Education could learn a lot from manufacturing - Granite Grok

Education could learn a lot from manufacturing

Once again, it goes back to measurement – surprise, surprise (after the jump):

SHOT: We need more diversity because MORE ADMINISTRATION!!!!

Read through the official DEI materials and you soon feel overwhelmed by inspiring platitudes and glossy pictures of smiling minorities. As I noted in an earlier Michigan Review article, the administration has a nasty habit of hiding potentially controversial policy decisions deep in a matrix of feel-good fluff and pages of meaningless drivel, such as:

Your passion for making us better, your belief that all individuals deserve an equal opportunity to succeed and your unwavering dedication to the highest aspirations of our university.

Whether DEI will accomplish that is questionable, but the plan certainly succeeded in adding new positions within the administration, including the vice provost for equity, inclusion, and academic affairs. According to UM Salary, the University of Michigan’s open salary database, the provost earned $385,000 during the 2016-2017 school year.

Read the rest – if you have even a passing interest in SJW disruption in higher education, you’ll at least want to speed read through this.

Robert Sellers, who occupies this provost position, wrote an op-ed in the Michigan Daily last April defending those developments. Citing the importance of DEI’s “personal, professional, and educational benefits,” Sellers boasted of over 200 University of Michigan community members “who are devoting all or a portion of their professional lives to this work.” He didn’t say exactly what are the “historic and contemporary contributions” those staff members provide, that Michigan taxpayers now sponsor. . . .

A major theme of the DEI plan thus emerges: to perpetuate the existence of our school administration’s diversity industry. Committees are formed to produce unreadable diversity pamphlets; these committees recommend more committees, and finally, the diversity provost makes sure everyone gets paid.

CHASER: This is what you start to learn when you learn how to measure classes:

Mandatory diversity course not effective, prof discovers.

A professor at East Carolina University recently discovered that the diversity course she teaches isn’t actually “effective” in changing students’ racial or gender biases. Dr. Michele Stacey, who teaches criminal justice at ECU, assessed the efficacy of the school’s diversity course by surveying 288 criminal justice students’ attitudes towards women and minorities both before and after taking the course, publishing her findings in the latest issue of the Journal of Criminal Justice Education. . . .

After assessing the bias of students before and after the course—using prompts such as “a woman should worry less about their rights and more about becoming good wives and mothers” and “if blacks would only try harder they could be just as well off as whites”—Stacey found that the course hadn’t altered students’ attitudes towards race or gender.

What a concept – measuring before and after; obtaining a baseline and then a delta difference.  Whodda thunk THAT was needed, eh?  Kudoes to Stacey for stating the obvious – this SJW stuff, no matter the “good intentions (at best, indoctrination and reeducation a la Mao’s Red Guard at the worst), people won’t be “evolved” if they realize they’re being manipulated or will be made examples of.

Whether DEI will accomplish that is questionable” – it doesn’t matter if it is K-12 or college / graduate schools, if you don’t measure, you don’t know.  Or what seems to be the truth here, if you aren’t measuring, you’re hiding something else.

>