Jeffrey Lehman was dean of the law school at the University of Michigan and an architect of its racial preferences policies. Now he is president of Cornell. He was keynote speaker at Cornell’s “Mosaic Conference” last weekend, and he began his speech as follows:
Integration today does not mean assimilation. Rather, it means a recognition of the value of a pluralistic society in which ideals are shared at the same time that different identities are values. They involve a recognition of the fact that integration does not describe the static demographic mix but rather involves a dynamic process of dialogue. This is a powerful and, to my mind, vital contribution to our society’s understanding of diversity and I want to endorse it wholeheartedly.
If anyone can translate that passage into coherent English, I will give him or her a free, one year subscription to DISCRIMINATIONS, complete with full commenting privileges.
And that was only the beginning. Lehman continued:
“[We] know that classes with meaningful amounts of racial diversity are almost always going to have a broader, more interesting, more challenging range of perspectives presented than classes without such diversity,” Lehman said while explaining the admissions policy of the University of Michigan law school. “The goal was to recognize as one value among many the pedagogic benefits of having within each class a critical mass of qualified minority students, a group large enough to enable each member to feel comfortable speaking in class as an individual, rather than as a spokespoken [sic] for his or her race.” (I’m sure “spokespoken” was an editorial error, not Lehman’s.)
But none of the “critical mass” was admitted “as an individual.” Each one was one more member of the “group.” If they were not considered to some degree as spokesmen for their race, there would have been no justification for giving them preferential treatment in admissions. Not to mention (Oh all right, I’ll mention it) that only one or at most two minority groups are admitted in “critical mass” numbers, revealing again the limited nature of the “diversity” that is sought.
And more:
We would prefer not to rely on racial categories in our admissions process. If there were another path to diversity, we would take it. Maybe someday there will be. Maybe someday white children and black children will really grow up together in the same neighborhoods, on the same blocks, in the same schools, but that day is not yet here, and pretending that it has arrived will not make it so.
Why? What’s wrong with relying on racial categories? If whatever is wrong with doing so can be outweighed by so airy and amorphous a concept as pigmentary diversity (the only kind sought at Michigan, Cornell, etc.), it couldn’t be wrong in any serious way. Another path to diversity? As long as you define “diversity” to mean pigmentary diversity, then you will have to continue “relying on racial categories” to achieve it.
A reasonable person would conclude that when Lehman says that “[m]aybe someday white children and black children will really grow up together in the same neighborhoods, on the same blocks, in the same schools,” that means minority applicants who do grow up in integrated (in the old-fashioned meaning of, well, integrated) neighborhoods receive, and should receive, no admissions preferences because they have no “diversity” contribution to make.
That is not the case, of course, but then no reasonable person would take Lehman’s statements seriously in the first place, at least not as an honest description of why racial preferences are given and how they work.
The Cornell Sun, from which these remarks are quoted, has a Comment feature, and some student comments on Lehman’s speech were encouragingly impressive. Here’s a typical one:
If you want us all to live together, then why the Latino living center? Why the African American living center? Why the Native American living center? Aren’t you promoting segregation?
No. That’s just the new, Lehmanian version of integration.
ADDENDUM
Reader Fred Ray calls our attention to an absolutely hilarious taxonomy of “The Wildlife of Planet Cornell,” by Sara Townsley, a Cornell graduate student.
Ms. Townsley calls Cornell “the most bigoted, ignorant, profligate swamp I’ve ever had the misfortune to call home,” but you should read what she says when she’s not being nice.
“Maybe someday white children and black children will really grow up together in the same neighborhoods, on the same blocks…”
Forced integration? What’s wrong with people choosing to live among their own kind, if that is what they want? Would Lehman use the Fed to enforce our living arrangements?
Why is he concerning himself with this?
The diversocrats seem to have fallen into a muddle. How do you force people to live in a way they don’t want to live?
Once again, a liberal bigot does not think about what he is saying. If whites needs a “critical mass” of blacks around them at Cornell, then why don’t black students needs a critical mass of white students at Florida A&M, Howard, Morehouse, etc?
The only way you can understand this drivel is to recognize it as a subspecies of the academic fad of post-modernism, which regards with skepticism any claims to moral or philosophical certitude. Since nothing is absolutely true or moral, we now need a range of “diverse” viewpoints to look at the world, not just racial and sexual, but also lower socio-economic class, religious, etc.
