We Ought To Fire The Campus Diversity Personnel

At the University of North Dakota campus personnel are preparing for the new year by outlining their initiatives and goals.

“Associate Vice President for Diversity and Inclusion Sandra Mitchell said her office is focusing on campus climate,” reports Grand Forks Herald reporter Anna Burleson. “This includes looking at creating a strategic plan for diversity, a climate assessment and working with an American Indian Research Committee. A Diversity Advisory Council, which was part of creating Mitchell’s position in 2014, has been reassembled as well.”

I can’t imagine anything less useful for the University of North Dakota, and North Dakota in general, than the work Mitchell is doing. In fact, I would argue that Mitchell and her colleagues in the diversity industry are doing more harm than good.

[mks_pullquote align=”right” width=”300″ size=”24″ bg_color=”#ffffff” txt_color=”#000000″]…what has that growth in diversity bureaucracy bought us? Tolerant, peaceful campuses where differences of opinion can be respected and disagreement can happen without disagreeable behavior?[/mks_pullquote]

Their positions should be eliminated. Their departments should be removed from budgets.

The rise in campus diversity personnel has coincided with an overall problem with administrative bloat in academia. “In 1975, colleges employed one administrator for every eighty-four students and one professional staffer—admissions officers, information technology specialists, and the like—for every fifty students,” Johns Hopkins University political science professor Benjamin Ginsburg wrote in 2011. “By 2005, the administrator-to-student ratio had dropped to one administrator for every sixty-eight students while the ratio of professional staffers had dropped to one for every twenty-one students.”

Rapid growth in diversity personnel has been a big part of that boom in campus bureaucracy, as the Wall Street Journal has reported.

And what has that growth in diversity bureaucracy bought us? Tolerant, peaceful campuses where differences of opinion can be respected and disagreement can happen without disagreeable behavior?

Not at all. Campuses have become epicenters of hidebound ideology, complete with “safe spaces” where controversial and provocative speech may not take place. Campuses are a place where comedians feel the must self-censor. A couple of generations ago America’s campuses were home to a thriving free speech movement, an offshoot of various protests movements including organized opposition to the war in Vietnam.

Today there may not be an institution in America where speech is more restricted and regulated.

I don’t think it’s a stretch to tie this development to the rise in diversity personnel. These people are not on campus to balance freedom of thought and speech with an overall respectful campus atmosphere. They are our modern political officers, armed with bureaucratic authority to enforce a “social justice” ideology to the detriment of the campuses they work on.

So let’s get rid of them, and pass the savings on to students and parents who are struggling to pay singularly bloated higher education expenses.