Ethics Articles
Articles: Diversity
>> = Important Articles; ** = Major Articles
Proven Commitment to Diversity: Meet the diversicrats (NRO, 030130)
Diversity, Like You’ve Never Seen It: Beyond the paradox (NRO, 030319)
Diversity: The Invention of a Concept By Peter Wood (New Criterion, 030300)
Diversity Prop: Grace on the cheap (NRO, 030603)
Indefensible: The mistaken road of affirmative action and diversity (NRO, 030620)
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Mr. Clegg is general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity.
Diversity, diversity, diversity. You hear the d-word praised and celebrated everywhere, by everyone. Democrats love it. Republicans love it. Colleges and employers say they want it. We are unified in our love for diversity, are we not?
But deep down we also know that, when someone talks about the importance and desirability of diversity, they are almost always saying — implicitly or explicitly — that we ought to be willing to discriminate against some groups and in favor of others in order to achieve it. That’s the real agenda of the civil-rights groups, personnel directors, and college-admission officers who sing diversity’s praises.
Diversity that occurs naturally, without discrimination, is not an issue. But are its benefits so great that it is worth the costs of discrimination — the unfairness, resentment, stigmatization, lowered standards, hypocrisy, illegality, and on and on — to achieve it? If the “underrepresentation” of some groups (blacks, Hispanics) must be eliminated in order to achieve diversity, it is an inexorable mathematical truth that other groups (Asians, Jews) are thought to be “overrepresented.” Building a floor for one means constructing a ceiling for the others.
So it is fair to ask: What’s so great about diversity, anyway?
Now, I don’t doubt that there are many instances where diversity is very important indeed, but we do have to make some distinctions here. I was in a debate about racial and ethnic admission preferences recently at a college and one of my opponents said that, if there is only one kind of tree in the forest, and that tree dies out, then there will be no forest. Therefore, we should discriminate in favor of African Americans in college admissions. Needless to say, I think the leap from biodiversity to institutionalized discrimination is a long one.
The three principal areas where racial and ethnic preferences are awarded today are in employment, university admissions, and government contracting. For the latter, the diversity rationale can be rejected out of hand. There is not a black way and a white way to pave a road. You give the contract to the company that can do the best job at the best price. You want to have some competition, but it doesn’t matter if the competition is between two white companies, or two black companies, or a white company and a black company. So you can’t use the diversity rationale in the contracting context.
What about employment? It has to be noted at the outset that there is an important legal problem here. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 has a categorical ban on racial and ethnic discrimination by employers with 15 or more employees. Whatever the plausibility of an argument that this ban can be relaxed if the employer is trying to correct past discrimination — a dubious exception that the Supreme Court has carved out — it does not extend to discrimination justified only by diversity considerations. If the statute is read to ban only discrimination for which the employer does not think he has a good reason, then it offers no effective ban at all.
But, legality aside, should the employer think there is a good reason for discrimination if it helps him achieve diversity? There are three possible such reasons.
The first is that, if there is not some critical mass reached of racial and ethnic minorities, then prospective employees who belong to those “underrepresented” racial and ethnic groups will not want to apply — and this will result in the company not being able to hire the best people. But it is dubious to justify not hiring the best people today by saying that it ensures you will be able to hire the best people tomorrow. Surely there are more effective ways to persuade nonwhites that they are welcome. Another problem with this argument is that it can be turned around to support the exclusion of minorities. If most of your prospective workers are white, and many of them would prefer not to work with nonwhites, then it makes no sense to hire nonwhites.
The second possible argument is that members of different racial and ethnic groups bring with them different expertise about what customers want. For instance, a Latina will do a better job of designing an ad campaign pitched to increasing the number of Latina customers.
Maybe, but maybe not. It would be surprising if Latinas were so strongly homogenous a group that every Latina, and only Latinas, could understand how to sell a product to them. Is it so difficult for people in one group to learn what appeals to those in another group? Moreover, even if there are some jobs where ethnic insight is peculiarly valuable, these are surely the exception rather than the rule. And of course we again have a two-edged sword. If you can use this sort of generalization to decide against hiring an Anglo, you can use it in another context to justify not hiring a Latina — if, say, your customer base is unlikely to include people in that specific category.
The third argument is that some level of diversity is necessary to fend off lawsuits and boycotts. That is all too plausible, but what it really argues for is a condemnation of the government agencies and civil-rights organizations that engage in this sort of blackmail.
It is in the educational context — particularly university admissions — that the diversity argument is made loudest. There are a variety of arguments here, too, but some are mutually inconsistent.
For instance, sometimes it is argued that racial and ethnic diversity is valuable because it ensures that different viewpoints and experiences are represented on campus, but it is also argued that diversity helps to show that not all African Americans, for instance, think the same way. Isn’t there some tension here? If there is diversity of experience and outlook among African Americans (as there surely is), just as there is among whites, then that at least undercuts the argument that race can be used as a proxy for belief and background. A recurrent theme in Ralph Ellison’s collection of essays, Shadow and Act, is the diversity among African Americans. While the Left says it is fond of celebrating diversity, it is selective about when to celebrate.
Here’s another tension. It is sometimes argued that exposing whites to blacks helps teach the former that the latter are just as smart as they are, thus exposing the silliness of bigotry. But for this lesson to work, you have to make sure that the black students admitted really are as smart as the white students. If you admit black students according to a lower standard than the whites, then you will only reinforce the stereotype of black intellectual inferiority — especially, of course, when it leaks out that the bar is being lowered for blacks.
Another problem with the pro-diversity argument in the higher-education context is that the value of exposure to students of different backgrounds is wildly exaggerated. For instance, one African American student stressed to me with utmost sincerity that, had he never befriended a particular Asian American on campus, he would never have learned the correct definition of “sushi.” Well, perhaps there is a correlation between ethnic diversity and exposure to food lore. But so what? Is spreading trivia about raw fish worth institutionalized discrimination?
Even in the strongest such pitch for classroom diversity — a course involving discussion of discrimination — it is not obvious that the presence or absence of black faces will make much difference. Those students now will not have lived through slavery or Jim Crow; they will have been born in the 1980s. Perhaps they will have experienced discrimination, but hardly of a kind or degree that non-blacks could not imagine or appreciate without the presence of blacks. Our popular culture is full of literature, movies, and television about the horrors of discrimination. I have taught employment-discrimination law and can honestly say that no special insights into discrimination have been offered, as a group, by the non-white students in my classes.
There is also the argument that, since college students will eventually, their parents hope, get jobs, it is important to teach them how to get along with people of different skin colors and ancestries, since this is surely a skill they will need in the workforce.
