Pepper-Spraying Taxpayers

National Review ^ | Heather Mac Donald

[ventanax5]

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.

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.

[Venturer]

OOOOh, OOOOh, my Daddy makes too much money tax him more, and I borrowed $100,000 dollars and can’t get a job, give me my loan for free.

Colleges need more money so they can teach basket-weaving to more of America’s elite.

[blueunicorn6]

American university students are the new sharecroppers.
“Bes be bowin’ and scrapin’ to ol massah university professor lessen he kick you off de land.”

[Eldon Tyrell]

Basket weaving is a trade.

These kids aren’t being taught anything near as valuable as basket weaving.

[Publius6961]

Perhaps what we should concentrate on is this idiot Basri and his crew of 17 as to what constitutes "higher education."

All students are created equal? No.
All College courses promote marketable skills? No.

Perhaps the educational-welfare complex should avtively make a distinction and subsidize real courses, that require real effort and a result in a marketable skill.

Otherwise we are just creating hundreds of thousands of additional welfare recipients who happen to have useless college degrees.

I'll leave it to the reader to make the endless list of useless college degrees or degrees that result in a negative enhancement on the National competitiveness and quality of life.

[neverdem]

bump and a diversity, equity & inclusion ping

[Carry_Okie]

The university credentialing system in its present form is an unnecessary, destructive, and hideously expensive dinosaur.

It doesn't have to be this way.