Bob Baird is a former director of admissions at UC Berkeley. In the current issue of Crosstalk, a publication of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, he gives some advice to admissions officers at large public universities on how to implement “diversity” in the post-Gratz/Grutter world.
His advice, all eight points of it, struck me for the most part as bland, boring, banal. Here, typically, is point No. 2:
In achieving its admissions goals, an institution should use a variety of sound criteria in its selection process, and these criteria should be directly tied to its admissions policy statement of purpose.
But even blandly boring banality can occasionally reveal something interesting, however unintentionally. Take a look at Baird’s first item of advice:
A college or university should have a clearly written, formal admissions policy. This policy should be crafted by the senior policymaking body of the institution, and the policy should be tied directly to the mission statement of the institution. If diversity is identified as one of the university’s goals, the policy statement should include a broad definition of that term, making clear that diversity means a student body that encompasses students from a wide range of geographic origins, socioeconomic backgrounds, races and ethnicities, special talents, and outstanding academic and personal achievements.
If I were a quibbler I might complain that the import of Grutter was to give colleges wide, virtually unbounded discretion to define “diversity” however they want. It is certainly not at all “clear” that “diversity” must mean what Baird thinks it means. But let’s not quibble. Even granting Baird his rather appealing definition, however, there is what strikes me as a rather prominent gap in his list of diversifying attributes: religion. The U.S., by many measures, is perhaps the most religious of modern, developed nations, and it certainly comprises more religious persuasions than any nation on earth. Diversiphiles, however, never mention religion, never list it as something important to be represented on the quilt of many colors that is their ideal campus.
Perhaps they retain a faint, maybe even subconscious awareness that a public grown numb to the discrimination required to implement racial and ethnic “diversity” might suddenly realize that state institutions engaging in religious preference would violate an important principle requiring official neutrality. And, my goodness, if they realized that, then….
