How Social justice became a luxury good for the elite. Jonathan Kay writes:
The University of Michigan alone has nearly 100 full-time diversity-related administrative workers, more than a quarter of whom earned in excess of $100,000 in 2018. And at nearby Michigan State University, the newly appointed diversity director will earn a $315,000 salary. These people aren’t getting hired to tell students to toughen up and hit the books. Just the opposite: Their livelihoods depend on upholding the idea that navigating campus life is a difficult struggle, punctuated frequently by invisible forms of bigotry whose negative effects can be managed only through the intervention of a professionalized corps of trained diversity officers.
As part of the larger trend by which leadership at colleges and universities has increasingly been taken over by professional business managers and other corporatized agents, these diversity officers have effectively become customer-service agents. And their work performance is graded according to the same crowdsourced indices of satisfaction that govern businesses on Tripadvisor.
[Jonathan Kay, "Workers vs. Wokeness: Recognizing Campus Social Justice as a Luxury Good,” Quillette, November 17]