There may be some truth to this, but it is not as if someone’s education on these matters is limited to the ages of 18 to 22. A lot of kids will have been in multiracial and multiethnic environments already. And this is not rocket science: (1) Treat people decently and as individuals; and (2) There are many different subcultures in America. If you haven’t learned this by the time you go to college, you haven’t been going to church and reading enough; if you can’t pick this up on the job, you probably weren’t smart enough to have graduated anyhow.
And how much diversity are you likely to get by using race and ethnicity as a proxy for different backgrounds? Suppose you are a college-admissions officer and you have applications from eight students:
· Son of aeronautical engineer (alumnus) who makes $75,000 a year. Stay-at-home mom. Lettered in basketball. Vice president of class. Organized fundraising campaign for Jewish Community Center. 700 math SAT; 700 verbal SAT. 3.5 GPA. White.
· Daughter of coal miner who makes $30,000 a year. Mom works as part-time waitress. Leader of church youth choir. Singing awards. 600 math SAT; 700 verbal SAT. 3.6 GPA. First woman in family to go to college. White.
· Son of construction worker who makes $35,000 a year. Mother deceased. Built his own ham radio and personal computer. No extracurricular activities except caring for six younger siblings. 700 math SAT; 600 verbal SAT. 4.0 GPA. Hispanic (Mexican American).
· Daughter of owner of car dealership who makes $150,000 a year. Stay-at-home mom. Girl Scout, lettered in three sports. 550 math SAT; 600 verbal SAT. 3.3 GPA. Hispanic (Cuban).
· Son of Vietnamese immigrants who run family restaurant. No extracurricular activities except work at the restaurant. 800 math SAT; 600 verbal SAT. 4.0 GPA. Asian.
· Daughter of chemical engineer (alumnus). Mother is schoolteacher (alumna). Treasurer of class, variety of high-school club memberships, including yearbook photographer. 750 math SAT; 750 verbal SAT. 3.9 GPA. Asian (Chinese American).
· Son of federal manager and city administrative worker (alumna), with cumulative income of $135,000 a year. President of class, captain of chess team. 650 math SAT; 650 verbal SAT. 3.5 GPA. Black.
· Daughter of unmarried welfare recipient. Captain of basketball team. Community service. 600 math SAT; 650 verbal SAT. 4.0 GPA. Black.
The thumbnail sketches of these applicants make clear that there is a wide variety of experiences that they will all bring with them to the university. It is also rather obvious that, for each of them, race will contribute the least of their characteristics to any diversity. And it is rather obvious, too, that you can’t draw very many conclusions about the individual if all you know is his or her race or ethnicity.
To return to the question posed at the beginning: The great thing about diversity is its implicit message of our common humanity; serving up racial and ethnic discrimination to achieve it will poison its beauty.
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By Peter W. Wood
The University of Memphis is looking for a vice provost for academic affairs — but I won’t be applying. I might be a reasonably good candidate in some ways, but the University of Memphis demands something I don’t have: a “demonstrated commitment to diversity.”
This job criterion is an instance of how deeply entrenched the diversity ideology has become in American higher education. Regardless of President Bush’s strong words against racial preferences in college admissions and regardless of whether the Supreme Court takes the Michigan cases as an opportunity to rule against the “diversity” excuse for racial quotas and preferences, higher education is overwhelmingly under the control of diversicrats.
For almost a generation, large numbers of colleges and universities — including the nation’s most prestigious public and private thinkeries — have stipulated that every senior administrator declare himself or herself “committed” to diversity. Higher education may have other litmus tests for ideological conformity, but the you-better-believe-in-diversity test is the only one that isn’t hidden. Each year, it adorns hundreds of job advertisements in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Higher education could legitimately pose many tests on the suitability of candidates for positions of leadership, but they rarely declare themselves in search of candidates with a “proven commitment” to honesty, academic freedom, objectivity, or high intellectual standards. Those commitments are either taken for granted or just not as important as having someone who promises to pursue diversity.
It should therefore occasion no surprise that 34 organizations representing higher education collectively urged President Bush to file an amicus brief in the Michigan cases — in support of the University of Michigan. The presidents of quite a few universities have also taken the occasion to prove their commitments all over again. Having fostered racial preferences in admissions and in every aspect of campus life, they are eager to preserve the status quo.
Because we will be hearing a lot from these folks in the next several months, it is important to see that they are, in a sense, intellectually compromised from the get-go. The presidents, provosts, and deans who are defending the importance of “diversity” in higher education owe their jobs in part to their willingness to advance this political cause.
Let me not over-generalize. Not all diversicrats are the same. Some are true believers and see themselves, however misguidedly, as engaged in a noble cause. Some are arrant careerists whose chief talent is mouthing the piety of the moment. And some are just conventional thinkers who have, with untroubled conscience, accepted the dogmas of their time and place.
It therefore wouldn’t be entirely fair to say that diversicrats owe their careers to their willingness to subordinate genuine intellectual inquiry and educational standards to the pursuit of diversity. Some of them have made that choice; for others, it was never a problem. It is fair, however, to point out that the concept of socially engineered diversity as a path toward social good and educational excellence is very weak. In the years during which administrators were “proving” their commitments to diversity, no philosopher, social scientist, or humanist of any stature even attempted to defend the idea. We have no great “founding documents” of diversity, not even the equivalent of a Communist Manifesto or Port Huron Statement that formulates the key idea.
The closest thing, coming long after the movement itself, was philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (1977). Professor Nussbaum is known to conservatives principally for the whoppers she told as an expert witness in her testimony in a 1993 court case (Romer v. Evans) in Colorado. In that instance, she bolstered a case brought by a gay activist by telling the court — to the surprise of classicists everywhere — that the ancient Greeks had no laws against homosexual behavior. In Cultivating Humanity, Nussbaum likewise conscripted the Greeks and the Romans too in an effort to legitimate a very contemporary cause. She claimed that the education favored by the ancients aimed to produce good citizens, and — lo and behold — that’s what “grappling with diversity” on campus will do for us today.
Nussbaum’s idea that “grappling with diversity” creates better citizens (in a global sort of way) has been taken up by other defenders of diversity, notably an expert witness in the Michigan cases, Patricia Gurin, who claims to have evidence that “diversity” as enforced by the University of Michigan, not only creates more engaged citizens, but also improves their “critical thinking.”
And that is pretty much it. The 34 higher-education organizations and the thousands of college administrators who support diversity as an educational good, of course, are currently concentrating on whether the pursuit of diversity passes constitutional muster as a reason for racial preferences in admissions. But the larger issue of whether the kind of diversity they support is educationally worthwhile won’t go away, and the Nussbaum and Gurin arguments are, at the moment, about all the diversicrats have to show. The University of Michigan’s briefs and the amicus briefs of its supporters are stuffed with these sorts of claims and “studies’ that purport to demonstrate them.
