Don’t bother to knock if you’re white-skinned and seeking to teach at Barnard College.
According to The College Fix, the women’s college, an adjunct of Columbia University, is deliberately hiring on a racial basis because of the “demonstrated benefits” of non-white faculty.
After a year of assiduous consideration, the Barnard College Task Force on Diversity and Inclusion has just released its draft recommendations this week. Their aim is to better the “representation, inclusion, and social justice” in the classroom and on campus.
How to improve representation? Barnard will institute an affirmative action plan that will add “10 new faculty members from underrepresented groups in 5 years.”
The task force claims that “diverse student bodies and diverse faculties” lead to “better learning outcomes and campus climate, [and] enhanced support for underrepresented students and faculty.”
To oversee the new world order at Barnard, the school will hire a new new position of chief diversity officer, someone who will “coordinate” existing diversity officers.
The task force recommends mandatory social justice workshops for all and more academic support for racial minorities and expects this initiative to be world-changing and to “increase the representation of students, faculty, and staff from historically underrepresented and socially distinctive backgrounds,” while creating a “commitment that values diversity.”
Along with mandatory social justice round-tables, students and staff can savor workshops on “inclusion and equity” that are guaranteed to generate “cultural competence with respect to race, ethnicity, gender, class, disability, sexuality, religion, and intersectionality.”
The task force offers scarce details on how everybody on campus will be coerced to attend this ambitious schedule of social engineering sessions, just noting that everyone “will be expected to participate.” After indoctrination, there will be activities at the newly-created Center for Academic Success and Excellence — but only for “students of color, first generation and low-income students.”
All this is supposed to flower by 2020, but there are few recommendations on how to pay the estimated $400 million bill. The school is already in the midst of one fundraising effort that is about 30 percent short of its goal, so the task force suggests another “targeted fundraising effort” be considered.
The task force will encounter college trustees at their annual retreat this March. The task force plans to tell the trustees that a “small number of recommendations” must be implemented immediately.
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