“Diversity,” Difference, Discrimination

The University of Texas at Austin is (surprise) considering considering race once again in admissions. (Via Howard Bashman)

The Texas argument is a reprise of Michigan’s “critical mass.”

The University of Texas aims to encourage the enrollment of enough minority students that no one feels as if he or she speaks for an entire race, and there are a variety of minority voices, said Bruce Walker, UT’s vice provost and director of admissions. That would teach all students that stereotypes don’t work, he said.

Really? I think it would be more likely to teach exactly the opposite. If minority students do not represent something different, after all, how does their admission contribute to “diversity”?

In any event real diversity, or even “diversity,” is difficult to engineer.

According to the university, 52 percent of classes with five or more students in fall 2002 had no black students and 79 percent had one or none. During the fall 2002 semester, blacks made up 3.2 percent of the enrollment at UT, according to numbers released by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board.

If good education is impossible without “diversity,” it would seem incumbent on Texas administrators to attack this appalling academic segregation. The Texas administrators could significantly increase their “diverse” offerings if they introduced class enrollment by race and refused to allow additional minority students to enroll in classes that already had more than two minority students signed up.

True, some civil rights advocates might regard racial class enrollment as discrimination, as denying an individual choice based on race, but the Supreme Court, with the enthusiastic backing of college administrators everywhere, have already approved that practice. It’s called racial preference.