Diversity, in other words, rests on the frailest sorts of intellectual foundations. It has, among its key supporters, some people who definitely have a hard time distinguishing historical fact from convenient fantasy and some dull ideologues, but little else. The scarcity of real arguments and evidence to support diversity goes all the way back to Justice Powell’s decision in 1978 in the Bakke case, where he relied on the Princeton Alumni Newsletter and a self-congratulatory puff-piece from Harvard as his only two sources for the idea that the pursuit of diversity as a “plus factor” was a worthy exception to the principle of human equality.
William Bowen and Derek Bok’s The Shape of the River (1998) showed that racial preferences in admission to elite colleges on the whole financially benefit the recipients. (They do, but so what?) But mostly we are left to contemplate Patricia Gurin’s rephrasing of Nussbaum’s good citizenship thesis. Gurin says diversity helps students “to become active participants in our pluralistic, democratic society.” Well, it did teach something like that to the Michigan plaintiffs, Jennifer Gratz and Barbara Grutter.
So as I see it, we will be hearing a lot from college presidents who have a “proven commitment to diversity” but not much of anything to say beyond the clichés they have been reciting for years. The cases before the Supreme Court will probably turn out badly for these educational leaders. But, in the aftermath, they will still have their jobs. If the Court says race preferences in admissions are illegal, thousands of college presidents, provosts, vice provosts, and deans, who have been recruited to their positions by having “demonstrated” their commitments to diversity will do everything they can to subvert the ruling. They will devise winking ways to take account of race in admissions, such as the “diversity essay” that will allow them to exercise race preferences without getting caught; they will continue to hire and promote on the basis of “social identity;” and they will maintain and build on the “group identity” apparatus in residence halls, student activities, and the curriculum. And many will do all this in the spirit of moral superiority, convinced that reducing people to their social coordinates is a noble enterprise.
We will know that the tide of battle has really turned when places like the University of Memphis drop the diversity oath as a job requirement for their administrators. I can even imagine the day when many of those college presidents and provosts who have “proven commitments” to diversity will be denying their past, trying to disprove that they ever advocated something so mean, so de-humanizing, and so anti-intellectual.
— Peter W. Wood is a professor of anthropology at Boston University and author of the new book Diversity.
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What, exactly, is “diversity?” Is it nothing but a euphemism for racial and ethnic quotas, or is it the name of a fundamentally new way of thinking about American society? Do lovers of diversity play-act at tolerating cultural differences about which they know little — and care to know less? Or have diversity’s acolytes actually discovered a way of reconstituting our personal identities?
Diversity, of course, is — and does — all of these things. Yet until now (and despite its advocates’ ceaseless prattle) diversity has been incapable of speaking for itself. There is no poet or philosopher of diversity — no Simone de Beauvoir, or even Betty Friedan, of diversity. The hollowness and mendacity at the heart of diversity serve to silence and disguise all that is remarkable and profound (even if profoundly troubling) about this concept.
Yet, diversity has finally found its poet and philosopher, in the form of a clever antagonist named Peter Wood. Wood’s extraordinary new book, Diversity: The Invention of a Concept, spills the beans about diversity — about its flimsiness and mendacity, yes, but also about its complex cultural accomplishments and appeal, however unfortunate or insidious these may be.
Let me first make a disclosure that is anything but pro forma. Peter Wood is my friend — that rare sort of friend of whom you find only a handful in a lifetime, if you’re lucky. Wood and I met at college, got our professional degrees in anthropology (yes, there are at least two conservative anthropologists), and for years watched each other do battle with the forces of political correctness in our respective academic settings. For years, Wood has been established as an influential administrator at Boston University, one of the few institutions of higher learning in the country that resists the new academic dispensation. Battle hardened and wise in the ways of the enemy, Wood has gone after diversity in a way that diversity’s friends will not, and cannot — he has taken the concept seriously.
Where did diversity come from? With remarkable precision, Wood is able to trace the diversity movement from its origins in Justice Lewis Powell’s opinion in the famous 1978 Bakke case, to the present. (Wood’s prehistory of diversity is just as interesting, but more of that below.) With the Supreme Court split four to four on Alan Bakke’s lawsuit against affirmative action, Justice Powell was casting about for a compromise. Unwilling to directly embrace reverse discrimination, yet unable to affirm classic liberal notions of individual equality and merit, Powell turned to diversity, a concept which, before that moment, had barely been whispered by anyone. By affirming the educational value of diversity, Powell was able to justify reverse discrimination as something other than a deliberate suspension of classic liberal principles.
Or so it seemed. Yet, by elevating and dignifying an obscure and seemingly benign concept of group rights, Powell subverted classic democratic ideals far more insidiously than he would have by forthrightly repudiating liberalism. Wood reminds us that the constitutional status of the diversity notion, as enshrined in Powell’s Bakke opinion, remains uncertain. Although colleges and businesses everywhere have embraced diversity, no other Supreme Court justice has ever joined Powell in affirming it.
That is why the Supreme Court’s upcoming decision on affirmative action in college admissions at the University of Michigan is so important. Should the Court unambiguously affirm the constitutional status of diversity, it will have given the go-ahead to a kind of counter-principal to liberalism. That means that we can look forward to suits pressing quotas on jury selection — even the election of legislators. In the end, the principle of diversity cannot coexist with classic liberal democracy, and one of the several things that Wood’s book does is allow us to see the breadth and depth of this opposition.
Before exploring this broader perspective, the threads leading out of the Powell opinion are worth following. Wood shows just how flimsy were the empirical claims on which the Powell opinion was based. Powell simply took a few public-relations statements from places like Ivy League alumni magazines and wrote as though the educational value of diversity had been scientifically established. It has taken decades for academics to churn out even a few shoddy and unconvincing studies purporting to prove that racial and ethnic diversity really does improve the quality of education. Wood fairly decimates these claims.
The empirical evidence underlying the rise of diversity programs in American business is even more scandalously thin. In a skewering of bogus statistics worthy of Christina Hoff Sommers, Wood shows how a garbled passage in a famous think-tank study was misread and turned into a major pro-diversity story by nearly every paper in the country. Supposedly, the famous Hudson Institute Workforce 2000 report of 1987 showed that, by 2000, white men would make up on 15 percent of the American workforce. Yet, the report actually said nothing of the kind. It merely projected that white men would make up only 15 percent of those workers entering the workforce, over and above the number of white men already employed. In other words, Workforce 2000 projected that the number of white men in the workforce would grow relatively slowly. The report in no way claimed that the proportion of white men in the workforce would fall to the drastically low figure of 15 percent. Yet this transparently absurd misreading of the report was accepted on its face, turned into a major story by (who else?) the New York Times, whence it filtered down to the rest of the media. As a result, businesses all over the country were pushed to institute diversity hiring.
