Peter Wood On Diversity

Erin O’Connor (who else?) recommends Peter Wood’s new book on diversity, and a recent article by him about his visit to Colby College to debate it only to find that no one, from the president on down, was willing to debate, even though Colby had signed onto an amicus brief in the Michigan cases defending race-based diversity.

Wood’s article is as good as Erin says it is, and you should definitely read it, and get his book. There is, however, one arithmetic misstatement in the article of which you should be aware, even though it was implicitly corrected in his next sentence.

Wood refers to Colby College’s assertion, in the amicus brief that it signed, that if Michigan is prevented from continuing to use race preferences in admission (and, implicitly, if no race-neutral diversity enhancer is put in place) the number of black students will probably decline from the current 5%-7% of the student body to 2% or so. Wood then observes that “[t]he cited ranges seem to imply that 3-5% of the current black students were not qualified for admission on the basis of their actual performance in high school and on tests.”

That’s not right. What he should have said, and obviously meant, is that 3-5% of all the students at Michigan are preferentially admitted minorities who were not qualifed, or at least who were not required to meet the same level of qualifications as non-preferentially admitted students. That Wood is aware of this is revealed by his next sentence: “That means more than half of the black students at Colby and the other 27 colleges that signed the brief were below the minimum standard for admission of white students.”

UPDATE – I am happy to report that the misstatement was not Wood’s. Or rather, that he had corrected it before publication but FrontPageMag went with the uncorrected draft. He is still trying to get it corrected. It should read: “The cited ranges seem to imply that black students comprising 3-5% of the current study body were not qualified for admission on the basis of their actual performance in high school and on tests.” Meanwhile, let me again enthusiastically endorse Erin’s and Stanley Kurtz’s recommendation that you buy, or at least read, Wood’s new book, Diversity: The Invention of a Concept.

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