Heather Mac Donald On The Two UC Berkeleys
Heather Mac Donald writes in the WSJ about the rise of Multiculti U -- how the budget-strapped University of California squanders millions on mindless diversity programs.

UC One, a serious university system centered on the sciences (though with representatives throughout the disciplines) and still characterized by rigorous meritocratic standards; and UC Two, a profoundly unserious institution dedicated to the all-consuming crusade against phantom racism and sexism that goes by the name of "diversity." Unlike Berkeley Two in Kerr's Day, UC Two reaches to the topmost echelon of the university, where it poses a real threat to the integrity of its high-achieving counterpart.

It's impossible to overstate the extent to which the diversity ideology has encroached upon UC's collective psyche and mission. No administrator, no regent, no academic dean or chair can open his mouth for long without professing fealty to diversity. It is the one constant in every university endeavor; it impinges on hiring, distorts the curriculum, and sucks up vast amounts of faculty time and taxpayer resources. The university's budget problems have not touched it. In September 2012, for instance, as the university system faced the threat of another $250 million in state funding cuts on top of the $1 billion lost since 2007, UC San Diego hired its first vice chancellor for equity, diversity, and inclusion. This new diversocrat would pull in a starting salary of $250,000, plus a relocation allowance of $60,000, a temporary housing allowance of $13,500, and the reimbursement of all moving expenses. (A pricey but appropriately "diverse" female-owned executive search firm had found this latest diversity accretion.) In May 2011, UCLA named a professional bureaucrat with a master's degree in student-affairs administration as its first assistant dean for "campus climate," tasked with "maintaining the campus as a safe, welcoming, respectful place," in the words of UCLA's assistant vice chancellor and dean of students. In December 2010, UC San Francisco appointed its first vice chancellor of diversity and outreach--with a starting salary of $270,000--to create a "diverse and inclusive environment," announced UC San Francisco chancellor Susan Desmond-Hellmann. Each of these new posts is wildly redundant with the armies of diversity functionaries already larding UC's bloated bureaucracy.

UC Two's worldview rests on the belief that certain racial and ethnic groups face ongoing bias, both in America and throughout the university. In 2010, UCLA encapsulated this conviction in a "Principle of Community" (one of eight) approved by the Chancellor's Advisory Group on Diversity (since renamed the UCLA Council on Diversity and Inclusion, in the usual churn of rebranding to which such bodies are subject). Principle Eight reads: "We acknowledge that modern societies carry historical and divisive biases based on race, ethnicity, gender, age, disability, sexual orientation and religion, and we seek to promote awareness and understanding through education and research and to mediate and resolve conflicts that arise from these biases in our communities."

The idea that a salient--if not the most salient--feature of "modern societies" is their "divisive biases" is ludicrously unhistorical. No culture has been more blandly indifferent than modern Western society to the individual and group characteristics that can still lead to death and warfare elsewhere. There is also no place that more actively celebrates the characteristics that still handicap people outside the West than the modern American campus. Yet when UC Two's administrators and professors look around their domains, they see a landscape riven by the discrimination that it is their duty to extirpate.

Check out how they are forced to twist the hiring process:

Thus it was that UC San Diego's electrical and computer engineering department found itself facing a mandate from campus administrators to hire a fourth female professor in early 2012. The possibility of a new hire had opened up--a rare opportunity in the current budget climate--and after winnowing down hundreds of applicants, the department put forward its top candidates for on-campus interviews. Scandalously, all were male. Word came down from on high that a female applicant who hadn't even been close to making the initial cut must be interviewed. She was duly brought to campus for an interview, but she got mediocre reviews. The powers-that-be then spoke again: her candidacy must be brought to a departmental vote. In an unprecedented assertion of secrecy, the department chair refused to disclose the vote's outcome and insisted on a second ballot. After that second vote, the authorities finally gave up and dropped her candidacy. Both vote counts remain secret.

An electrical and computer engineering professor explains what was at stake. "We pride ourselves on being the best," he says. "The faculty know that absolute ranking is critical. No one had ever considered this woman a star." You would think that UC's administrators would value this fierce desire for excellence, especially in a time of limited resources. Thanks to its commitment to hiring only "the best," San Diego's electrical and computer engineering department has made leading contributions to circuit design, digital coding, and information theory.

...For more than a decade, the federal government has used its grant-making power to demand color- and gender-driven hiring in the sciences. UC One's passion for discovery and learning will fuel it for a long time yet, but it will continue to be weakened severely by UC Two.