Here is a memo from a large academic department at the University of North Carolina:
Dear All,
I am completing our annual departmental diversity survey and need you to respond to me on three questions, if applicable.
1. Please list the most important conferences, events, seminars, symposia, or advising activities related to diversity that your unit provided in the Spring 2011, Fall 2011, or in Summer 2011.
2. Please provide up to five citations with full bibliographical information regarding research published during calendar year 2011 by faculty or students in your unit concerning issues of diversity.
3. Please provide information regarding important engagement activities during calendar year 2011 by faculty or students in your unit concerning issues of diversity that are not listed above.
Please email me your responses by Weds, January 25th.
Gosh, I don't work at that university, but I can answer the questions:
1. I attended the Chinese New Year event at the San Francisco Symphony in early 2011. Afterwards, I ate at an Italian restaurant (the Chinese restaurants were too crowded). Later that year, I attended Turandot at the opera. But you don't count Chinese or Italians under "diversity," do you? Well then, I frequented a Mexican restaurant and sat at the bar, where I was served by a hot lass who is half Vietnamese and half Jewish.
2. I don' have any faculty peers or students intelligent enough to write on issues of diversity, but the afore-mentioned barmaid has credit card receipts with my signature. Does that count as citations with full bibliographic information?
3. I am presently hustling the barmaid. If I succeed, would that count as a diversity engagement?
Of course, I have publications in science and engineering that have been cited by other professionals. But I see that those don't count.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseSaw nearly an identical memo one year at a Big Ten university. The department also tried to adopt a "diversity" policy for faculty and admissions that had such explicit quotas that even the Affirmative Action office agreed with me when I objected on the grounds that it was clearly illegal.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThis lunacy isn't confined just to colleges. It's creeping into the workplace.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abusecreeping in? H*ll, it flooded in years ago. I can remember a hiring meeting 25 years ago at which one of the reasons stated for offering a position to a mediocre person was "Well, she's a woman and she's black..."
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse1984.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseInstead of minorities earning a place at higher education or in the work place, libs want it to be a gift to satisfy their false sense of guilt.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWhy do the white Americans who cause and/or put up with this nonsense demand that they be seen as evil in their own home country?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThere's plenty of diversity to be found on and about Franklin St., UNC's main drag. But I once sat through a show there at Morehead Planetarium, all a-goggle at the 'son et lumière' overhead, but being informed by the narrator that the Druids built Stonehenge; so Chapel Hill's luster is dimmed in my eyes. (And that's not sour grapes: my brother clocked up two years there.)
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseHey, this is important stuff. The person who attended the most diversity conferences, published the most diversity research, and conducted the most engagement activities on issues of diversity will win the department's Stalin Prize in the Field of Diversity. The person with the fewest will be sent for diversity re-education at an Arctic labor camp.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe Iron Law of Academic Diversity: the more racially diverse a department, the more intellectually monolithic.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseCould I include in my report frequent postings to conservative sites like NRO? Or do they not mean THAT kind of diversity?
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