For perspective on the center’s pathetic $86,000 budget (just increased by President Brown, with touching gratitude from Kopff), consider that CU spends $22 million annually on diversity programs. This includes nearly 100 activities so tangled and varied – but none addressing intellectual or political diversity, of course – that administrators conceded to an Independence Institute researcher there’s no complete list.
With a 6-3 Republican majority on the Board of Regents, you might Kopff would be faring better. But it was clear who runs the asylum when Regent Tom Lucero brought a resolution last December that would have directed administrators and faculty to start a Department of Western Civilization, Republicans Pat Hayes and Paul Schauer sided with the three Democratic regents to defeat it, 5-4.
Were the GOP dissenters swayed by the inner voice of multiculturalism, or pressured by faculty postmodernists? They haven’t said, but you have to wonder if the same five votes were what elected the liberal Hayes as chairman in June, edging out conservative Republican Steve Bosley.
Bosley at least heads the search committee seeking a successor for Hank Brown, who is leaving next year. But will CU’s new president be chosen by the 8-1 bloc that fired Ward Churchill, or by the 5-4 alliance that squashed Western Civ? That’s the next big showdown between “critical class theory” and "the permanent things."