There's also something way out-of-whack when the University of California Berkeley has a vice-chancellor with the title of "equity and inclusion." Last week, Cal announced an initiative to address what officials termed the under-representation of African-Americans among the student body, faculty and staff. This, in a place, that practiced affirmative action for years.
Cal's craziness may have been surpassed by the University of Tennessee where administrators decided to ban "he and she" in favor of made-up words to avoid hurting students' feelings. You cannot make this stuff up. That's how whacky the educrats have become—and in the South, yet. You might expect it on the left or right coast, but the South?
The outgoing chancellor in that position, Gibor Basri, cited the discussions about race starting with Ferguson, Missouri. Somehow, in the Ferguson discussion, the media tends to forget that not only did a Grand Jury of citizens find no charges to bring against the police officer that shot and killed the teen-aged Michael Brown, who was 18 and weighed more than 300 pounds—the federal Justice Department, under the hyper political Eric Holder, also found no evidence to bring charges.
According to the Bay Area News Group report, the black population of Berkeley has declined from 20 percent in 1980 to 10 percent in 2010 according to the U.S. Census Dept. data. Given that people have the freedom to choose where they live, so what?
Cal would do well to cross the Bay and ask Hoover Institution scholar Thomas Sowell what he recommends.
Sowell had a very telling interview with Kyle Peterson of the Wall Street Journal in the Sept. 5-6 edition. Sowell, who grew up in poverty in Harlem, recently turned 85 and is preparing another book.
Among the points he made is that he can never remember hearing gunshots while he grew up. He cited the highly competitive Stuyvesant High School where black enrollment has dropped to 1.2 percent versus 12 percent 33 years ago.
Sowell also said that as long as there is a federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, there always will be findings of discrimination. When was the last time any government agency went out of business because it had achieved its goals?
He also cited that since 1994 the poverty rate for black married couples has been in single digits—the striking decline in the intact black family (from 70 percent prior to the "Great Society" experiment to about 30 percent today—poverty rates particularly for single black moms have soared as has unemployment and black-on-black violence for teen-aged and 20-something black men.
