Applicants are requested to submit a Statement of Contributions to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (typically between 150-300 words) providing your career aspirations and contributions toward promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion. Through this statement, you can share how your lived experiences; and past, present, and future academic and professional activities have or will contribute to VCU’s mission of promoting equity and inclusion.
Note: Examples include working with others to further the goals of equity and inclusion; leading in any capacity that tangibly promotes an environment where diversity is welcomed, fostered, and celebrated; creative activity, research and scholarship that promotes equity and parity; teaching and mentoring students, and/or engaging with faculty and/or staff from traditionally underrepresented groups to create a positive and successful organizational experience.
Not sure where to post this, but wtf. Are we 17 applying to college again? What does this accomplish?
- "
Tangibly promotes an environment." WTF does that even mean? Tangibly? Like as in I can touch it?
- "Promotes equity AND parity." Thesaurus.com says you left a few out: Unity, congruence, equivalence, sameness, consistency. Why don't you also need those? Are those not important? Wait, can we have consistency and diversity? Maybe we can be consistently diverse?
- "Lived experiences" As opposed to unlived experiences? What about lived experiences from
past lives?
- "Engaging with faculty and/or staff from traditionally underrepresented groups" And/or? So I could chose to engage with either or? Engaging sounds violent. But maybe it's the good kind of engaging. The representation of a group should be the criteria upon which I choose to engage? I can think of numerous "groups" with very small numbers of people that are very bad. But maybe I can use the bad kind of engaging with them.
-"(typically between 150-300 words)" The irony of including a word limit in a 2 paragraph essay prompt that could have been simply reduced to a checkbox that said "Initial here that you promise not to be a hateful bigot or we will fire your ass."
There is a part of me that would really like to be back in academics, but I'm honestly not sure I could stomach the nonsense knowing that part of my production is going to fund employees who produce this kind of psuedoacademic adverbial drivel in an environment where they are protected from any criticism of it.