HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The University of California is cutting back on many things, but not useless diversity programs. “California’s budget crisis has reduced the University of California to near-penury, claim its spokesmen. ‘Our campuses and the UC Office of the President already have cut to the bone,’ the university system’s vice president for budget and capital resources warned earlier this month, in advance of this week’s meeting of the university’s regents. Well, not exactly to the bone. Even as UC campuses jettison entire degree programs and lose faculty to competing universities, one fiefdom has remained virtually sacrosanct: the diversity machine. Not only have diversity sinecures been protected from budget cuts, their numbers are actually growing.”

It’s a religion.