Is Our Children Learning?

The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.

Is Our Children Learning?
“Meghan McCain: Bachmann Is ‘Just More Smarter’ Than Palin”–headline, DailyCaller.com, Dec. 1

Selling ‘Diversity’
Remember the pepper spray incident at the University of California, Davis, which was supposed to spark a revolution against the police? Neither do we, but last week the Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald used it as a news peg for a National Review Online piece taking aim at a favorite target of hers. As she notes, the clash with university police started out with a protest against skyrocketing tuition:

UC Berkeley’s Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion declared that the rising tuition at California’s public universities is giving him “heartburn.” It should, since Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion Gibor Basri and his fellow diversity bureaucrats are a large cause of those skyrocketing college fees, not just in California but nationally. . . .

Basri commands a staff of 17, allegedly all required to make sure that fanatically left-wing UC Berkeley is sufficiently attuned to the values of “diversity” and “inclusion”; his 2009 base pay of $194,000 was nearly four times that of starting assistant professors. Basri was given responsibility for a $4.5 million slice of Berkeley’s vast diversity bureaucracy when he became the school’s first Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion in 2007; since then, the programs under his control have undoubtedly weathered the recession far more comfortably than mere academic endeavors.

UC Berkeley’s diversity apparatus, which spreads far beyond the office of the VC for E and I, is utterly typical. For the last three decades, colleges have added more and more tuition-busting bureaucratic fat; since 2006, full-time administrators have outnumbered faculty nationally. UC Davis, for example, whose modest OWS movement has been happily energized by the conceit that the campus is a police state, offers the usual menu of diversity effluvia under the auspices of an Associate Executive Vice Chancellor for Campus Community Relations. A flow chart of Linnaean complexity would be needed to accurately map all the activities overseen by the AEVC for CCR.

Mac Donald’s next two sentences take 140 words to list eight different Davis diversity divisions. She goes on to enumerate similar programs at UC’s San Francisco and San Diego campuses and to cite a few at Harvard and Yale.

This “diversity bureaucracy” is unquestionably a worthy target of scorn. It is, as Mac Donald suggests, fundamentally parasitic, producing nothing of value to the taxpayers, students and parents who foot the bills. Resources wasted on this nonsense are not spent on actual education–or, for that matter, on other vital government services or investment in the real economy.

But to read Mac Donald’s writings on the subject, you’d think the burgeoning diversity bureaucracy was nothing more than a patronage machine or an ideological vanity project. Actually, it is central to the business model of contemporary higher education, and that is why institutions like the University of California prioritize it even at a time of fiscal distress.

Mac Donald seems to adhere to the old-fashioned idea that the purpose of a university is education. It’s a worthy ideal, and of course learning goes on at universities. But in today’s world, education is not the primary business of the higher-ed industry. The main “product” that institutions like UC Davis are selling is credentials–job-hunting licenses.

In some cases–say, a degree in nursing or engineering–the credential signifies an education in specialized professional skills. But if a student has a degree in English or feminist basket-weaving, he might have cruised through school (in the latter case, almost certainly did) taking dumbed-down courses and learning little of value.

But the credential is still worth something even if the education isn’t. As we argued in 2007, a college degree is a certificate of basic intelligence. Since 1971, civil rights laws have prohibited employers from administering intelligence tests, which were found to have a “disparate impact” on minority candidates. Colleges, however, rely heavily on such tests–the SAT and others–in deciding whom to admit.

Thus for corporate employers considering applicants to entry-level jobs, a college degree, and the relative prestige of the institution granting it, serves as a rough proxy for an intelligence test. It’s also an expensive proxy, but the cost is borne by the prospective employees and the taxpayers, not the employer.

Employers would be in trouble, however, if the courts were to hold that the requirement for a college degree has a racially disparate impact. That’s why “diversity” is so important to keep the whole credentialing process going–and it is why in 2003, when the Supreme Court considered the constitutionality of racial preferences at public universities, 65 Fortune 500 companies filed a friend-of-the-court brief asking that the justices affirm it.

This also explains the particular adiposity of California universities’ diversity bureaucracies. The admissions departments of California’s public universities, unlike those in most other states, do not discriminate on the basis of race. Race-based preferences were banned by both the university regents and the voters in 1996. In order to keep their credential marketable–to avoid an employer’s risk of a disparate-impact suit for preferentially hiring UC graduates–the university system has redoubled its efforts to achieve “diversity” by other means.

American employers are stuck with the disparate-impact standard, which Congress codified into law in the Civil Rights Act of 1991, and it seems unlikely that the political climate will soon be hospitable to reforms of civil rights laws.

On the other hand, we’ve argued that it’s quite possible the Supreme Court will overturn Grutter v. Bollinger, the atrociously reasoned 2003 decision permitting racial discrimination in college admissions. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports the justices are considering whether to take a case from Texas that would give them the opportunity to do so. If they don’t, they may have another opportunity with the Michigan case we wrote about in July.

If the court overturns Grutter, the likely result will be the fattening of diversity bureaucracies at higher-ed institutions nationwide. Perhaps in due course the whole system will collapse under its own weight.

For more “Best of the Web” click here and look for the “Best of the Web Today” link in the middle column below “Today’s Columnists.”