How to Be More Diverse

~ Clarissa

Once again, my alma mater is doing something dumb – assed.

Yale has decided to become more diverse, and as you can imagine, manufactured diversity always ends up looking ugly. The university will spend $50 million over 5 years to hire. . . ten visiting professors.

For those who are not in academia: the title of Visiting Professor sounds cool but all it means is that a scholar is expected to uproot her or his entire life every single year to flit from one part of the country to another without any hope of a real job.

I have met a professor, for instance, who is Native American and who has already helped half a dozen universities  (including mine) to meet their diversity requirement by hiring her for such a position. What this sort of professional instability does to her life and her scholarship interests no one. The woman is simply passed around from one school to another as some sort of a token that allows a bunch of bureaucrats at every one of these schools to tick off a diversity box in a report and forget all about it.

All of this turns out to be quite harmful to the scholars who happen to be black, Native American, or visibly disabled* because they end up being dragged around like exhibits in a show of fake diversity.

Real diversity, of course, can only be created by doing the exact opposite.

* These are the identity categories that are currently in demand by bureaucrats.

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Published by Clarissa

13 thoughts on “How to Be More Diverse”

  1. One suggestion for real diversity: credits from Yale should be offered to students at the Gateway community college, and vice-versa.

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        1. People who graduate with a PhD in this country are often in their late twenties (sometimes, early thirties) and have only taken a handful of courses in their research discipline. Trying to predict which one of these budding scholars will actually end up producing scholarship that is significant enough to place one at Yale (or Harvard, or Princeton) is a waste of time.

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  3. My own alma mater has gone a step further and has online a form you can fill out if a student or professor says something that isn’t politically correct and sent it to the office of diversity to squeal on them. You know the place, Clarissa, they advertise themselves as the Harvard of the Midwest.

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    1. “a form you can fill out if a student or professor says something that isn’t politically correct and sent it to the office of diversity to squeal on them”

      • Seriously? God, insanity spreads and multiplies. It is so pathetic that we have to bend over backwards to please these idiot bureaucrats who are too stupid to do anything but tick off boxes on forms and questionnaires.

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  4. Dumb question: What’s the difference between a visiting professor and an adjunct professor? The contract length?

    One year is basically a blink for complex jobs. If this is to benefit students, it can’t help anyone who actually develops a working relationship with the professor, because in a year, the professor has moved on.

    Does it really cost $1 million to hire a professor for a year? How much of that is just search committees and publicity? It doesn’t make sense when we keep hearing stories of professors living in garrets, dying of consumption and eating freegan dumpster food at the Chronicle (exaggeration).

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    1. These are not dumb questions. The system is complex and confusing.

      “What’s the difference between a visiting professor and an adjunct professor?”

      • To put it bluntly, a Visiting Professor has a future in academia as a serious colleague and potentially tenure-track material. An adjunct has pretty much been discarded by the system. Aspiring academics: DO NOT ACCEPT ADJUNCT POSITIONS. If nothing else is available, just get out and find a non-academic job. That’s what I would have done.

      “If this is to benefit students, it can’t help anyone who actually develops a working relationship with the professor, because in a year, the professor has moved on.”

      • Exactly. These visiting professors are not assigned graduate students to supervise and don’t take part in any service opportunities or collective research projects. They exist on the margins of all departmental and university activities. I was a VP for one year and it’s OK as a stop-gap but not as something you are stuck doing forever.

      “Does it really cost $1 million to hire a professor for a year?”

      • No, of course not. At Yale, the salary would be around $60-65,000. Which is not that much given that New Haven is quite expensive, especially in terms of the rent. The rest of the funding will be eaten up by meaningless “events”, conferences, meetings, paperwork, etc. Sadly, at Yale very little money ends up invested into actual education.

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  6. “For those who are not in academia: the title of Visiting Professor sounds cool but all it means is that a scholar is expected to uproot her or his entire life every single year to flit from one part of the country to another without any hope of a real job.”

    A Visiting Professor, as I understand the term, is someone who already has a tenured job at one university who is spending a year or two at a different institution.

    What you are describing sounds more like a Visiting Assistant Professor position. In my department, a Visiting Assistant Professor position is for two years, with possible renewal for a third year.

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