DIVERSITY MANIA
By Walter E Williams
WorldNetDaily, OR
Nov 1 2006
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. The 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.
(Column continues below)
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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