Of course, the deeper point is that, even if there had been so major a reshuffling of the workforce, it would have best been dealt with in the spirit of classic liberal universalism. Not only does authentic justice demand as much, but the “cultural differences” that supposedly divide races, ethnic groups, and “genders” actually have almost nothing to do with real cultural variety. The fact is, in nearly every important respect, Americans share the same culture. In the hands of Wood, a knowledgeable anthropologist, free of the current orthodoxies, the diversity industry’s claims to be dealing with “cultural differences” ends up in tatters.
The Workforce 2000 report was issued in 1987, at the very same moment that our contemporary culture war broke out in earnest. The controversy over Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind was in full flower, and the use of “politically correct” as a term of complaint had only just begun. Here is where we arrive at the crux of Wood’s history of the present. With the sensation over Bloom’s book, and with resistance to political correctness growing, advocates of affirmative action were on the ropes. Just then, Wood shows, is when the campus Left seized upon Powell’s diversity concept (which by then had become merely a bit of pathetic legal camouflage for full-fledged quota systems in education and business), and transformed it into an organizing principle for a whole new way of looking at politics, culture, society, and personal identity. By the early ‘90s, a concept few had known or cared about before 1987 had become a ruthlessly enforced article of faith, and a challenge to liberal democracy itself.
The central paradox of Wood’s book is that diversity is simultaneously hollow and full — a euphemism — indeed, a lie — yet with cultural weight and substance nonetheless. You’ll have to read the book to feel the paradox whole. But let me suggest a bit of it, using my own formulation at first, and then returning to Wood.
Diversity fills up a place left empty by modern life. I’ve already written of how, in a lonely secular world, liberalism itself has been rendered illiberal and transformed into a kind of religion. Diversity serves as a kind of substitute religion, chiefly by subsuming an individual in a cause larger than himself — membership in (or vicarious identification with) a group with a history of oppression. In an important sense, the new minority identifications do substitute for religion. That is why diversity carries real cultural weight and substance. At the same time, there is something thin, false, and unsatisfactory about the new political religion.
The problem goes back to what we’ve already learned from Wood. Diversity isn’t really diverse. All Americans share the same culture. There is something imaginary and contrived about the whole effort to hype one-sided and simplistic stories of oppression into the equivalent of the religious and cultural systems of the past.
Wood has his own way of getting at the falseness and superficiality of contemporary diversity. (Actually, Wood has ten or fifteen ways of getting at that. But let’s confine ourselves here to one.) As a contrarian anthropologist, Wood has spent years making himself an expert in everything that contemporary anthropologists despise and disregard. Wood has become a master reader of 19th-century traveler’s tales — the kind where the intrepid explorer sensationalizes cultural difference — hyping exotic customs, freely condemning alien practices, and openly expressing disgust, admiration — or lust — for his hosts. This is exactly the sort of stuff that 19th-century Americans used to eat up. Nearly every American middle-class home had some of these travelogues, and nothing could be more offensive to today’s diversity advocates than the open aesthetic and moral judgments passed by these American and European travelers on their “native” hosts.
Yet Wood returns us to diversity’s 19th-century prehistory — a time when ordinary Americans were surprisingly aware of, and riveted by, authentic cultural difference. What Wood manages to show is that, back in the day, with all of their ethnic and racial stereotyping — and even with their relative lack of sophisticated intercultural expertise — Americans were 1,000 times more honest and insightful about cultural difference than we are today.
Wood’s fascinating account of traveler tales from South Africa are especially impressive. For all the easy and simplistic stereotyping of Africans (enough to make anyone today wince), 19th-century travelers had a frank — and frankly unfriendly — attitude toward the South African Boers, who were plainly treating the Africans with disturbing hostility and prejudice. However much they lacked in tact and understanding, our 19th-century forbears allowed themselves to express their spontaneous, human, complex, and surprisingly balanced response to real cultural difference. They were frank about how strange the Africans seemed to them, yet equally willing to praise the “natives” and condemn their white oppressors. Ultimately, that sort of honesty allows insight to bubble up, and biases to be corrected.
By contrast, the contemporary ideology of diversity perpetually struggles against our natural tendency to be alternately horrified and fascinated by the reality of cultural difference. Human beings naturally judge others. We are attracted and repelled, delighted and disgusted, by authentic difference. Yet all of this is what so-called diversity advocates quickly smother in guilt, shame, and simplistic and one-sided stories of oppression. Real cultural diversity in America barely exists, and such diversity as remains is forbidden to us to acknowledge. We cannot attend to real cultural diversity long enough to know it or feel it in a genuine, rounded, and human way (which necessarily includes repulsion as well as attraction) for fear of being classed as an oppressor. So diversity is instead hollowed out and turned into a quick and superficial signal of entitlement and guilt. Thus, today, although our yearning for diversity is powerful and real, what we call diversity is thin and false. This is what Peter Wood shows in his wonderful history of “diversity before diversity.”
There’s plenty more to this book: diversity’s subversion of religion, diversity’s affliction of the arts, etc., and always with Wood’s trademark restrained, yet razor sharp, wit. Hey, if you don’t believe me because I know Wood, check out John Derbyshire’s review of Diversity: The Invention of a Concept in the latest issue of The New Criterion. The book has gone as high as 126 on Amazon, and has been selected by the Conservative Book Club. It’s doing well, but I’ve been annoyed to see it frozen out of the mainstream chain stores. No doubt a book jacket with glowing blurbs by Shelby Steele and Ward Connerly is a mixed blessing in today’s world. But with the Michigan affirmative-action case before the Supreme Court, this is the book of the moment. Don’t miss it.
— Stanley Kurtz is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
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Encounter Books; 351 pp. $24.95
by John Derbyshire
A few weeks ago I happened to acquire a copy of Carleton Coon’s 1965 book The Living Races of Man. What a gem! Coon was an anthropologist — was in fact Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. His book is a world-wide survey of human types, with a thorough classification into races and sub-races, buttressed by a wealth of physiometric, linguistic and archeological data. The real fascination of the book, though, is the illustrations at the end: 128 black and white photographs of human beings from every part of our planet. “A Russian Lapp” ... “A Tungus woman” ... “An Ainu man of Hokkaido” ... “A Mayan-Spanish Mestizo of Yucatán” ... “A Negrito woman of Mindanao” ... “An Irishman from County Cork” ... “A farmer of Rajasthan” ... “A Vedda of Ceylon” ... “A young Zulu woman” ... Leafing through these pictures, one marvels at the sheer physical variety of humankind, at the astonishing diversity of our common species. At the same time, of course, one cannot help but reflect that no respectable publisher (Coon’s was Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.) would contemplate bringing out such a book nowadays. Nor, for that matter, would any anthropologist think of submitting one.
