 CJ via Instapundit
[CityJournal] As American unemployment mounted by the millions in March and April, the dance of the college diversity deans kept up its usual brisk pace. On April 1, Harvard University announced that its acting associate dean for inclusion and belonging was moving on to Denison University. But the Harvard associate deanship will not be vacant for long. On May 1, the current head of diversity, equity, and inclusion at New York University’s Abu Dhabi campus will step into the Harvard position, to direct the Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion team within the Dean of Students Office; the Office of BGLTQ Student Life; the Office of Diversity Education and Support; the College’s Title IX Office; the Women’s Center; and the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations.
Everyone knows large, centrally planned consolidated school districts are the answer.
Elsewhere, campus diversocrats enjoyed similarly enviable mobility while the rest of the country was shutting down. The vice president for inclusion and diversity at George Mason University will become chief diversity officer at the University of South Carolina at Columbia on June 15. The former occupant of the South Carolina position decamped to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on March 15 to serve as its community and equity officer. On March 1, a former associate vice president for diversity, equity, and inclusion at the University of Iowa became associate vice president for inclusive excellence at Georgia Southern University. The first diversity, equity, and inclusion librarian at the University of Florida assumed her position in February.
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Many college presidents are terrified that the coronavirus pandemic will devastate their schools’ finances and enrollment. Anyone who cares about a revival of serious learning can only hope that they are right.
Higher education today resembles a massive Ponzi scheme. Colleges desperately recruit ever more marginal students who stand little chance of graduating. Before their inevitable withdrawal, those students’ tuition dollars fuel the growth of the bureaucracy, which creates the need to get an even larger pool of likely dropouts through the door to fund the latest round of administrative expansion. Administrative positions at colleges and universities grew at ten times the rate of tenured faculty positions from 1993 to 2009, according to academic consulting firm ABC Insights. By the 2013 school year, there were slightly more campus administrators nationwide than faculty; spending on the bureaucracy was equal to spending on all educational functions, including faculty. Tuition rose to cover those bureaucratic expenses, regardless of whether families could afford to pay it. Tuition at private four-year colleges grew 250 percent from 1982 to 2012, while the median family income rose about 18 percent, adjusted for inflation, according to ABC Insights. Since the 2008 recession, tuition at four-year public colleges rose 35 percent.
The coming higher-ed crisis would, in an ideal world, take out the student-services bureaucracy‐that dizzying edifice of associate vice chancellors for student engagement and assistant vice presidents for student development‐starting with its most destructive component: the diversocrats. Their job is founded on a patently false proposition: that colleges are filled with racists and sexists who impede the advancement of females, blacks, and Hispanics. To the contrary, virtually every college today is trying to admit, hire, and promote as many females, blacks, and Hispanics as possible. Belonging to those identity categories confers a large advantage on the academic job market and in admissions. Nevertheless, the diversity bureaucracy spends its days devising new ways to promote the culture of victimhood, at the cost of millions of dollars in student loans and private tuition.
...Conservatively, half of American college students should not be in college at all; they are neither intellectually prepared for nor temperamentally inclined toward postsecondary book learning. Yet the dominant narrative in our culture today is that the only way to be successful and self-respecting is to have a college degree.
...Left-wing professors who scorn "neoliberalism" (academic-speak for capitalism) blind themselves to the fact that their salaries depend on a ruthless economic battle for consumers. And anyone who still thinks of college as a place defined by a passion for knowledge and beauty is equally out of touch.
...And now, the coronavirus threatens tuition dollars, government support, and alumni giving. Some high school seniors are reconsidering their plans to start college this fall‐roughly 12 percent to 15 percent, depending on the poll. Some say they want to stay closer to home; some are concerned about their family’s finances. A third of seniors in one poll were considering less expensive institutions. A whole branch of enrollment consulting is devoted to rustling up foreign students, since they usually pay full tuition. That sector is especially at risk, including Chinese students who may have a harder time getting a student visa and who may fear difficulties in returning home.
Already-enrolled students have been sent packing and told to hook up their laptops for distance learning. Almost no college is considering a tuition rebate, which implies that online learning should be valued at the same rate as an on-campus class. Students and their parents may start to ask why they should pay astronomical fees for a campus experience if they can get the same instruction over the web. 
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