed in hiring a more diverse faculty. He hopes to establish a mentor program for minority faculty and hire external consultants to work with staff on race issues.
The university would also hire two additional admissions officials who would concentrate on recruiting more students of color from high schools and community colleges. It may consider adding a diversity course required of all first-year students.
So, universities, who implicitly hold themselves up as the model the rest of society should emulate regarding the management of multiculturalism and “diversity,” must hire “external consultants” to help themselves deal with “race issues”!
Here’s some free advice — no “external consultant” required — on how “to boost the inclusion of minorities” and “to eliminate the pattern of balkanization that often results in a disconnection of students of color from the general campus community”: treat them just like everyone else.
UPDATE
I think Richard makes an excellent point in a comment below. “It’s no accident,” as we conspiracy theorists would say, that the American institution with the most highly refined sense of multicultural sensitivity and the most pervasive commitment to a whole panoply of racial preference programs, the American university, has become the leading hotbet of continuous racial strife.
By contrast, the arena with extensive racial interaction with the least amount of racial conflict is the sports arena, at all levels from professional down to pee wee. And second, I would guess, is the military. Again, “it is no accident” that it is in sport and in the military that individuals are more likely to be judged exclusively on their own abilities, with no deference to or discrimination against race. It is also important to note that both sports and the military emphasize co-operation and teamwork and common purpose.
Maybe everyone in American should be given a uniform.
Did you ever wonder why that bastion of Liberalism, the University, seems to have more problems with race than any other segment of society? Why is it that an organization that claims that it is dedicated to advancing the interest of minorities has so many problems? How can a university where 90% of the faculty is on the Left of the political spectrum be incapable of maintaining an environment that is friendly to minorities? Why, for example, if they see a problem with a lack of women and minorities on the faculty, can
Well, yes, many university types are hypocrites, but giving up one
More to the point, one’s performance in sports, and to a lesser extent in military service, is objectively verifiable. It’s not dependent on someone else’s subjective approval.
You catch the ball, or hit the target, or you don’t.
Teaching, and to a lesser extent learning, in academia are entirely judged by the subjective standards of others. Influencing one’s evaluator is easier than doing the work.
“Teaching, and to a lesser extent learning, in academia are entirely judged by the subjective standards of others. Influencing one’s evaluator is easier than doing the work.”
And they will fight you to the death to keep it that way, too. They don’t want any kind of objective evaluation of ability – afraid that everyone will find out that they don’t have any. That, pure and simple, is the driver behind the ‘teaching profession’s’ resistance to performance incentives.
I sort of recommend “Diversity” by Peter Wood. Sort of, because it could be 50 pages instead of 300, but he makes some excellent points.
He describes acedemia’s obsession with diversity, and how Balkanization creates a lack of diversity, and how false advertising creates false expectations for diversity, which gives students an excuse to call for … more diversity! Which is what the administrators wanted in the first place.
It is not the results of diversity that universities strive for. If it were, they would be measured, and schools would realize the positive aspects really don’t amount to a whole hell of a lot. It is the CALL for diversity which faculty and administrators love, because it makes them feel good.
Still, how could liberal Amherst have made it to 2005 without impossing a diversity tax already? Or is the key word “additional”, as in “two additional admissions officials”. I have an idea, hire 10 additional admissions officials, all of them minorities, and then brag about how you’ve just hired 10 new monities!
i’m a student at umass and was a member of the diversity commission. some comments:
first, the military and the world of athletics are poor choices for comparison. the diversity problem at universities exists in large part because it takes extensive preparation before one can start university, and students who start university are all over the place in terms of preparedness. american public schools are extremely uneven in terms of quality, and certain minority and poor populations tend to get a worse education than white and wealthier populations, with the result that it takes on average more talent and persistence for a black or hispanic or poor white person to get into college than a white or asian person from a middle or upper class background. if the door is opened to less prepared but equally or more able individuals, as it did to some extent in the past, then support programs are sometimes necessary to catch those students up.
i don’t think there are any such barriers in the worlds of the military or athletics. umass amherst had virtually no black or latino students before the diversity programs were put in place, and virtually no poor students before the GI bill. take away these programs, and you can expect a return to the status quo ante. on the other hand, blacks had to be kept out of sports like baseball by an affirmative policy of discrimination.
second, i agree that there’s stunning hypocrisy on the part of administrators, and that the perception that they are working towards diversity is more important to many of them than actually having a diverse university. the solution, however, is not to eliminate programs that support diversity, but to eliminate the hypocrisy and get diversity to be an actual priority for the university.
third, chancellor lombardi is working hard to *dismantle* these support structures and *decrease* the accessibility of the university. to that end, he is disregarding the diversity commission’s recommendations and destroying student government, which has in the past used its resources to hold the university accountable to its public mission. funding initiatives out of a “diversity tax” is a tactic designed to generate hostility toward the goal of an accessible university – no other university expenditure that i know of is funded by such a tax. his policies are extremely unpopular with students (over 90% of voters opposed his policies in a spring referendum) and affected staff. his ideology is privatization and corporatization of the university, and he reserves special contempt for the public mission of the university and for the notion of accountability. the result is a culture of secrecy and corruption at the upper levels of the administration, and a university population with very few underrepresented minorities, very few poor people, and virtually nobody from the intersection of those two categories.
finally, whatever you think of quotas in student senate (in the context of this university system, i support them), the “anti-quota” candidate did not lose (twice – he and some of his buddies engineered a cancellation of the first election) because of his stance on this issue, on which students are ambivalent at best. he lost because he was widely perceived as a toady for the administration with no apparent plans for improving student life, while his opponent came in with fresh ideas and plans, like a textbook rental system, and with a platform of integrity, student empowerment and the public mission.