Peter Wood is Professor of Anthropology at Boston University, and in the book under review he has taken diversity as his title and his topic. This is not, however, the diversity that is so apparent in Carleton Coon’s photographs. A great deal of water has flowed under the bridge since 1965, and it is nowadays considered a breathtaking violation of good manners to notice the kinds of things that Coon made it his life’s work to study and elucidate. Wood’s topic is the doctrine of diversity as it is pressed on us by the great and the good — by, that is to say, college administrators, corporate human resources officers, producers of plays, movies, TV shows and artworks, politicians, church leaders, and, when all efforts at persuasion and propaganda have failed, trial lawyers. Such a book is long overdue. Amidst all the cant of our age, there is probably no word more prominent or ubiquitous than “diversity,” yet I am not aware of any previous attempt to encompass this concept in a way that is properly skeptical, yet accessible and thorough.
Concept? Doctrine? Dogma? What is it exactly, this “diversity” we are all enjoined to celebrate with such enthusiasm? Peter Wood declares that it is an ideology. He explains:
The word [i.e. “ideology”] is not neutral; rather, it registers my judgment that diversity offers a closed loop of thought and experience. Once one enters this loop and accepts the main propositions of diversity, it is difficult to see out of it.
Note the italics, which are the author’s. Throughout this book, he italicizes the word “diversity” wherever it refers to this ideology he is discussing, in order to distinguish this sense of the word from its older meanings. From this point on, I shall follow the same practice, for the same reason, and also to give my reader the flavor of Wood’s approach.
Where did it come from, this ideology of diversity? Peter Wood notes the oddity of the fact that such a powerful idea, energetically propagated across the whole of society for a quarter of a century, has no founding text to refer to, was inspired by no charismatic teacher, was carried forward with no mighty struggles or cruel reverses, has roots in no significant philosophy. “It arrived unparented,” says Wood, “as a kind of collective emanation of ponderous academic silliness.” We just woke up one morning and there it was, demanding that we “celebrate” it. In its impact on the individual psyche, diversity is indeed an ideology in the sense Wood describes; yet it is a shallow and trivial one — essentially a folk superstition, a pop-culture fad like the Hula Hoop or body piercing, with no intellectual moorings at all. One of the author’s key insights, in fact, is the lightness and essential frivolity of diversity, especially by contrast with actual diversity. As he says at the end of a chapter titled “Diversity Before Diversity” (in which, however, I am sorry to see that the labors of Carleton Coon pass unmentioned):
Once upon a time, Americans encountered the world’s diversity with awe, anger, prejudice, disgust, erotic excitement, pity, delight — and curiosity. Then we recast ourselves as champions of tolerant diversity, became fearful of inconvenient facts, and lost interest.
You notice this loss of interest especially among children. In the Empire Boys’ Annuals of my own British childhood, the human world was a diverse place indeed, populated by head-hunters, cannibals, Polynesian bungee-jumpers, ferocious Gurkhas, exquisitely polite Japanese, reed dwellers, cave dwellers, tree dwellers, suttees, thuggees, fellows who inserted four-inch wooden disks into their lower lips and women who elongated their necks by adding a metal ring every year. Now youngsters are assured that though people who live in foreign parts may sometimes look a bit odd, they are really just middle-class Americans in thin disguise. Little Masai boys like to play soccer, says the “Social Science” textbook issued to my fourth-grader. In China they prefer volleyball. Uh-huh. Is it any wonder that Americans find it difficult to summon up interest in the world beyond their borders? When Longfellow, an Anglo-Saxon Unitarian, used the metrical structure of the Finnish Kalevala to write an epic poem about American Indians, he attained diversity without striving for it. The typical diversiphile of today would confidently deride such a production as “inauthentic,” while knowing nothing, and desiring to know nothing, about either medieval Finns or 16th-century Iroquois chiefs. Diversity is a cult for the ignorant, unimaginative, and incurious. The idea that it is beneficial to either individual persons or to society at large is supported by not a single shred of evidence.
Diversity as practiced in the United States is in fact a very pale thing, the magnification and glorification of tiny differences, promoted with all the deep historical and geographical insight of a kindergarten “Our Friends Around the World” class. As Peter Wood says, “We no longer have access to the unalloyed feelings of amazement, repugnance, pity and horror that some cultural differences might indeed warrant.” If you seek to celebrate diversity by joining the Taliban, subjecting your daughters to clitorectomy, or declaring the intention to throw yourself on your husband’s funeral pyre, you will be locked up as a danger to society. My own circle of acquaintance includes several Chinese couples who immigrated during the 1980s. Their American-born children, now entering their teens, are indistinguishable in tastes and habits from any other American kids. They eat pizza, follow baseball, memorize Britney Spears lyrics, and introduce reported speech with the “like” construction. Their command of Chinese extends no further than a handful of domestic commonplaces. When they get to college, though, they will be initiated into the mysteries of diversity. Kindly mentors will induct them into “Asian-American” student societies, where they will learn that anger, shame and loathing are the correct responses to the society their parents embraced with such gratitude and relief.
Though the diversity ideology lacks any serious philosophical foundations, there are of course origins. A principal begetter was Justice Lewis Powell of the U.S. Supreme Court. Writing a stand-alone opinion in the 1978 case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, Powell asserted that the goal of “attaining a diverse student body” provided a “constitutionally permissible” reason to allow racial preferences in college admissions. None of the other justices concurred with this point, so it has no force in law. None the less, in asserting the desirability of diversity, Justice Powell lit such a candle by God’s grace in America, as (it seems) shall never be put out. Peter Wood gives over his longest chapter to a detailed analysis of the Bakke case, its antecedents, and its consequences, demonstrating all too clearly that Supreme Court Justices are very far from being the best and brightest legal brains of their time, are in fact much more often colorless mediocrities chosen and confirmed because they give the least offense to the largest number of political interests — or nowadays, the worm Ouroboros chewing on its tail, for reasons of diversity.
The notion of diversity as a thing desirable in itself was not altogether new at the time of Justice Powell’s obiter dictum. Most race-preference schemes up to that time, however, had justified themselves as remedies for past injustice, looking back to Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 Howard University speech, in which Johnson declared the principle of “affirmative action,” and to that same president’s Executive Order 11246, which gave that principle its name, and charged the federal bureaucracy with the task of promoting it. By 1978 these remedial programs were increasingly unpopular, and awkward question were beginning to be raised about how long it would take to remedy the injustices in question, and how we would be able to tell when the remedying was complete. Justice Powell’s assertion that “attaining a diverse student body” is a desideratum by itself, without regard to any past discrimination, was just what the social engineers needed. The ideology of diversity was born, and has now spread itself into every corner of our society and culture.
