American colleges and universities have been gripped by the diversity mania for decades, but presidents always seem to find reasons to do more. Want to quiet the furious academic Left for a while? Just come up with a new and even more costly plan to make the campus more “inclusive.”
That is what has happened at the University of Michigan and in today’s Martin Center article, a U of M student, Amory Manuel, writes about the follies in Ann Arbor.
U of M’s president Mark Schlissel declared that he wanted a “vibrant climate of inclusiveness” at the campus. “Whether [the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) plan] will accomplish that is questionable” Manuel writes, “but the plan certainly succeeded in adding new positions within the administration, including the vice provost for equity, inclusion, and academic affairs. According to UM Salary, the University of Michigan’s open salary database, the provost earned $385,000 during the 2016–2017 school year.” Ah yes — a bigger “diversity” bureaucracy. That will surely attack all the “exclusion” on campus.
Also, the school will now have a “Multicultural Leadership Council.” Its function — to spread the Progressive gospel and cement itself into the school’s apparatus. Manuel explains,
A major theme of the DEI plan thus emerges: to perpetuate the existence of our school administration’s diversity industry. Committees are formed to produce unreadable diversity pamphlets; these committees recommend more committees, and finally, the diversity provost makes sure everyone gets paid.
Using other people’s money to get power — the standard M.O. of the Left.
The plan (which has a price tag of $85 million) also features mandatory diversity workshops to cleanse U of M of all the horrid racism that abounds there.
Manuel doesn’t believe there is any racial problem on campus — a few bits of graffiti here and there are most likely hoaxes — and suggests that the best approach for the administration would be to tell everyone to calm down and get back to studying. Of course, that won’t happen. Manuel concludes,
Calls for “justice” on campus will not cease. President Schlissel, in his awkward bind, will feel compelled to increase appeasement expenses in the future. There are hardly any examples of American campus activists bribed into contentment; the Evergreen State fiasco, on the other hand, demonstrates just how far progressive activists will go once appeasement begins. Michigan should stop now.