Interesting View of Diversity

Diversity adulation
By Walter E. Williams

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"? What would you think if you heard a Microsoft
director tell his fellow board members that the company should have
more diversity and manufacture kitchenware, children's clothing
and shoes? You'd probably think the director was smoking something illegal.

Our institutions of higher learning take diversity seriously and
make it a multimillion-dollar operation. Juilliard School has a
director of diversity and inclusion; Massachusetts Institute of
Technology has a manager of diversity recruitment;
Toledo University, an associate dean for diversity; the
universities of Harvard, Texas A&M, California at Berkeley,
Virginia and many others boast of officers,
deans, vice-presidents and perhaps ministers of diversity.

George Leef, director of the John W. Pope Center for
Higher Education Policy in Raleigh, N.C., writes about this
in an article titled "Some Questions about Diversity" in
the Oct. 5 issue of "Clarion Call." Mr. Leef suggests that only
in academia is diversity pursued for its own sake, but there's
a problem: Everyone, even if they are the same ethnicity,
nationality or religion, is different. Suppose two people are
from the same town in Italy. They might differ in many important
respects: views on morality, religious and political beliefs,
recreation preferences and other characteristics.

Mr. Leef says that some academics see diversity as a
requirement for social justice -- to right historical wrongs.
The problem here is that if you go back far enough, all groups
have suffered some kind of historical wrong.
The Irish can point to injustices at the hands of the British,
Jews at the hands of Nazis, Chinese at the hands of Indonesians,
and Armenians at the hands of the Turks. Of course, black Americans
were enslaved, but slavery is a condition that has been with mankind
throughout most of history. In fact, long before blacks were
enslaved, Europeans were enslaved. The word slavery comes
from Slavs, referring to the Slavic people, who were early slaves.
White Americans, captured by the Barbary pirates, were enslaved
at one time or another. Whites were indentured servants in colonial
America. So what should the diversity managers do about these
injustices?

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.
According to a recent national survey, reported by the American
Council of Trustees and Alumni in "Intellectual Diversity," 72 percent
of college professors describe themselves as liberal and 15 percent
conservative. Liberal professors think their classrooms should be
used to promote a political agenda. The University of California
recently abandoned a provision on academic freedom that cautioned
against using the classroom for propaganda. The president said
the regulation was "outdated."

Americans, as taxpayers and benefactors, have been
exceedingly generous to our institutions of higher learning.
That generosity has been betrayed. Rich Americans, who
acquired their wealth through our capitalist system, give billions
to universities. Unbeknownst to them, much of that money often
goes to faculty members and programs that are openly hostile to
donor values. Universities have also failed in their function of
the pursuit of academic excellence by having dumbed
down classes and granting degrees to students who are just
barely literate and computationally incompetent.

What's part of Williams' solution? Benefactors should stop
giving money to universities that engage in racist diversity policy.
Simply go to the university's website, and if you find offices of
diversity, close your pocketbook. There's nothing like the sound
of pocketbooks snapping shut to open the closed minds of administrators.

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Dr. Williams serves on the faculty of George Mason University
as John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics and is the
author of More Liberty Means Less Government: Our Founders
Knew This Well.