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Heather Mac Donald says the Occupy folks should protest against one of the real campus calamities – the diversity pukes that populate American academia.
As protesters festively (oops! I mean “heroically”) rally on college quads across California in the wake of the gratuitous macing of a dozen Occupy Wall Street wannabes at University of California–Davis last Friday, 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.
It is to be expected that students will be immaculately ignorant of the matters they protest, but it takes a special type of gall for a bureaucrat such as Basri to shed crocodile tears over California’s tuition increases, which had been a seeming target of OWS-inspired protest before the brutish UC Davis pepper-spray incident provided a more mediagenic reason to cut classes. OWS-ers are theatrically calling for a general strike of the University of California for this coming Monday.
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. They include a Diversity Trainers Institute, staffed by Davis’s Administrator of Diversity Education; the Director of Faculty Relations and Development in Academic Personnel; the Director of the UC Davis Cross-Cultural Center; the Director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Resource Center; an Education Specialist with the UC Davis Sexual Harassment Education Program; an Academic Enrichment Coordinator with the UC Davis Department of Academic Preparation Programs; and the Diversity Program Coordinator and Early Resolution Discrimination Coordinator with the Office of Campus Community Relations. The Diversity Trainers Institute recruits “a cadre of individuals who will serve as diversity trainers/educators,” a function that would seem largely superfluous, given that the Associate Executive Vice Chancellor for Campus Community Relations already offers a Diversity Education Series that grants Understanding Diversity Certificates in “Unpacking Oppression” and Cross-Cultural Competency Certificates in “Understanding Diversity and Social Justice.” …
And Debra Saunders says the OWS group should hope they’re not treated like those opposed to abortion.
For all their whining about the “police state” and the city’s failure to respect their “First Amendment rights,” Occupy Oakland activists have managed to flout the law with regular impunity. Somehow demonstrators have managed to turn Frank Ogawa Plaza into a tent stew and shut down parts of the city in a so-called general strike Nov. 2, and still they think they’re victims who have been deprived of their free speech rights.
But if they want to see what it’s really like to fight City Hall, they should talk to Walter Hoye. Hoye’s offense was to walk up to people with a sign that said, “Jesus loves you and your baby. Let us help.” For that he was arrested twice in 2008 and sentenced to 30 days in jail.
The difference here is that Hoye wasn’t peddling some amorphous grievances that might be addressed with higher taxes and more government. Hoye’s sin – pardon the expression – is that he opposed abortion. …
Janet Daley writing in The Telegraph, UK, has advice for British pols – “Want to fix things in the economy, try doing less.”
… Instead of finding new, ingenious ways to use your money that might give a brief appearance of nibbling at the edges of problems such as unemployment and property prices, the state needs to withdraw from hyperactive job-creation and mortgage-lending, and become much more vigilant in ensuring competition in the productive parts of the economy. The deregulation of the 1980s and 1990s would be coming in for much less criticism now if it had not funked the matter of competitiveness: nationalised industries too often gave way to private monopolies and cartels. If people are taxed less and fleeced less, they will be happy to stimulate the economy in the good old-fashioned way.
As David Cameron used to say before he took fright: we need a smaller state that does less and spends less. Mr Osborne used to say that, too, in terms that were at least as stark as any Tory backbencher. Maybe a generation of Treasury officials who came of age under the Brown Terror got to him with the electrodes. Or else, his role as election campaign manager for the Conservatives is conflicting with what should be his better judgment as head of the nation’s finances. After all, it should be his function as Chancellor to tell his party’s political strategist that voter-appeasing initiatives are unaffordable, and that economic reality must take precedence. Presumably, Mr Osborne would have had to carry on that argument with himself. (If he did, we know which side won.)
There is an urgent need now to rethink the whole relationship between government and populace while there is still the possibility of discussion. In Britain, Europe and America, the questions are remarkably similar. Can a free-market economy support an infinitely growing state? We will have to choose, quite soon, between liberty and the “security” of a society in which government controls the levers of economic life. Washington politicians are getting a terrible drubbing for failing to resolve their implacable differences over the size of the state (to the extent that they are unable to agree a federal budget). The US national debate may seem rough and ready to European ears – but at least they are engaging in the real argument.
