No wonder kids are coming out of college uneducated - universities measure themselves on racial goals...

... and not, you know, teaching stuff.

“I’ve said before and I’ll say it again, that we as a faculty and staff and student body, as an administration, if we 10 years from now are as white as we are today, we will have failed as a university,” said Bruce Shepard, president of WWU, in a 2012 address.

Tolerance - The moment between breathing out one orthodoxy and breathing in another

Diversity training for a non-diverse workforce.

You have always been very kind to me, Prof. Kantrowitz, so it pains me to ask you this, but is this really what the History Department thinks of me? Is this what you think of me? I am not sure who selected the readings or crafted the itinerary for the diversity session, but, as they must have done so with the full sanction of the History Department, one can only conclude that the Department agrees with such wild accusations, and supports them. Am I to understand that this is how the white people who work in this Department are viewed? If so, I cannot help but wonder why in the world the Department hired any of us in the first place. Would not anyone be better?

There is one further issue. At the end of yesterday’s diversity “re-education,” we were told that our next session would include a presentation on “Trans Students”. At that coming session, according to the handout we were given, we will learn how to let students ‘choose their own pronouns’, how to correct other students who mistakenly use the wrong pronouns, and how to ask people which pronouns they prefer (“I use the pronouns he/him/his. I want to make sure I address you correctly. What pronouns do you use?”). Also on the agenda for next week are “important trans struggles, as well as those of the intersexed and other gender-variant communities,” “stand[ing] up to the rules of gender,” and a very helpful glossary of related terms and acronyms, to wit: “Trans”: for those who “identify along the gender-variant spectrum,” and “Genderqueer”: “for those who consider their gender outside the binary gender system”. I hasten to reiterate that I am quoting from diversity handouts; I am not making any of this up.

Please allow me to be quite frank. My job, which I love, is to teach students Japanese history. This week, for example, I have been busy explaining the intricacies of the Genpei War (1180-1185), during which time Japan underwent a transition from an earlier, imperial-rule system under regents and cloistered emperors to a medieval, feudal system run by warriors and estate managers. It is an honor and a great joy to teach students the history of Japan. I take my job very seriously, and I look forward to coming to work each day.
It is most certainly not my job, though, to cheer along anyone, student or otherwise, in their psychological confusion. I am not in graduate school to learn how to encourage poor souls in their sexual experimentation, nor am I receiving generous stipends of taxpayer monies from the good people of the Great State of Wisconsin to play along with fantasies or accommodate public cross-dressing. To all and sundry alike I explicate, as best I can, such things as the clash between the Taira and the Minamoto, the rise of the Kamakura shogunate, and the decline of the imperial house in twelfth-century Japan. Everyone is welcome in my classroom, but, whether directly or indirectly, I will not implicate myself in my students’ fetishes, whatever those might be. What they do on their own time is their business; I will not be a party to it. I am exercising my right here to say, “Enough is enough.” One grows used to being thought a snarling racist–after all, others’ opinions are not my affair–but one draws the line at assisting students in their private proclivities. That is a bridge too far, and one that I, at least, will not cross.

I regret that this leaves us in an awkward situation. After having been accused of virulent racism and, now, assured that I will next learn how to parse the taxonomy of “Genderqueers”, I am afraid that I will disappoint those who expect me to attend any further diversity sessions. When a Virginia-based research firm came to campus a couple of years ago to present findings from their study of campus diversity, then-Diversity Officer Damon Williams sent a gaggle of shouting, sign-waving undergraduates to the meeting, disrupting the proceedings so badly that the meeting was cancelled. In a final break with such so-called “diversity”, I will not be storming your office or shouting into a megaphone outside your window. Instead, I respectfully inform you hereby that I am disinclined to join in any more mandatory radicalism. I have, thank God, many more important things to do. I also request that diversity training be made optional for all TAs, effective immediately. In my humble opinion, neither the Department nor the university has any right to subject anyone to such intellectual tyranny.

Here's one answer to my question about why it is that, in spite of the fact that we pour more money into education than thirty years ago, we have fewer classes and few educational options for our best students.... ...the money is being poured into politically correct BS that favors the liberal agenda. D'uh. From the City Journal:

The University of California, San Diego has done it again. Last year, it announced the creation of a new diversity sinecure: a vice chancellor for equity, diversity, and inclusion. Campus leaders established this post even as state budget cuts resulted in the loss of star scientists to competing universities, as humanities classes and degree programs were eliminated to save money, and as tuition continued its nearly 75 percent, five-year rise. The new vice chancellorship was wildly redundant with UCSD’s already-existing diversity infrastructure. As the campus itself acknowledges: “UC San Diego currently has many active diversity programs and initiatives.” No kidding. A partial list of those “active diversity programs and initiatives” may be accessed here. Now UCSD has filled the position and announced the new vice chancellor’s salary. Linda Greene, a diversity bureaucrat and law professor from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, will pull in $250,000 a year in regular salary, but that’s just the beginning: she’ll receive both a relocation allowance of $60,000 and 100 percent reimbursement of all moving expenses, a temporary housing allowance of $13,500, two fully paid house-hunting trips for two to the San Diego area, and reimbursement for all business visits to the campus before her start date in January 2013. (By comparison, an internationally known expert in opto-electronics in UCSD’s engineering school, whose recent work has focused on cancer nanotechnology, received a little over $150,000 in salary from UCSD in 2011, according to state databases.) The UCSD press office did not respond to a request for the amount the university paid the “women-owned executive search firm with a diverse consulting team” it used to find Greene.

