Tuesday’s now-infamous affirmative-action bake sale at UC-Berkeley is unlikely to dissuade Gov. Jerry Brown from signing a bill to reintroduce race and gender preferences into the state’s public universities. Yet it has clarifiied just what Berkeley’s vice chancellor for equity and diversity does for his whopping $194,000-a-year salary.
Berkeley’s College Republicans wanted their “Increase Diversity Bake Sale” to serve as a counterweight to a phone bank erected on the campus’s main thoroughfare, where students could call Brown and urge him to sign the pro-preference bill. Like other satirical campus bake sales over the last decade, the College Republicans’ event priced items according to the race and gender of the customer: charging whites $2 for a pastry, Latinos $1 and blacks 75 cents, while women got a 25-cent discount.
And, like previous such bake sales, it triggered a storm of ludicrously clueless outrage.
Student Devonte Jackson told the San Francisco Chronicle that the sale was inappropriate and hurtful, “attacking underrepresented communities by reducing their communities to a cheaply priced good.” The president of Berkeley’s student government explained to CNN that the bake sale “humorized and mocked the struggles of people of color on this campus.”
Capping all this off, the student senate passed an emergency resolution condemning “the use of discrimination whether it is in satire or in seriousness by any student group.”
Gibor Basri, Berkeley’s vice chancellor for equity and diversity, could have pointed out that the bake sale was obviously a parody of racial and gender preferences, not a criticism of students themselves — and that such political theater belongs to Berkeley’s once-revered tradition of free speech.
Instead, Basri chose to stoke the melodramatic self-pity of today’s undergraduates: “A lot of students, especially students of color, read [the bake sale] as placing a higher value on white students,” he told the New York Times.
Basri, in other words, obeyed the ironclad script for all such minor revolts in the otherwise unbroken reign of campus political correctness. That script requires treating the delusional claims of hyperventilating undergrads with utter seriousness.
Students in the ever-growing roster of official campus victim groups flatter themselves that by attending what is in fact the most caring, protective, and opportunity-rich institution in the history of the world, they are braving unspeakable threats to their ego and even to their physical safety.
Designation as an oppressed minority is a highly valued status. Thus, even though the bake sale was said to brutally demean certain categories of customers, a Gender and Women’s Studies major held a sign during Tuesday’s protest of the bake sale decrying the exclusion of “queer people” from the discount structure.
Reality check: No adult on today’s campuses wishes for anything more than to see females and minority students succeed to the utmost of their capacities. And the overwhelming majority of students are indifferent to race and gender and simply want to get along.
It’s hard not to attribute bad faith to Basri for his stupendously misguided interpretation of the bake sale as “placing a higher value on white students.” If he’s really incapable of understanding such a simple satire, he doesn’t belong in an institution of higher learning — or at least what used to pass for one.
One might think that a college administrator’s mission would be to work for enlightenment, diffusing whatever tensions may arise from ignorance and misunderstanding. Basri has, after all, been granted vast taxpayer largesse, commanding an expensive office of 17 staffers. But (like all such campus diversocrats) he is in fact a partisan in the crusade for unending identity politics, stoking tensions rather than calming them.
The University of California is already wasting millions of dollars on these ever-expanding diversity sinecures. If Gov. Brown signs the bill into law (likely violating the state’s constitution), the diversity bureaucracy and its political supporters will have ensured the diversocracy’s future growth — as students admitted for their race, not their academic qualifications, provide the pretext for yet more vice chancellors for equity and diversity.
Heather Mac Donald is a contributing editor of City Journal and the John M. Olin Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. From city-journal.org