Jennifer Rubin posts on the Gingrich balloon.
Many conservatives who know better have constructed an odd justification in the 2012 presidential primary for supporting the man who makes Bill Clinton look like a model of impulse control. It goes like this: Newt Gingrich did a magnificent job getting the GOP back into the House majority and defeating HillaryCare 17 years ago. His acerbic wit and mental dexterity would make for a hugely entertaining debate with President Obama. Therefore, he should be our nominee.
This is silliness on stilts. The American people — the ones who will vote in the general election — don’t give a darn about 1994. Moreover, the huge ideological inconsistencies, the character flaws and the ever-present danger of self-immolation make Gingrich probably the worst possible nominee to go up against the search-and-destroy Obama reelection campaign. And should he, by some miracle, get to the Oval Office, do we really imagine the presidency would be any different than his speakership (disorganized, frenetic, disloyal to conservatives, gaffe-prone and all about HIM)? …
Ann Coulter has Gingrich memories too. She closes by endorsing Romney.
So now, apparently, we have to go through the cycle of the media pushing Newt Gingrich. This is going to be fantastic.
In addition to having an affair in the middle of Clinton’s impeachment; apologizing to Jesse Jackson on behalf of J.C. Watts – one of two black Republicans then in Congress –- for having criticized “poverty pimps,” and then inviting Jackson to a State of the Union address; cutting a global warming commercial with Nancy Pelosi; supporting George Soros’ candidate Dede Scozzafava in a congressional special election; appearing in public with the Rev. Al Sharpton to promote nonspecific education reform; and calling Paul Ryan’s plan to save Social Security “right-wing social engineering,” we found out this week that Gingrich was a recipient of Freddie Mac political money. …
… Although Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — the institutions most responsible for the nation’s current financial crisis — were almost entirely Democratic cash cows, they managed to dirty up enough Republicans to make it seem like bipartisan corruption.
Democrats sucked hundreds of millions of dollars out of these institutions: Franklin Raines, $90 million; Jamie Gorelick, $26.4 million; Jim Johnson, $20 million.
By contrast, Republicans came cheap. For the amazingly good price of only $300,000 apiece, Fannie and Freddie bought the good will of former Reps. Vin Weber, R-Minn., Susan Molinari, R-N.Y., and Newt Gingrich, R-Ga.* Former Sen. Alfonse D’Amato, R-N.Y., was even cheaper at $240,000.
[*Correction: After Gingrich admitted last week to receiving $300,000 from Freddie, we found out this week that it was actually closer to $1.6 million.] …
… Instead of sitting on our thumbs, wishing Ronald Reagan were around, or chasing the latest mechanical rabbit flashed by the media, conservatives ought to start rallying around Romney as the only Republican who has a shot at beating Obama. We’ll attack him when he’s president.
It’s fun to be a purist, but let’s put that on hold until Obama and his abominable health care plan are gone, please.
Kimberley Strassel gives us the back story on the government gripes against Gibson Guitar.
On a sweltering day in August, federal agents raided the Tennessee factories of the storied Gibson Guitar Corp. The suggestion was that Gibson had violated the Lacey Act—a federal law designed to protect wildlife—by importing certain India ebony. The company has vehemently denied that suggestion and has yet to be charged. It is instead living in a state of harassed legal limbo.
Which, let’s be clear, is exactly what its persecutors had planned all along. The untold story of Gibson is this: It was set up.
Most of the press coverage has implied that the company is the unfortunate victim of a well-meaning, if complicated, law. Stories note, in passing, that the Lacey Act was “expanded” in 2008, and that this has had “unintended consequences.” Given Washington’s reputation for ill-considered bills, this might make sense.
Only not in this case. The story here is about how a toxic alliance of ideological activists and trade protectionists deliberately set about creating a vague law, one designed to make an example out of companies (like Gibson) and thus chill imports—even legal ones. …