But, hey, let's raise taxes on the greedy 1% - which we all know will eventually trickle down to everyone - because we need to pay liberal/leftist apparatchiks more money so they can kick it back to keeping the Democrats in power so the Democrats can create more liberal/leftist sinecures. It's simple: no more money until they stop wasting the money they get.

File this under "Post-Modern Cognitive Dissonance" - "Diversity training doesn't extinguish prejudice. It promotes it."

Well, of course it does. We all know that. The purpose of diverstity training is to create the expectation of offense that justifies more diversity training.

Saying it, however, is very un-PC, but this article at CBS does say it:

"Diversity training doesn't extinguish prejudice. It promotes it," says Peter Bregman in Psychology Today. He's not alone in his belief. Walter Olson at Overlawyered.com has collected numerous articles detailing why diversity training doesn't actually make people more tolerant. In fact, it can open your company to lawsuits, as the Federal Aviation Administration found out way back in 1995.

Bregman reports:

A study of 829 companies over 31 years showed that diversity training had "no positive effects in the average workplace." Millions of dollars a year were spent on the training resulting in, well, nothing. Attitudes -- and the diversity of the organizations -- remained the same.

It gets worse. The researchers -- Frank Dobbin of Harvard, Alexandra Kalev of Berkeley, and Erin Kelly of the University of Minnesota -- concluded that "In firms where training is mandatory or emphasizes the threat of lawsuits, training actually has negative effects on management diversity."

You would think that we would have learned something over the years, and stopped doing ridiculous trainings where we try to come up with the proper thing to say for every possible scenario. That, of course, is impossible. Add to that the fact that people hate any kind of mandatory training that they don't see as applicable to their jobs, and you end up with a situation where people think that A.) As long as they follow the exact formula explained in the the training when those exact situations occur they are fine; and B.) Joking about the boring and irrelevant nature of the training is fine. You end up with disaster.

Phil Bowermaster follows up on this article:

I worked for a large telecom company back in the 90′s where they had a huge mandatory diversity (they called it “pluralism” back in those days) training effort. The main class had an exercise in which people wrote down every “fact” they could think of related to various ethnicities and religions and the two genders. These were written on huge post-it notes that were then stuck on to people representing the various groups. It was a great exercise. Seeing these people covered with these big sheets of paper — some saying good things about them; some, bad — really drove the point home that it’s almost impossible to value people as individuals if we insist on labeling them.

Later in the day the organizers of the training would try to get people to sign up for more advanced classes. I remember looking through the list an seeing a class entitled (and I’m not kidding, this is really what it was called) “White Male-ism.”

So I guess we have to label some people, after all.

Thus my first suggestion on how to make diversity training more effective: no double standards.

Same class, I remember we spent some time talking about the hidden sexism and racism in everyday speech. One of the things we were told to avoid saying was “rule of thumb.” According to the class, that expression comes from English common law, which said that it is permissible for a man to beat his wife with a stick as thick as his thumb, but no thicker.

So, the thinking went, anyone who uses the expression “rule of thumb” is essentially endorsing domestic violence. I actually spoke up at this point, protesting that people who had no idea about the origin of this phrase weren’t endorsing anything, and asked whether it really made sense to find offense where none was remotely intended.

At that stage I was granted the same pariah status that Suzanne Lucas and Peter Bergman are now enjoying.

Later I learned that there is no evidence linking the phrase “rule of thumb” to that appalling guideline about beating-stick circumference (which does have backing in a couple of U. S. cases, but which doesn’t appear to show up anywhere in the Common Law.)

So there’s no reason to be offended by the phrase “rule of thumb.” However, the About.com article linked in the previous paragraph suggests we should avoid using it because some people might be offended by it. And how would they have come to be offended by it? Probably from something they learned in diversity training.

So my second modest suggestion for diversity training: don’t invent new ways for people to be offended.

This video brings together the themes of Leftist intolerance, narrow-mindedness, inability to engage in rational discussion and hypocrisy that we've explored in the last several months.

Doug Wilson is heckled by Diversity activists on a university campus. The best part of this is Wilson's comments after the de rigeur clown act leaves the building.