This post-modernist philosophical stuff is now used as some sort of justification for breaking civil rights laws by the academics, as they spread the disease of their intellectual and moral fatigue to the rest of society. You are right to reject this poison. It is destroying the academy, and it will destroy the rest of us as well.
As for the comment about things changing when everybody lives together blah, blah, blah, its just another reference to marxist class stuff. Justice is only achieved when everyone is the same. Until the great classless society is reached, we must break the law to achieve justice. How romantic! The assumption is that minorities’ low achievement is due to class structure and segregation rather than an inability to perform. Real life works in the reverse.
Reactus writes:
>>>The assumption is that minorities’ low achievement is due to class structure and segregation rather than an inability to perform. Real life works in the reverse.”
And the reason behind your above statement is?
–Cobra
“Integration today does not mean assimilation. Rather, it means a recognition of the value of a pluralistic society in which ideals are shared at the same time that different identities are values. They involve a recognition of the fact that integration does not describe the static demographic mix but rather involves a dynamic process of dialogue.”
This is multiculturalist speak, short for ethnic federalism, which promotes the official recognition of distinct, ethnic groups and rejects the notion of a transcendent American identity. It forsters inter-group competition for power and resources. Tribalism at its finest!
“[We] know that classes with meaningful amounts of racial diversity are almost always going to have a broader, more interesting, more challenging range of perspectives presented than classes without such diversity…”
This bit of wisdom flows from the his first premise — multiculturalism. This moron is actually saying that race is the determining factor in beliefs, values, and attitudes of any specific group. In other words, races are monolithic. There is no intra-group variation, only inter-group variation.
One thing I can say for Jeffrey Lehman’s s speech, it is beyond parody. A speech produced by a computer program that put together random phrases would make at least as much sense as what Dr. Lehman said. It is self evident that the President of one on the top Universities in the US is a blithering idiot.
An anonymous poster writes:
>>>This moron is actually saying that race is the determining factor in beliefs, values, and attitudes of any specific group. In other words, races are monolithic. There is no intra-group variation, only inter-group variation.”
Now, place that paragraph next to that of “Reactus”, who is actually saying that race is the determining factor in performance.
Which is the more problematic position?
–Cobra
I’ll try for the translation prize-
“I like the feeling of power I get from controlling things. If I can arrange the visible characteristics of the student body according to my whim, then I feel important every time I look around me.
It’s even better when you all sit here in agreement with whatever gibberish I make up to “explain” my caprice.”
How’s that?
We overlook the personal endorphin rush that liberal arts academics get from the diversity racket. One of the most hard wired human drives is the will to build, trade, and create.
Liberal arts teachers, unlike the carpenters and cashiers they affect to despise, don’t DO. They just talk and research about what other people do. So all this diversity stuff lets them feel as though they are making something happen themselves for a change.
If you really read and listen to the diversity talk, it is gibberish. But through it all comes loud and clear,
” I will remake the world! ”
Carnival of Education, Week 13
It’s here, the latest of Carnival of Education. Once again, the contributions remind me how many great ideas and great writers there are in the Edusphere. These submissions are elegant, excellent, touching, and enlightening. Enough of me blathering, …
Nouveau Segregationists!
“Integration today does not mean assimilation. Rather, it means a recognition of the value of a pluralistic society in which ideals are shared at the same time that different identities are values…”
The principle distinction between Lehman and his ilk in the Multiculturalist Wing of Segregationists and the more hard line segregationists like the Aryan Brotherhood, is duplicity.
The goal of the Aryan Brotherhood is explicit, but that of the Multiculturalist Wing is wrapped in the rhetoric of “cultural pluralism,” while it espouses and practices segregation rather than integration. For example, Cornell and Stanford have separate living arrangements for the Latino, African American, and Native American students. Stanford has a separate freshmen orientation week for minority students.
At the University of Colorado, your ethnic and gender status are self-ascribed, although you are supposed to indulge in a period of reflection before announcing what you are. Nothing so tacky as evidence is required; indeed, it is discouraged. So you can imagine a Ward Churchill thinking, “A feeble-witted white instructor at $36,000 for the next 40 years, or an ‘American Indian’ department chair at $118,000? This concludes my period of self-reflection.”
