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January 18, 2003
The diversity rationale
Accepted as an article of faith in recent debate about the University of Michigan's racially biased admissions policy is that diversity promote learning. Ethnic diversity among a student body may be a worthwhile objective for institutions of higher learning to pursue, but where is the proof that it promotes better learning? If this were really true, as many on the left hold as indisputable doctrine, then were is the left's opposition to all black colleges and universities? Where is the proof that the educational benefits of diversity outweigh the benefits of a well-prepared and qualified student body? My experience at an Ivy League college was that I benefited from peers who were smart and driven and while many had different ethnic background than I--something which may have enriched be culturally--I fail to see how that ethnic diversity helped me grasp physics, poetry, or history in a more profound matter.
The other, very sad truth was that my college was heavily segregated by the administration--far more so than Strom Thurmond or Trent Lott could ever have dreamed of. This was done in the name sensitivity, but it was profoundly divisive. Black students had their own fraternities and even their own institution, the African-American house, to which they could belong and isolate themselves from the rest of the student body in. Being black was a special and privileged class. Few whites were allowed in those circles--but this was not true going the other way. However, those black students who did cross the lines and had white friends risked ostracism from the black community. Several of my friends struggled deeply with this issue.
The diversity rationale has little to do with actually achieving racial harmony and much more about achieving a political agenda by those that advocate it. Rich Lowry tackles the diversity lie on campus.
If one looks at the great names of intellectual history; hardly any of these would have gone to school with, or even met, someone of a different race or highly divergent ethnic background. Compare their situation to that of recent decades; diversity has been recruited for racial reasons, but there have been no great academic intellectuals or theoretical breakthroughs in this period. If racial and ethnic diversity were a proper value for schools, one would expect there to have been some event like the demonstration of the continental drift theory forty years ago, having occurred since that time. In any case racial diversity itself can't do what is expected of it; unless ideas are inherited genetically and racially, but this is the definition of what?