By Matt Rooney | The Save Jersey Blog
New Jersey taxpayers pay a LOT of money to subsidize far-left behavior at Rutgers University. “Shit ton” would be more accurate but we try to keep Save Jersey a PG environment to the fullest extent possible for a website that covers the likes of Jim McGreevey and Bob Menendez.
Not surprisingly, despite this overly-generous public investment, Rutgers continues to flounder under poor leadership, resulting in not just another 2.3% tuition hike but also an S&P credit downgrade. Sound familiar? It should. Future legislators are on campus as I write this, learning how to spend themselves into a hole – and try to tax (or in this case, tuition-hike) – their way out instead of making hard, smart decisions. God help us.
In any event, none of the adults are learning from their mistakes by failing to make cuts, and spend money more responsibly, particularly in the wake of the “unfunded mandate” that is the UMDNJ merger.
President Robert Barchi blasted out an e-mail to the university list serve on Tuesday evening announcing a brand new diversity (!) initiative, headed-up by the brand new Orwellian-sounding “University-wide Diversity and Inclusion Office,” with an expensive twist:
Should an academic unit select a faculty candidate who increases the diversity of that unit, as broadly defined above, the unit will be eligible to receive fifty percent of that individual’s salary for three years, as well as additional funds to support mentoring and retention activities.”
Something tells me that hiring, for example, your Blogger-in-Chief to teach a law or politics class isn’t included in the “broad definition.”
Does this sound like a university that just got chastised by S&P to you?
You can check out the e-mail full text below the fold. I won’t even get into the ridiculousness of the ideology of “diversity” in this post, Save Jerseyans, other than to point out the obvious, something I’ve said many times before on this site: Rutgers’s priorities are screwed up. Hopelessly.
And speaking as both a New Jersey taxpayer and an alumnus of the school of law, I’m sick and tired of helping its leadership avoid tough decision-making, and engage in bizarre, expensive social experiments, through the enabling power of our tax dollars.
_____
Members of the Rutgers Community:
As part of the restructuring of Rutgers University occasioned by the
integration of the former University of Medicine and Dentistry of New
Jersey (UMDNJ), we are creating a University-wide Diversity and
Inclusion Office, headed by Senior Vice President Barbara Lee. In
addition, this fall we are launching a University-wide faculty diversity
hiring initiative.Diversity and inclusion are a key foundational element of the
University’s Strategic Plan. Although we have been extraordinarily
successful in attracting and retaining a diverse student body, the
University has been less successful in hiring and retaining diverse
faculty. An earlier program focused on increasing diverse faculty hires
had some success, but the program ended several years ago. This new
program will focus on creating a diverse recruitment pool, hiring
excellent faculty, and mentoring and retaining those faculty by
providing scholarly and career support, particularly for untenured faculty.In our goal to enhance faculty diversity, we are defining diversity very
broadly. Diversity may include, but is not limited to, gender,
ethnicity, race, culture, national origin, or other personal or
professional characteristics that are either unrepresented or
underrepresented in the particular department or unit of intended hire.This definition of diversity thus has “inclusion” as a critical and
literal component, in that the inclusion of a diversity of individuals,
groups, and points of view will be stressed in faculty recruitment and
retention, as opposed to the privileging of a particular group or groups
over others. In order to be supported, such diverse or inclusive hires
will have to demonstrably enhance the academic unit’s scholarly and
teaching excellence.The initiative will focus on ensuring that academic units participating
in this program will develop an inclusive pool of qualified candidates
after developing a recruitment plan that is informed by data on the
demographic mix of the national or international labor market for that
discipline. The plan will also include a determination of whether any
demographic group is underrepresented within the existing unit faculty
in relation to its representation in the pool of qualified potential
candidates. Units proposing faculty hires will be required to post the
position description in outlets that are likely to be accessed by
diverse potential applicants, including national and international
higher education publications, disciplinary listservs, minority group
academic listservs, etc. Search committees will be required to reach
out to graduate programs, federal agencies (such as NIH), and/or
nonprofit organizations and foundations that collect names and contact
information for diverse candidates.Should an academic unit select a faculty candidate who increases the
diversity of that unit, as broadly defined above, the unit will be
eligible to receive fifty percent of that individual’s salary for three
years, as well as additional funds to support mentoring and retention
activities.Funds for this salary support will be available for diverse faculty
hiring at Rutgers University–Camden, Rutgers University–Newark, Rutgers
University–New Brunswick, and RBHS. Questions about the program may be
directed to SVP Lee at svpaa@oldqueens.rutgers.edu.Sincerely,
Robert Barchi
_______
Obsessed with diversity to the point of suicide.
The sadder part is that I’m no longer surprised.
Was the goal to see how many times the word diversity could be used in one email?
Barchi is only there to bring a merger together as directed by the part time Governor that needed to keep Sir George Norcross happy. This is what you get with people who are absolute dumpster fires and have never led a major institution.
You do realize NJ public schools receive the least amount of funding per student right? You may not agree with a lot of things that go on there, (I certainly don’t), but if Rutgers received less funding, they might as well be a private school. They are one of the most expensive in state public schools because they get such little funding from the government. Do a little research. Go ahead and compare Rutgers in state tuition to the other state schools in the country. There is a reason why it’s so expensive. It’s because of lack of funding.
http://www.nj.com/education/2015/06/nj_last_in_federal_funding_per_college_student_rep.html
No, it’s because they waste money on entire departments like this. Rutgers has the most diverse student population in America, so why do they have office after office on “diversity?”
Waste. Of. Money.
Thanks Bush for creating this ISIS by invading a country that had nothing to do with 9/11.