Postby crunt » Fri Jan 07, 2005 11:46 am
Diversity Is Overrated
by John Bloom
NEW YORK, February 10 (UPI) -- Let's imagine what would happen if all the "diversity" goals were reached by every university, government agency, multinational corporation and corner frappuccino shop in the nation.
Utopia has been achieved. Each corporate entity is precisely balanced to reflect the exact percentages of every race, ethnic group, gender and sexual orientation in every statistical category, including lesbian Eskimos and displaced Slovenian Muslims.
Would diversity policies wither away, like Lenin's hope for the state itself?
Of course not. There would be diversity problems within the balanced diversity package. A corporation would have enough French-speaking natives of the Ivory Coast to satisfy its African and multilingual requirements, but only 2 percent of them would be in management positions, compared to the 38 percent of transgendered Argentinian-Americans and 29 percent of gay Lithuanian Job Corps graduates.
You would need a brand new diversity policy to ensure there was balance among all the various diversities. You would have to write policies evening out degrees of reward, title, compensation and position, so that no one was left out and no one group was favored over another. You would, in fact, need a bureaucracy to constantly monitor the shifts in human fortune and the ever- present danger of some sub-department of a regional office falling out of diversity balance.
They already tried this in the Soviet Union. It didn't work. Among other things, it wasted millions of man-years in productivity. Today the Russians are glad to be rid of it. Why do we insist on having it?
One of the more remarkable diversity articles in recent years appeared on the front page of The New York Times. A Times reporter sat in on a session of the seven-member admissions committee at Rice University. Rice feels compelled to honor the 1996 appeals court ruling against the University of Texas Law School, striking down race considerations as illegal--but they don't like it.
So what they do now, to protect themselves legally, is to avoid using the words black, African-American, Latino, Hispanic or minority, but replace them with--wink wink nudge nudge-- reviewing essays on the applicant's "cultural traditions," or discussing teacher recommendations that refer to "his Hispanic heritage," or inventing new nouns like "overcome," as in "He's an overcome," indicating the student has had to overcome a background of cultural handicaps. If any of these code words are used, the admissions committee might accept a drastically lower SAT score in order to admit the student.
In other words, they defy the intention of the court, which said: Do not consider race. It's unfair.
A minority freshman entering Rice University this fall was probably born in 1985. So the assumption made by the Rice admissions commmittee is that any education he received between 1991 and 2003 was so tainted by discrimination that he couldn't possibly be expected to perform as well as a white student. Are we so certain that this is true, living as we do in an age of super-sensitivity toward minority education of all types?
There's also an assumption that a dysfunctional home would have handicapped the potential Rice freshman--but only if he's a minority. The upper-class white daughter of an abusive alcoholic gets no extra credit for having a handicap to overcome. (Nor should she.)
It's called social engineering, and its purpose is to create campuses and workplaces that look like a United Nations chef's salad of skin color. The idea, I suppose--I'm guessing here--is that if a white student sits in a desk flanked by a black and a Hispanic, all three students will somehow be transformed.
Unless, of course, they don't like one another.
Of course, that would be unacceptable. Somewhere in the course of this thirty-year effort to force people to mingle, the major institutions of the country have adopted as an article of faith the idea that we need to all like one another. Big Brother here assumes the form of a particularly naive yet shrewish soccer mom, who's constantly shaking her finger at the youngsters who refuse to share their toys. The result is that the child--or, in this case, the Rice student--makes an outward show of sharing the toys while waiting for the moment when they can be snatched and hidden away. Even if he "gets it," he resents it.
When President Bush announced his opposition to the University of Michigan's affirmative action plan--in a brief to be argued before the Supreme Court--he was careful to say that he was attacking quotas, not diversity. In other words, even the Justice Department believes that there's some innate value to be derived from this vague but holy concept.
And yet consider the sheer paternalism of it:
1) It makes the assumption that being a minority is a handicap.
2) It makes the assumption that minorities are less capable of hard work and academic achievement.
3) It makes the assumption that all whites, given a choice, will wield power in such a way as to hold minorities back.
4) It assumes that diversifying skin color in a student body has an academic purpose.
5) When faced with evidence to the contrary--for example, the dominance of Asian students in mathematical and scientific testing--it ignores the evidence. Big Mother knows best.
There are excellent universities--in Europe, in Asia, in Africa--that still use the examination system. The applicant takes a strenuous examination that's the sole basis of admission. If he fails, he can take it a second time. If he fails the second time, he can't attend that university.
They don't ask about his background, his skin color, his home life, or what ethnic student association he was president of. They simply say, "This is the basic minimum knowledge you need to have mastered in order to thrive here."
Nevertheless, their student bodies are diverse. They're diverse because people are diverse--already, without social engineering. What we call diversity is a shallow fake version of diversity--diversity of the outer, instead of the inner, person. We don't know what diversity is