I told my wife, a tenured professor, “This is meta-stupid. This goes beyond defending your family by getting rid of your guns. This goes beyond saving social security by refusing investment. This goes beyond reforming the UN by giving it more money and keeping its chief crook in charge. This is so stupid that only a warren of academics could have thought of it.”
High in WTF Factor
Cornell University President Jeffrey Lehman, at the school’s Mosaic Conference last weekend: Integration today does not mean assimilation. Rather, it means a recognition of the value of a pluralistic society…
Lehman is actually a very bright guy, for someone who has bought into the academic establishment so much. Carl Cohen, for example, actually likes the guy despite their disagreement. However, like most who have come into the powerful position he has, he has to make statements like this. The more drivel, the better – because the less it can be interpreted and used against you.
Let me take a crack though at deciphering it. Translation in brackets. [do I get a gilded copy of discriminations, John?]
“Integration today does not mean assimilation. … [Admissions diversity, even though justified by the compelling educational benefits it provides, doesn’t mean that the university has an obligation to work against self-segregation, and indeed, some self-segregation is actually good because it provides a necessary racial identity separate from the national identity – note that the student comments in the Cornell Sun seem to have figured this out],
it means a recognition of the value of a pluralistic society in which ideals are shared at the same time that different identities are values. … [regurgitation of the same point as above, except the flourish of the “shared ideals” isn’t referring to what we understand as common American ideas, but rather the shared ideals found within the group, or tribe]
They involve a recognition of the fact that integration does not describe the static demographic mix but rather involves a dynamic process […race preferences will require many, many years to work, but we must nevertheless use them…] of dialogue. [regurgitation of the same point as above – repetition increases the credibility of the incredible]”
“[We] know that classes with meaningful amounts […critical mass… 10% quota] of racial diversity […use of preferences…]are almost always going to have a broader, more interesting, more challenging range of perspectives […equals educational benefits…] presented than classes without such diversity…” [larger assumption that must be veiled by drivel: people think different if they have different colors of skin]
“The goal was to recognize as one value among many […regurgitation of U-Michigan’s statistic obfusucation of degree of preference used – “one factor among many”…] the pedagogic benefits […science trumps morality, “educational benefits”…] of having within each class a critical mass […quota…]of qualified minority students, a group large enough to enable each member to feel comfortable speaking in class as an individual […winks and nods: the real value of diversity is not really the “educational benefits” to whites as I just told you and the Supreme Court, but rather making minorities feel comfortable…”], rather than as a spokespoken [sic] for his or her race. […rather than teach students the riduclousness of the notion that an individual could be a spokesperson for their race, we’ll quadruple the number of racial spokespeople so that all non-minorities students have the opportunity to hear a spokesperson for minorities and educationally benefit…”
Chetly,
You made a valiant effort to translate from gibberish into English, but it appears that we still need to discover the diversity Rosetta stone so that we can understand the nuances that obviously must be present in all that verbiage. Otherwise we have to assume that that this
Let me try!
“Integration today does not mean assimilation.”
Yesterday, integration meant everybody had to be like the white folks.
“Rather, it means a recognition of the value of a pluralistic society in which ideals are shared at the same time that different identities are values.”
I have to think this was not transcribed correctly, because it makes no sense at all. Maybe “ideas” are shared, and maybe “different identities are valued”. This has at least some superficial sense, but it’s still fairly opaque. Maybe it means that we all realize we should want a pluralistic society in which we talk to each other but we still identify ourselves as black or white, etc. I’ve been around people of other races all my life, and that’s pretty much how it’s always been.
“They involve a recognition of the fact that integration does not describe the static demographic mix but rather involves a dynamic process of dialogue.”
Not sure what the antecedent of “they” is. Static demographic mix would mean X% black, Y% Hispanic, etc., forever and ever. You could contrast this with a dynamic process of integration in which those numbers would wax and wane. I don’t understand this sentence in which he contrasts a static demographic mix with dynamic dialogue.
“This is a powerful and, to my mind, vital contribution to our society’s understanding of diversity and I want to endorse it wholeheartedly.”
