November 16, 2006 – 11:57 am
Jonah Goldberg has a great column at Townhall.com addressing diversity and affirmative action programs at universities. I’ve expressed my feelings about promoting or ‘celebrating’ diversity in a previous post. I’ve also linked to columns by Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell on the subject. You can view these posts here.
From Goldberg’s column:
When the University of Michigan’s admissions policies were being reviewed by the Supreme Court, former school president Lee Bollinger explained that diversity was “as essential as the study of the Middle Ages, of international politics and of Shakespeare” because exposure to people of different hues lies at the core of the educational experience.
This is the problem I have with diversity programs: They assume that students at Yale benefit more from being exposed to a child of a black physician living in Connecticut than being exposed to a child of a white farmer living in Mississippi. In this sense diversity programs are racist. There are plenty of potential black students that are more like the majority of white Yale students than many potential white students.
If universities were really interested in building a diverse student body they would recruit students from across the country and from different socio-economic backgrounds — regardless of skin color.
Update: Jennifer Gratz, a young white woman who was denied admission as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, sued the university on the basis that the undergraduate college had unconstitutionally awarded other applicants a set number of points solely for not being white. The Supreme Court of the United States ruled in her favor. OpinionJournal, in an article by John Fund, reports that:
She believes universities could look to socioeconomic factors rather than racial ones when considering applicants. Economic elements “should be taken into account, regardless of your skin color.” (emphasis mine)
Obviously she is wise beyond her years — since she thinks like me.
November 1, 2006 – 8:58 pm
Now Dr Williams is on the record with some good questions about the push for diversity in this country, especially on college campuses. From his article, Diversity Adulation, on Townhall.com:
There are some ideas so ludicrous and mischievous that only an academic would take them seriously. One of them is diversity. Think about it. Are you for or against diversity? When’s the last time you said to yourself, “I’d better have a little more diversity in my life”?
When academics call for diversity, they’re really talking about racial preferences for particular groups of people, mainly blacks. The last thing they’re talking about is intellectual diversity.
Some of my thoughts on diversity are here.
October 31, 2006 – 11:35 am
I’m pleased to find that Dr Thomas Sowell’s thoughts on celebrating diversity are similar to mine. From his article on OpinionJournal:
What is it that has made Iraq so hard to pacify, even after a swift and decisive military victory? In one word: diversity.
That word has become a sacred mantra, endlessly repeated for years on end, without a speck of evidence being asked for or given to verify the wonderful benefits it is assumed to produce.
Worse yet, Iraq is only the latest in a long series of catastrophes growing out of diversity. These include “ethnic cleansing” in the Balkans, genocide in Rwanda and the Sudan, the million lives destroyed in intercommunal violence when India became independent in 1947 and the even larger number of Armenians slaughtered by Turks during World War I.
Despite much gushing about how we should “celebrate diversity,” America’s great achievement has not been in having diversity but in taming its dangers that have run amok in many other countries. Americans have by no means escaped diversity’s oppressions and violence, but we have reined them in.
October 12, 2006 – 6:46 pm
By now just about everyone has heard the terms “celebrate diversity” and “promote multiculturalism.” I went to college too long ago to understand why we need or would want to do either.
There are several definitions of ‘celebrate’, including get drunk at a party and commemorate with ceremonies. But I suppose users of the term mean that we should extol or praise diversity. People have been different for as far back as we have knowledge that people existed. Trees are different too. Will we someday be called upon to celebrate that? I can understand the need to respect people that are different from us, but I don’t understand why we need to celebrate something that has been a part of nature for thousands of years.
In fact, it seems a little arrogant to me. Who is doing the celebrating? Do we have the consent of all ethnic or otherwise diverse groups to celebrate their diversity? I seriously doubt that the Amish people want to participate in the celebration.
I have similar reservations about promoting multiculturalism. In this usage, ‘promote’ means to help or encourage to exist or flourish. Now why in the world do we need to do that? I can understand the need to accept the fact that many cultures differ significantly from our own, and the need to treat them with the respect that they deserve. But there are plenty of different cultures in the world and in our country. I don’t see the need to create any more or help the existing ones to flourish. Again, this would seem a bit arrogant to me. If a culture can’t flourish on its own, then perhaps it’s time for it to disappear. Who are we to think that we can prop it up and help it survive? I believe that we should be promoting assimilation, not multiculturalism.
