An article with the above title has just appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education (link may require subscription). Go read it if you can. By Peter Wood, an anthropologist at Boston University who has a forthcoming book on DIVERSITY: THE INVENTION OF A CONCEPT, it’s one of the best things I’ve read on diversity. Alas, it’s too long to reproduce here, too tightly written to excerpt well, and too pithy to quote on a few items. Nevertheless, ….
Several observers (including me, here and here) have pointed out that the overblown arguments for “diversity,” if taken seriously, would require regarding historically black colleges (not to mention all of higher education in, say, Japan) as the educational equivalent of potted plants. But at least these colleges don’t worship at the altar of “diversity.” The elite women’s colleges, Peter Wood mercilessly points out by quoting the paens to diversity in all the marketing material from the best of them, do. As someone who is on the giving end of a massive transfer of wealth to one of these colleges, this is a matter in which I take an unusually keen personal interest.
Wood points out that the doctrine of diversity “has always been used to advance the claims of some groups and to neglect or suppress the claims of others.” It does not, for example, justify preferences for the learning disabled or ex-felons or Arabs or refugees from (non-Hispanic) dictatorships, etc. “Still,” Wood wryly observes, “there is something a little strange about a college that embraces diversity but persists in excluding males.” Wood calls this
the opportunistic side of diversity: its readiness to justify discrimination in favor of one category (African-American students) and against another (male students) to suit the convenience of the moment.
That element of opportunism is important because it vitiates the colleges’ claims to be interested in the real diversity of humanity. Instead, the elite women’s colleges as a group pursue a tailored and managed diversity…. the diversity that colleges promise is the managed and artificial variety of the aviary or the aquarium, not the diversity of the world as such.
According to Wood, “diversity” is marketed to prospective white students and their parents as something exotic, but the pitch aimed at “students of color” is entirely different.
The diversity message to those students is one of reassurance. It says, in effect, “You will be welcome; your cultural background will be respected; and the college will provide lots of opportunities for you to participate in the mainstream of campus life — or, if you wish, you may opt out of participation in majority-dominated activities. That’s OK with us, too. In fact, we have arranged a whole separate curriculum of ethnic studies, should you prefer to minimize intellectual involvement with the larger community.” A prominent aspect of such appeals is the patronizing promise to provide extra assistance to the minority student to meet the standards and expectations of the college.
Wood concludes:
Institutions that wed themselves to the self-serving lie of promising real but delivering fake diversity deserve to be excoriated. That lie breeds other lies. It gives the public-relations staff a rationale for publishing staged or phony pictures of racial and ethnic harmony. It tempts colleges to betray their admissions standards and to lie and insist that they haven’t. It underlies corrupt choices about grades, courses, faculty appointments, and whole academic programs — which, in turn, perpetuate a deeper dishonesty throughout society.
This large hypocrisy eats away at the foundations of American higher education.
I can’t wait to read his book. Maybe he’ll mince fewer words.
UPDATE – See Erin O’Connor’s perceptive comments here.
