Diversity: The Good, The Bad and the Ugly Part 3

Diversity: The Good, The Bad and the Ugly Part 3

This is the third of a three-part series on diversity, its value, and its risks to our society.

The first part of this three-part series on diversity dealt with the good that diverse institutions and organizations do for society while the second discussed the bad that arises when “race hustlers” claim they stand on the moral high ground while publicly shaming and intimidating those whose views do not conform with theirs.

Turn now to the ugly: colleges and universities that serve as indoctrination centers for today’s radical progressive politics.

Academic diversity should be the hallmark of any university. A college education should expose students to a range of beliefs, values, and experiences, fostering inquiry and debate. An absence of academic diversity is antithetical to higher education.

But the word “diversity” has taken on an entirely different meaning at many universities today. It has been recast as the diversity of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation. This type of diversity is social and political, not an academic diversity of ideas.

Politically-motivated, identity group-based diversity encourages students to see themselves first as members of an identity group and to conform their political and social views to a group template. That kind of thinking is natural for political parties but defeats the entire purpose of higher education.

Students at many universities today are exposed only to one side of the many complex issues facing society as conservative professors retire and are replaced with radical progressives. As a result, today’s college students have become increasingly intolerant and unwilling to accept anything other than leftist dogma as worthy of discussion in the public square.

Even science, the one bastion of verifiable truth on campus, is called a mere “social phenomenon” by progressives. Is E = mc² a racist construct?

Conservative professors are ostracized; conservative speakers are “disinvited” from campus programs often accompanied by threats of violence. Authors are forced to withdraw books that are insufficiently “woke” or deemed offensive to one identity group or another. So much for free speech and independent thinking.

Students brave enough to express more traditional or conservative viewpoints quickly learn to fall in line as they receive scathing counterattacks from professors and low grades that diminish their future prospects.

Minority students are expected to represent their assigned groups which others must not “appropriate,” even with the best of intentions. As a result, how many African-American students are willing to defend inner-city policing? How many gay students would side with the baker who refuses to make wedding cakes depicting same-sex couples?

Civilization is recast as class warfare with dominant groups – read “white males” – oppressing minorities. Perhaps the most shocking product of this trend is the New York Times’ brazen rewrite of United States history in “The 1619 Project.” The Times would have us abandon 1776 as the birth of our nation and replace it with 1619, the year the first shipload of slaves arrived in colonial Virginia.

In it, the Founding Fathers are vilified as slave-owning racists, unworthy of anything but disgust. Our nation’s history up to the present day is rewritten as the struggle of African-Americans and other minorities for their rights. Even Abraham Lincoln is deemed a racist.

California’s Department of Education demonstrated the extent to which this line of thinking has permeated the progressive elite by introducing Critical Race Theory into its new ethnic studies “model curriculum” for K-12 students. California’s teachers’ unions, the radical progressive junior varsity, love it. Yet even the New York Times found this hard to swallow.

The movement to impose the political form of diversity on campus has given rise to an ever-expanding diversity bureaucracy. Virtually every college in the country has a vice-president of diversity. The title alone confers a supposed moral high ground on its incumbent: any who would take issue with any policy instituted by the diversity office must, by definition, be a closet racist.

Yale University is an all-too-typical example. It has an Office of Diversity and Inclusion, a Dean of Diversity and Faculty Development, an Office of Gender and Campus Culture, and 150 full-time staff and student representatives in comparable positions and programs. Sadly, it has no office dedicated to academic diversity or free speech, both fundamental to a university education.

The once-great University of California system is frustrated that since 1996 its state constitution requires it to ignore race in admissions. With its racial composition not reflecting its preferred racial diversity, it has decided to drop SAT and ACT test results as considerations for admission.

Putting politics ahead of the academic excellence it once exemplified, the university is ignoring its own faculty senate report that found that the tests do not discriminate against minorities. The report showed that failing to complete required high-school courses is the biggest impediment to academic success for minority students.

Following California’s lead, many highly selective universities, including Stanford and those in the Ivy League, will no longer use the SAT and ACT tests in admitting freshmen in 2021.

To me, that smacks of “systemic racism,” allowing them to ensure their preferred ethnic and racial diversity by denying admission to more qualified whites and Asians. And it ensures the class of 2025 will enter the job market with a presumption of lower qualifications.

To their credit, voters in California set an example for the nation last fall in rejecting the racial preferences that their namesake university is adopting.

In 1996, African-American Ward Connerly led the effort to pass Proposition 209, amending California’s constitution to prohibit the state government from considering race, sex or ethnicity in employment, contracting, or education.

In 2020, California’s progressive legislature introduced Proposition 16 to reinstate those preferences and supported it with a $27 million ad campaign. Connerly led the opposition to Proposition 16 with a far more modest budget of only $1.7 million.

California voters rejected Proposition 16, retaining the state’s commitment to equal opportunity, by an even greater margin than the original Proposition 209 received 24 years earlier. In a deep blue state that gave President Biden 5 million of his nationwide 7 million popular vote victory margin, some 3.5 million Biden voters rejected racial, sex, and ethnic preferences.

In a previous column, I noted the disturbing similarities between fascists, Stalinists, and today’s radical left. Indoctrinating the young to accept only the progressive worldview is hardly more than a sophisticated version of Nazi book burning and Stalinist purges.

It’s time to insist on a return to academic diversity and to ensure that all minority public school students get a chance to complete the required high school coursework that will lead to college success.

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