The far Left rules most of our colleges and universities, especially in California, where new, increasingly bizarre ideas sprout up like springtime weeds.

In today’s Martin Center article, Mariusz Ozminkowski, who teaches at Cal Poly Pomona, explains how “cultural taxation” will lower the bar for tenure — if you’re a favored minority.

He writes,

A typical university policy statement (such as this one from California State University, Fullerton) reads, “Faculty members from traditionally underrepresented groups may experience additional demands on their time, a phenomenon termed ‘cultural taxation.’ Cultural taxation involves the obligation to demonstrate good citizenship towards the institution by serving its needs for ethnic representation and cultural understanding, often without commensurate institutional rewards.”

So, a black professor is burdened with the supposed need to spend more time with black students than a white professor would be and therefore deserves some extra compensation. There isn’t any evidence that this is true, says our author, but that doesn’t stop the DEI crowd.

Ozminkowski exposes the glaring flaws in the “cultural taxation” concept, such as:

There is a more fundamental question: Even if they do need help, as some students in general do, why must the help come from a faculty member of a matching race or ethnicity? Why would a Latino professor necessarily be more effective in helping Latino students than an Asian-American, white, or black professor?

His conclusion is spot-on:

Students need professors who are hard-working and successful—those who do serious research, run engineering projects, write books, and are high-quality teachers. There are many of them among minority faculty, and those are the people who need to be recognized and cultivated by the university. Promoting the few mediocre activists doesn’t serve the students or the institution, and it definitely does not serve underrepresented faculty.