Let's do one more education-related post to keep the streak running. The Sunday SF Comicle section titled "Insight" provided a rare sliver of insight this week. I enjoy watching new words being created and this piece brought wider notice to the term "Pretendianism" to describe the act of faking your ethnic background to take advantage of ethnicity-driven hiring programs. The piece titled "Pretendianism too common in academia" asks the question: How do so many people with no Native ties get away with using a false heritage to infiltrate some of the most rarefied academic spaces in America?
I'll skip over the details of one Associate professor Elizabeth Hoover's gaming of the system because the article leaked an even more egregious practice at UC Berkeley that probably exists elsewhere in publicly funded academia. It's hardly news and it's quite profitable as the Other Elizabeth has been proving for more than a decade.
But deep in the article, this tidbit is revealed
Contrary to some reports, Hoover was not a “cluster hire,” the faculty member said, which is when several new faculty members identified as members of a minority or historically disadvantaged groups are brought aboard simultaneously — a method has been championed at UC Berkeley to make “an immediate and substantial impact far greater than a few isolated hires.”
Yikes! Is this a "cheaper by the dozen" approach? Let's not spend time and effort examining individuals' skill sets. We'll just hire a handful all at once that look the right way. One wonders if that tactic would survive the "shoe on the other foot" test? Is it any wonder that campuses are a mess? California taxpayers are not getting their money's worth, and the faculty lounge is the first place where the shades should be lifted and sunlight should shine. "Rarefied spaces" indeed.
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