Peter Wood gives a comprehensive survey of diversity’s scope. It is most at home in the Academy, of course, and the 31-page chapter titled “Diversity on Campus” is one of the strongest in this book, and the most unsparing. Writing of Martha Nussbaum’s attempted defense of diversity, and of her description of the campus as a place where “faculty and students grapple with issues of human diversity,” Wood comments:
The “grappling” is her ennobling conceit for the festering discontents, censorship and fear; the gloating privilege; the rotting intellectual insecurity; and the regnant falsehoods that diversity has brought to most campuses. ... [T]he real world of diversity is no idyll. Rather, it brims with tribal vanities, assertions of entitlement, sour anti-Americanism, disdain for freedom and equality, and prideful ignorance.
Whew! As this passage illustrates, Peter Wood is a terrific polemicist, with a lethal gift for exposing cant and a masterful turn of phrase. When reviewing a galley copy like this (that is, a book that cannot be sold after review to my neighborhood second-hand dealer), my habit is to mark the text up with highlighters: yellow for key steps in the author’s arguments, red for false or dubious assertions, and green for pointed, well-turned sentences worth quoting in my review. This copy of Diversity has much more green than usual — far more than I can fit into the space the gentle editor has assigned to me. Here are just a few cuttings from that greenery. On the Academy again:
Diversity only preserves some of the outward appearance of liberal education, while substituting its own antiliberal agenda on every crucial point.
On the use of “diversity consultants” in business:
Diversity advocates create the problems that diversity consultants are then hired to ameliorate.
On the divisiveness of diversity:
Do Americans know how to put their differences aside and work together? For the most part, the answer is definitely yes. Does diversity augment this aspect of our national character? No, we manage it despite the imposition of diversity, which is often pulling in the opposite direction.
On diversity in religious practice:
As I gauge it, the differences among American religions are small though important; but construed through the lens of diversity, the inverse image appears: the differences are huge yet somehow inconsequential.
For all its delights, this is a flawed book, with a hole at its center. Peter Wood is an inhabitant of the Respectable Right, and so is scrupulously deferential to what William F. Buckley, Jr., the leading light of this faction, has called “the prevailing structure of taboos.” This book began, in fact, as an essay posted on the National Review Online website. As one so often finds these days with books that seek to challenge current sociological pieties while staying within the bounds of acceptable comment — bounds drawn and vigilantly patrolled by left-liberal opinion elites — this approach weakens Peter Wood’s case. Why, after all, is the diversity racket so persistent? Intelligent people everywhere scoff at it and constantly make jokes about it. Even TV sitcoms do so. A recent episode of Fox TV’s Andy Richter Show revolved around a workplace diversity wrangle, and had characters uttering lines like: “So I am supposed to celebrate your difference while at the same time totally ignoring it, right?” (I note, however, that this show seems to have been canceled.) Why, when wellnigh everybody — including, very likely, some large subset of the diversicrats themselves — knows that it is all nonsense, do we let it go on?
We all know the answer. Without massive gerrymandering of the “affirmative action” or diversity type, black Americans would pool at the bottom of postindustrial society even more conspicuously than they currently do. This state of affairs would be grossly offensive to American ideals of justice, equality, and national identity, all the more so in an age like the one we seem to have entered, when our country is under the constant threat of attack by foreign terrorists, and we are being reminded once again that if we do not hang together, we shall hang separately. For an optimistic, idealistic people like ourselves, wishful thinking is an irresistible temptation. We can, after all, always fall back — as Carleton Coon did in The Living Races of Man — on the hope that science (in this case, benign genetic engineering) will relieve us of our contradictions before they become too acute. When our idealism conflicts with reality, therefore, it is reality that must yield. Mr. Wood has fallen in with this principle. Races, he declares, “are social conventions, not biological realities.” I wonder if he has ever watched the finals of an Olympic men’s sprint event? Or looked into The Living Races of Man? The real dilemma facing America is that we can have a meritocracy, or we can have equal outcomes by ancestry group, but, unless the information now coming in by every post from the human sciences is all utterly wrong, we cannot have both. Both, of course, is exactly what we insist on having, and diversity is our current attempt at squaring this unhappy circle.
Never mind. Diversity is a fine book, full of cogent arguments, curious facts, and nasty slimy things that burrowed away unnoticed under the foundations of our culture till Professor Wood turned them up with his trowel. Given that “prevailing structure of taboos” we should be grateful for such a vigorous and literate defense of truth, sanity and scholarship against the ever-pressing forces of unreason; and to any minor logical flaws in such a defense, we should turn the same blind eye that Peter Wood has turned to the 800-lb gorilla on his living-room sofa.
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Let me just say it up front: My problem isn’t with diversity, it’s with propaganda.
The rest, as they say, is commentary.
So let’s get going with the commentary.
Diversity isn’t an unqualified good. In fact, save for a few pedantic exceptions — God, wisdom, etc. — there are no unqualified goods. Tolerance is bad if you tolerate evil. Democracy is a problem if it becomes tyrannical, which it most certainly can. Law can be “a ass.” Dissent isn’t necessarily heroic. For every Mandela, Gandhi, or Thoreau there are 1,000 — no, 10,000 — drooling morons, jabbering misfits, and opponents of progress with equal claim to the title “dissenter,” “dissident,” “protester,” “rebel,” or “non-conformist.” When a group or society is heading in the right direction, the maverick is no hero for telling everyone to turn around. Even Irish whiskey, taken to an extreme, can be a problem.
Diversity is another of those words we imbue with all nobility and goodness without question or reservation. And that’s nonsense. If diversity were always and everywhere good we would be clamoring for more midgets in the NBA. We would demand that mobsters get jobs at the FBI and we would consider it a grave problem that not enough blind men — and women! — were applying to be crossing guards, snipers, and surgeons.
Indeed, if diversity were always a boon to the educational process, we would decry the ghettos of backwardness we call all-women’s colleges and historically black universities. After all, are not blacks and women in the most need of educational support? Lee Bollinger, the former president of the University of Michigan (and current president of Columbia University) recently declared:
Diversity is not merely a desirable addition to a well-run education. It is as essential as the study of the Middle Ages, of international politics and of Shakespeare. For our students to better understand the diverse country and world they inhabit, they must be immersed in a campus culture that allows them to study with, argue with and become friends with students who may be different from them. It broadens the mind and the intellect — essential goals of education.
Well, if it’s an essential goal of education, let’s diversify Morehouse College right now before one more black kid is forced to study without the benefit of experiencing the glories of sharing a dorm with a few Asian and white kids. And since it’s an established fact that blacks are more educationally disadvantaged than most, doesn’t that mean that integrating black schools is even more of an imperative than getting a few more African Americans at Harvard?
Many of our greatest scientists, statesmen, soldiers, and artists attended remarkably un-diverse institutions. Indeed, many of our greatest black leaders attended all black, and often all black male, institutions of higher learning. And yet, if I were to say that a black man can’t be properly educated unless some of whitey rubs off on him, I’d get in a lot of trouble.
