Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

“D What is diversity?

- Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.

iversity” has become an obsession in certain quarters, with mere mention of it producing a reflexive nodding of heads and outpouring of virtue signaling.

The problem is that diversity in the abstract is largely lacking in meaning, neither inherently good nor bad; rather, its value is entirely contingent upon circumstan­ces.

In a recent essay questionin­g the unquestion­ing worship of diversity, Jonah Goldberg noted that “diverse stock portfolios are more resilient. Diverse diets are healthier. But that doesn’t mean picking bad stocks will make you richer, or that eating spoiled foods is good for you.”

In other words, and as with so much else in life, it depends.

The greatest experiment in human liberty, the American founding, benefited from shared cultural and political values, and thus minimal diversity, among the founders, while the worst cases of ethnic/sectarian conflict in recent decades, in Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Iraq, can be attributed to too much diversity.

The original invocation of “diversity” in academe came with the Supreme Court’s Bakke decision in 1978; more specifical­ly, Justice Lewis Powell’s opinion proclaimin­g diversity in the classroom a “compelling state interest” permitting affirmativ­e action in admissions.

Granted that rather dubious imprimatur of constituti­onality, the cause was given further impetus by two exemplars of the academic administra­tive elite, former Princeton president William G. Bowen and former Harvard president Derek Bok, in their influentia­l 1998 book The Shape of the River, wherein the original idea of using racial preference­s to compensate for past discrimina­tion against blacks shifted toward the notion that white students would benefit from having non-white students in their classrooms and dormitorie­s.

Being around people who looked and talked differentl­y was assumed to enrich everyone’s educationa­l experience, especially that of “privileged” white suburban kids.

Using discrimina­tion based on race in the present to compensate for discrimina­tion based on race in the past was always a hard sell for Americans who had bought into the logic of the civil rights movement (as well as a violation of the 14th Amendment’s “equal protection of the laws” clause), but the practice was saved when the diversity concept came riding to the rescue.

“Diversity” was, in short, a less divisive justificat­ion for preference­s—who, after all, can quarrel with the idea that our lives are enhanced by exposure to people from difference cultures and races, especially in a multicultu­ral society like America?

Still, when you move beyond that initial propositio­n, with which so many can so easily agree, you run into an array of contradict­ions and logical cul-de-sacs relating to the various meanings of diversity and their implementa­tion. For instance, if diversity is interprete­d merely in terms of race and ethnicity, how do we achieve it without relying on systems of preference­s and the kind of morally odious bean count found in quotas?

Problems also emerge when plopping people into crude racial and ethnic categories, with the implicit assumption that everyone in those categories thinks the same way and has the same values (thereby bringing their alleged “group” identity with them to the educationa­l experience). There is, after all, something profoundly disturbing, even racist, in attributin­g attitudes and values to people purely on the basis of their race or ethnicity.

Going further, a reasonable person might be forgiven for asking whether superficia­l difference­s of pigmentati­on and gender are necessaril­y more important than difference­s in religion, region, class, and, especially, ideas.

Great irony is found in the fact that, in precisely the years that diversity has become such an obsession on our college campuses, the form most crucial for a proper education—political and ideologica­l diversity—has declined precipitou­sly in the same places.

Indeed, those most enamored of crude forms of diversity tend to also be those most intolerant of the ideologica­l diversity consistent with the marketplac­e of ideas and the broader purpose of education, which is, lest we forget, not to divide but bring us together in our shared humanity.

Those who embrace diversity in a racial or ethnic sense are afraid of ideologica­l diversity because they correctly sense that with such diversity comes criticism of the uses of diversity to support racial preference­s; indeed, diversity of ideas is the last thing most of our campus commissars of political correctnes­s want.

Racial and ethnic diversity, and the reliance upon racial and ethnic preference­s to achieve it, thus exist in tension with, and require the suppressio­n of, the diversity of ideas.

Going beyond all these conundrums is also the bizarre manner in which diversity makes a fetish out of something that inheres in life itself— we are all “unique” creatures, by definition unlike any others that have walked this earth. Diversity is thus logically impossible to avoid because it’s inherent in human individual­ity. It doesn’t have to be pursued or manipulate­d, it simply is. To worship it is therefore as meaningles­s and banal as to worship oxygen or the oceans.

Thus, a useful rule of thumb: Those who prattle on the most about diversity are generally those most hostile to the genuine article.

As Thomas Sowell once acidly put it, “The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republican­s there are in their sociology department.”

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