Almost every college and university official pledges allegiance to “diversity.” They talk about it incessantly, spend money on it like mad, and make sure that nobody who questions it is left at peace. But aren’t all human beings “diverse” in many ways?
They are, argues Professor Bruce Thornton in this essay.
He writes, “In contrast to ‘diversity,’ real diversity is a timeless fact of human existence, based on numerous criteria such as culture, mores, language, religion, geography, political philosophies, social organizations, values, and economic status. Ethnicity, not ‘race,’ is the basic unit of human identity, and it is comprised of these elements. The ‘diversity’ we talk about today is based on the superficial physical differences like skin color or hair texture, and duplicates the crude, reductive ‘race’ categories of post-Darwinian ‘scientific racism’ based on skin colors like ‘black,’ ‘white,’ ‘brown,’ or the all-purpose, utterly vague and meaningless ‘person of color.’ Ignored are the more important differences of culture and ethnicity. How people live is what creates their identities, not how they look.”
Thornton is rightly skeptical of the claims that there are “educational benefits” to the kind of diversity that is produced by college-admissions preferences. It’s just a cliché that universities trot to in front of credulous judges when they have to.
He also points to the considerable downside of “diversity,” namely that it mismatches students and institutions, placing the supposed beneficiaries of preferences in schools where they are not academically competitive — much to their detriment.
Thornton observes, “Meanwhile, the degradation of higher education curricula by watered down foundational skills and fundamental knowledge, and by the endemic politicization by leftist propaganda like Critical Race Theory; tendentious anti-Western melodramas; and illiberal identity politics continues. These phenomena have been abetted by affirmative action policies that have lowered admission and grading standards.”
Is there any chance that this time the Supreme Court will not again turn a blind eye to the huge drawbacks to preferential admissions, not to mention the Civil Rights Act’s prohibition of racial discrimination?
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/why-the-obsession-with-diversity/