But that’s the diversity argument in a nutshell. The old argument about redressing past wrongs against historically disadvantaged people has been defenestrated. It’s not about helping black people by giving them a little extra consideration any more — it’s now about helping white people, by “exposing” them to minorities. The evidence, anecdotal and scientific, that such exposure is indisputably beneficial simply does not exist. In fact, an important new study just published in The Public Interest suggests just the opposite in many significant respects.
At least the old idea, equally flawed and well-intentioned, worked on the premise that affirmative action would be a temporary effort, aimed at fixing a specific problem and moving on once fixed. But diversity is forever. It’s a permanent regime of race-based policies with an internal logic that remains just as valid 100 years from now.
Now there are those who will argue that diversity efforts run counter to America’s long-standing commitment to merit. I agree with the idea that diversity programs conflict with the idea of merit, but I don’t think the meritocracy is as old as many people think it is. Sure, the ideal of a meritocracy — Jefferson’s aristocracy of talent and all that — is very old, but America fell short of it for a long time. Not long ago many of the nation’s top colleges and grad schools used quotas to keep Jews out. Harvard famously decided it had “too many” Jews and implemented a “silent quota.” Until Lionel Trilling, Columbia never even had a tenured Jewish professor. When four out of five winners of N.Y. Regents scholarships were Jewish, notes historian David Brion Davis, most New York medical schools had a strict anti-Jewish quota — in the name of diversity. The dean of Columbia University’s medical school defended his school’s quota by arguing, “The racial and religious makeup in medicine ought to be kept fairly parallel with the population makeup.”
Nobody can reasonably dispute that there was an old boy network which discriminated not only against Jews, blacks, and what few Asians there were around — and, of course, against women — but against middle-class ethnic whites as well. What people forget is that the SAT and a host of other measures were created in the 1950s and 1960s in order to dismantle the old boy network, to give the poor and socially disadvantaged a chance to compete with the sons and daughters of privilege. And it was remarkably successful on that score. America’s elite colleges and universities became vastly more integrated — ideologically, socially, and racially — because America made the decision to live up to the meritocratic ideal (the marketplace and the G.I. bill probably had a lot to do with it, too). The average IQ at elite U.S. schools soared as the duller children of privilege were forced to compete with middle-class Jews, Catholics, and blacks in ways they never had before. But there were costs. Higher education became much more of a national job-training program and less of an incubator of virtue and good citizenship. Local communities lost some of their best and brightest to the big cities because, for the first time, their best and brightest had an opportunity to compete there on a fair level. And, yes, the self-esteem of some groups suffered as fair chances failed to yield “fair” results.
And just as the meritocracy had costs, so does diversity. In fact, it would have costs even if minority applicants had identical academic records and SAT scores indistinguishable from the general pool of students because the concept of proportional representation is ultimately arbitrary when set against the riot of desires, aspirations, abilities, and attitudes of the college-bound population. Children of Asian immigrants may disproportionately want to become engineers and doctors while Jews may cluster around, say, law or journalism. Blacks may be more inclined toward education or business.
Whatever. The point isn’t to play pin the stereotypical career on the ethnicity. The point is that to say that any given room must have at least X percent of blacks, Y percent of Asians and Z percent of whites — simply because that’s their distribution, in this sprawling continental nation — is to impose an entirely ideological, theoretical and inherently arbitrary system on a discrete phenomena. Why not simply pick the closing average of the Dow Jones to use as the basis for such numerical games? Invariably, as the number of Asian Americans in a class or a school approaches their “natural” distribution Asians would be judged more strictly vis-à-vis the standards applied to Arab Americans (or whomever).
BACK TO THE PROPAGANDA
This isn’t to say that I’m against diversity, though racial diversity seems less important than social diversity (they overlap but aren’t the same thing). If the choice is between an abstract black and an abstract white and they are for all intents and purposes otherwise indistinguishable, I’m not going freak out if the black kid catches a break, even if it that violates the principle of colorblindedness. But, I’d be even more in favor of a poor white kid from Oklahoma catching a break at the expense of a black dentist’s kid.
But what I cannot stand is the propagandistic notion that this is all cost-free or that diversity is merely replacing another form of prejudice. James M. McPherson of Princeton University recently argued that affirmative action is justifiable because he benefited from the “old boy network.” Such arguments disgust me because A) Who cares? and B) They make no sense except as political theater. If McPherson admitted at the end of his career that he got his first job through bribery or fraud, would he say that justifies affirmative action? After all, he’s not defending the old boy network, he’s denouncing it. Second, McPherson seems to have anointed himself a representative of white people, and therefore any white who gets the shaft today shouldn’t complain because McPherson got his unfair break already. What this leaves out is that diversity didn’t replace the old boy network, it replaced a system based on merit — quota defenders always leave that part out. And, besides, the old boy network screwed whites too. Middle-class whites are being told to accept a new system that discriminates against them even though the old system did too. Third, this is all very easy for McPherson to say. He sounds like a hero only after his distinguished career is winding down. What sacrifices will he make?
Such grace on the cheap is a hallmark of liberal defenses of affirmative action these days. So is denial. David Broder’s April 6 column could not be a more pristine example of both. After a long love letter to everything he’s gained from diversity, Broder sums up by recounting Justice Scalia’s exchange from the bench with the University of Michigan’s lawyer. Broder writes:
If diversity is so important to you, Scalia told the university’s lawyer, lower your standards to the point that more minority applicants can qualify. Not only is that derogatory in its implications, but it is strikingly inappropriate from anyone who purports to believe in pure meritocracy. Today neither Michigan nor The Post lowers its standards to admit minorities. They look for minorities within the large pool of qualified applicants.
Lower the standards? And deprive this country of the quality that a great university (or, if I may say so, a great newspaper) can contribute? That is a contemptible alternative.
That may be true of the Post, I don’t have enough information to say. But we know for a fact it is not true of the University of Michigan, where black applicants have a roughly 20-percent advantage over whites. Broder is a smart guy, but you can’t help but get the sense that he’s deliberately refusing to think — or to think out loud — about what he’s saying, so as to stay on the good side of his diverse newsroom.
Compare this to Jeffrey Rosen’s astoundingly honest — given the forum(The New York Times Magazine) and his job as a professor — appraisal of the costs of diversity and the potential costs of getting rid of it. Rosen believes that the ideological imperatives of diversity are so strong that if we get rid of quotas, universities will simply find another way to lower standards. I think he’s probably right, though I also suspect that the marketplace would find new ways to “price” the degrees of schools which lower their standards. (Then again: Harvard’s price seems immune to deflation.) As Andrew Sullivan notes, Rosen seems to work on the assumption that blacks will never be able to compete fairly and so he thinks quotas are the least-damaging way to pursue a noble end, since our leading universities are more smitten to racial diversity than they are to academic excellence. It’s a deeply depressing argument when you think about it, but at least it’s honest about the costs of diversity. And even a bad diagnosis is refreshing if all you’ve heard are dishonest good ones.
