Every day I get up to 40 emails from different bureaucratic branches of my university that I delete without reading. Everybody I know in academia has the same experience. When I think about the enormous wasted work of all these people who keep creating and sending out flyers, brochures, notifications, lists, queries, quizzes, projects, plans, announcements, etc. that nobody even opens, let alone uses, I feel sad.
Obviously, the university doesn’t create these ridiculous bureaucratic departments because it’s fun to have them around. We are simply following the endless and endlessly stupid requirements of the federal and state regulators. That’s the same state, by the way, that hasn’t given us a broken dime worth of funding for a quite a while and is actually stealing the money we pay into our insurance program. We get to slash every academic program on campus to pay for the exploding cast of bureaucrats, their secretaries, and the secretaries of their secretaries.
The names of the offices that send out this useless stream of paperwork are very telling. Office for Promotion of Multiculturalism, Office for Diversity and Inclusion, Rape and Sexual Assault Prevention Office, Career Advancement Center, Spirituality Center, etc. It’s like a really crazy game we are all playing where we try to create the image of ourselves as multicultured, inclusive, spiritual, advanced, and diverse, as if that were something you become by creating reams of paperwork repeating the words “diversity,” “culture” and “spirituality.”
Clarissa's Blog 
I hardly ever getany e-mail from my university. My university e-mail address received one spam from some dodgy publisher today. That was the total sum of incoming e-mail for the day. For the week before that there are just a couple of e-mails from a colleague on another continent about a conference next year.
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I’m literally green with envy. Today, the server is acting up and is actually preventing me from deleting all this spam.
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You are becoming more and more conservative by the day! By the time we have a reasonable candidate (probably about 20 years til I run) you will vote Republican I can tell. 🙂 Liberals almost never admit there is crazy amounts of bureacracy and inefficiency in govt. mandated programs
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Given that most of these federal programs were imposed on us under President Bush, I wonder who it is who’s got to admit that this is a problem.
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“Office for Promotion of Multiculturalism, Office for Diversity and Inclusion, Rape and Sexual Assault Prevention Office, Career Advancement Center, Spirituality Center, etc.”
A majority of these were created between 2001 and 2009 due primarily to heavy pushing from the bush administration? If you have proof that would be interesting. If they were passed during that time i would think from 2005-2009 once the congress went democrat, but still HIGHLY doubt the majority of these and regulations for higher education were created during that time period.. .been around much longer
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The reality in American politics is that it’s virtually impossible to stop the growth of government programs, no matter which side is in power. Too many people benefit from any government program to make meaningful cuts politically feasible.
When Republicans talk about “cutting the size of government,” what they really mean is that they’ll TRY to reduce the rate of growth. When Democrats accuse the Republicans of “cutting programs,” they mean the Republicans aren’t letting the programs grow fast enough.
One big exception to this was welfare reform under Democrat Bill Clinton, after the huge Republican gains in the 1994 midterm election scared him to death. The last meaningful government cuts were in the Federal Budget Sequestration of 2013, and that law was never meant to go into effect — its intent was to SCARE members of Congress into passing specific budget legislation that would make its most draconian measures moot. (We all know how well that worked.)
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“The reality in American politics is that it’s virtually impossible to stop the growth of government programs, no matter which side is in power. Too many people benefit from any government program to make meaningful cuts politically feasible.”
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You could create some bingo cards with all of this and hand them out to others who are in on the game …
“Diversity … sensitivity … empowerment … creativity … culture … inclusion … advancement …”
I’VE GOT BINGO!
[after all, there absolutely has to be an academic version of the popular corporate game known as Buzzword Bullshit Bingo] 🙂
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