BRING TO MADISON THE SMACK THEY BROUGHT TO PRINCETON.

That is, Princeton's president made a ritual confession of institutional racism, whatever that is, intended to evoke the Proper Sentiments among faculty and donors, and the Department of Education asked for its money back.

Now it's time to make an example of Wisconsin.  Retired economics professor and New Frontier staffer W. Lee Hansen continues to take issue with the misappropriation of state property going on under the rubric of diversity.

Consider first [current chancellor (holding tenure in economics) Rebecca Blank’s] concern about the need for a more welcoming campus climate. She fails to recognize that this problem arises in part because non-minority students resent the preferential treatment given to minority student applicants during admission. This resentment is compounded by the many minority student programs created to assist these students after enrollment. Non-minority students and their families are not fooled by the supposed neutrality of “holistic” admission standards. The widely used term “targeted minorities” is a dead giveaway, and its use is demeaning as well.

Chancellor Blank also provides no convincing evidence that any of her proposed “commitments” are able to deal effectively with these larger social problems, or that the “training” will be effective in promoting a more welcoming campus climate. She refers to a list of fifty briefly described, ongoing minority student programs, labeled as “diversity and inclusion” programs. But what effect have any of these programs had in making the UW-Madison campus a more welcoming place for minority students? If any of them have been successful, we surely would have heard about that by now.

I suppose it's always possible to argue that the pilot programs were not successful because they were not funded adequately, but then we hear that stuff out of Amtrak at the same time that they antagonize sleeping car passengers.  But I digress.  Perhaps not so far as the Diversity Weenies have in Madison. "Among them are the following: Replace the Lincoln Monument in front of Bascom Hall with someone who stands for “justice for all,” adopt the Teaching Assistant plan for resuming instruction, defund and then abolish the UW police force, see that all student demands from 1969 to 2020 are met, implement permanent funding to support student organizations that serve marginalized groups, create an organized framework to respond to acts of oppression, and improve the support system for marginalized students."  You mean the troops aren't home from Vietnam, the mathematics research for the Army hasn't been moved, and Dow is still making napalm?  And that Leo Burt, should he still be alive, be told to come out of hiding as all is forgiven?

And here the professor (with whom I have interacted on matters involving public finance research and economic education) says the quiet part out loud.

Not so incidentally, this grant on its face is in direct violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits such discrimination, as would the $2 million scholarship proposal by UW-Madison student athletes, a plan that restricts eligibility to “students of color”. These are but specific instances of such violation—one might legitimately indict the entire diversity program on such a ground.

Thus, either the university administration are using money to violate the civil rights acts, or they are confessing to ongoing violations of the civil rights acts. Is somebody on education secretary Betsy DeVos's staff paying attention?