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It is amazing to contemplate the number of arguments for affirmative action that have been advanced, and then ultimately discredited, since the policy first began to be implemented in the mid 1960s. Yet notwithstanding these repeated defeats, affirmative action has brought about vast — and vastly detrimental — changes in the very nature of higher education itself, changes that will be hard to undo even if the policy is finally prohibited by the courts, as it certainly should be.
Behind the insistence on affirmative action was a profound condemnation of our society. America, some civil-rights advocates believed, was so deeply and habitually racist that without racial preferences blacks could not expect to get an even break. Opponents of this view countered that an intrinsically and indelibly and thoroughgoingly racist society would scarcely have passed the comprehensive civil-rights legislation of the 1960s. Many ardent supporters of the civil-rights movement believed that getting rid of discrimination rather than giving people positive advantages was the way toward a just fulfillment of America’s Founding principles. Unfortunately, this pure civil-rights idea never had a chance to be tested in practice because no sooner was the ink dry on the laws, and America’s newly equal-before-the-law blacks and whites barely given time for a howdy-do, than LBJ and his liberal cohorts instituted group rights for blacks. Everyone was soon caught up in the debate over quotas and timetables, with the accompanying anger, resentment, denial, and defensiveness that are familiar to us all. But LBJ had announced the goal — equality as a fact and as a result, with racial preferences seen as a temporary expedient to overcome the handicaps imposed by past discrimination and to bring about equality of outcome between blacks and whites.
Group rights and color-consciousness not being consonant with the constitutional principles upon which the civil-rights movement had been based, supporters of affirmative action tried to reconcile racial preferences with traditional American ideals of liberty, equality, and individual merit. They insisted that it would not mean reverse discrimination, that it would not bring quotas, that it would not require the lowering of standards, that it was simple justice to compensate for slavery and segregation, that it was only a temporary measure, and that race would be just a tipping factor to helps schools or employers choose among equally qualified individuals.
As those who have followed the issue know, every one of these arguments has been proven false. Affirmative action did mean reverse discrimination, it did mean quotas, it did require the massive lowering of standards, it was not justified by slavery and segregation, it was not temporary, and race was not just a tipping factor but the decisive factor.
THE DIVERSITY FACTOR
But even as these various rationales were being refuted and discarded, a new and more comprehensive articulation of affirmative action was emerging into prominence. This was the diversity ideology, meaning the demand for proportional group representation in all areas of endeavor, and not just for blacks but for a whole panoply of other minority groups as well. While the concept of racial proportionality had played a key role in affirmative action from the start, namely as the only sure proof of the absence of racial discrimination, it was now touted as nothing less than the organizing principle of our whole society. In other words, instead of racial proportionality being seen as a questionable means justified by a morally good end (such as the overcoming of past discrimination) it had become the end, an apodictical good in itself. Equal group representation and the accompanying discrimination against whites no longer had to be tortuously reconciled with American ideals of fairness and equality; it was their very fulfillment. America is “diverse,” and colleges must “look like America.” We must have diversity because we must have it. Even worse, we must have it because we have had it. We’re used to it now, we expect it, we couldn’t live without it. But an invidious injustice remains an injustice even if it has been institutionalized for a long time, and even if some people feel they could not abide life in its absence.
Meanwhile, far from enhancing higher education as has been claimed (i.e., providing diverse experiences and points of view, shaping the skills needed for leadership in a pluralistic society, etc.), diversity has diminished it. No fewer than three separate studies (by the National Association of Scholars, by Robert Lerner and Althea Nagai, and by Stanley Rothman, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Neil Nevitte) have shown that the only “educational benefit” of proportional representation is ..proportional representation itself. At the same time, the cultic attention paid to the various ethnic groups as groups has radically devalued the idea of a common culture and intellectual tradition. In higher education in particular, diversity practitioners boast of the “new academy” that is now under construction, obliterating the ideals of liberal education as the cultivation of the individual mind through the study of works of lasting value, in favor of an “education” devoted entirely to diversity itself, with its focus on group identity, victimhood, and grievance against American society.
Most people are aware that diversity in higher education requires the recruitment, admission, and retention of minorities in faculty, staff, and administration as well as in the student body. Fewer are aware that diversity mandates the reorienting of the entire curriculum. This entails not only specific courses on diversity (now required at many institutions), but the injection of diversity learning into every aspect of the educational experience. And the reconstruction doesn’t stop with the classroom experience. According to diversity educators, all non-curricular activities, such as counseling, career planning, and residential life, must be informed by diversity concerns, facilitated in structured discussions and diversity workshops. The goal is to create students adept in “relational living,” who demonstrate “cultural competence,” students, that is, who can endure the falsehoods and injustices of the diversity regime with bland equanimity. Some real education does no doubt continue to take place, but as more and more traditionally minded professors retire, of whom there are precious few left as it is, their ranks will be filled by those who have been steeped in diversity ideology and its various theoretical cousins, such as feminism, postmodernism, deconstruction, and cultural relativism.
It is a searing shame that we have come so far on this mistaken road. There are many institutions of higher education in our country that can educate students at every level of ability, and these students, properly prepared, can go on to multiple kinds of success. In addition, new, targeted efforts supported by the Bush administration to improve our public schools and to tackle the problem of minority unpreparedness earlier, in elementary and secondary schools, will no doubt increase minority competitiveness over time. But even without college there are many honorable walks of life to follow, especially in a country with almost unlimited opportunities like ours. Engineered group outcomes work in exactly the opposite direction of the American genius, which is to free people to follow their own best gifts and inclinations, creating wealth, activity, prosperity, and happiness in myriad, dovetailing ways that cannot be planned by any diversity engineer. But the inexorable logic of the diversity ideology is that America’s “unfulfilled promise” will never be fulfilled until there is racial proportionality in every walk of life, and diversity becomes the be all and end all of our national existence. We could never really attain such an artificially controlled culture, of course, but we can tear down our society in trying.
And so far from bringing justice, diversiphiles are denigrating the real achievements of minorities, encouraging in them a sense of envy and entitlement, and ensuring their dissatisfaction with the accomplishments they can attain on their own. Instead of trusting our citizens, our system, and the natural variety and multifariousness of life itself, we have scorned honest work and torn down the old and noble idea of individual achievement, however modest, if genuinely earned. Worst of all, we have gone a long way toward destroying the great liberal education that has been a passport for so many students of various backgrounds to the life of the mind and a greater understanding of the human condition.
— Carol Iannone is editor-at-large of Academic Questions, the journal of the National Association of Scholars.
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