OK, what is a contribution? The idea of people talking to each other but maintaining their racial identities? This is really nothing new. The idea of contrasting static demographic mixes with dynamic dialogue? I’ll grant a certain originality of thought there, since I doubt anyone else ever strung all that together.
OK, I’ll give myself a D- at translation.
And this guy is president of Cornell. Wow.
John,
The first paragraph you quoted is certainly one of the most convoluted explanations of multiculturalism I’ve ever seen. I’m not sure it’s possible to clarify it, but I’m certainly willing to give it a shot. I think one valid way to view this statement is from the perspective of the “melting pot” analogy vs. the “salad bowl” analogy.
I once heard a multiculturalist interviewed on NPR, who rejected the melting pot analogy, which she characterized as, “a kind of stew where all of the ingredients are cooked down and lose most of their original flavor”. She rejected this in favor of what she called the salad bowl, which she characterized as “a large assortment of ingredients mixed together without losing any of their original flavors”.
There are at least a couple of problems with this. The first is that she mischaracterizes the “melting pot”. The “melting pot” analogy has its origins in a play of that title by a late 19th-century Jewish immigrant named Israel Zangwill. This analogy is based not on cooking, but in the blacksmith’s shop. The idea was one of several raw metals being heated in a crucible, down to their purest possible essences, and then being forged together, to form a new alloy, which was both stronger and more flexible, and therefore more durable, than any of those original metals would ever have been on their own. It is precisely this idea that has made American society so strong and enduring for so long, and I have yet to hear anyone offer a cogent explanation of exactly what is wrong with that idea.
As far as the “salad bowl” analogy goes, well, I suppose it’s possible for someone to come up with a recipe that successfully combines lettuce, tomatoes, sauerkraut, eggplant, goat meat, raw fish, haggis and vegemite, but somehow I doubt that most people would want to eat that mess all mixed together, regardless of how it was done. In fact, I suspect that what most people would do, is exactly what most people end up actually doing in the kind of societies envisioned by multiculturalists: they would pick out just the parts they like and leave the rest.
The second paragraph is more telling. Multiculturalists believe that racial diversity promotes diversity of thought. But that idea only works if you’re willing to presume that people of different races are likely to think differently and have different values, and you have to be willing to make that presumption based solely on race, as Lehman does. And that’s a racist idea in itself.
Promoting diversity of ideas is certainly a worthy goal of any educational institution. But using race as the vehicle for reaching that goal is simply exchanging one form of racism for another.
Lehman’s speech, at least as quoted, is so convoluted and opaque that I was confident even my talented group of commenters would not be able to make it coherent. Alas, I was wrong. Several of you succeeded, or almost succeeded, and thus you may look forward to FREE access to DISCRIMINATIONS. Of course, shipping and handling will be additional….
Laura Wrote:
>>>Not sure what the antecedent of “they” is. Static demographic mix would mean X% black, Y% Hispanic, etc., forever and ever. You could contrast this with a dynamic process of integration in which those numbers would wax and wane. I don’t understand this sentence in which he contrasts a static demographic mix with dynamic dialogue.
———-
I think you hit on something Laura, the purpose of diversity is always to decrease the number of white men, to increase the number of blacks, hispanics, women, what have you.
I’m sure that Cobra is as horrified by the (still) large number of gainfully employed white men (or the number of white male students) as is Jeffry Lehman himself, and he will support anything which will solve this horrible problem.
Is there any social problem which cannot be solved by discriminating against white men? Listening to Cobra and his like, it seems not.
Funny thing though, I don’t see any signs of the utopia promised as ‘diversity’ increases and whites become a minority. And in the countries where whites are not a majority, things seem pretty grim. The blacks in South Africa are killing white farmers and raping their wives and daughters. This may seem just and right to Cobra and his ilk, but I still have some issues with this raw hatred. Must be a personal thing. Somehow I suspect that were white farmers to be doing this to blacks, Cobra would be at the forefront of the condemnation (of all whites nach) and call this a hate crime. When black Africans kill white men and rape and kill white women (because they are white), Cobra calls it a tradegy, like being killed by a hurricane, it’s an act of nature and no one is to blame.
Rich
Sara Townsley should be the president of Cornell
Hey Rich, just a hunch…but I think I can safely stop thinking that the Christmas card you sent me got lost in the mail, huh?
Rather than take the obvious bait,
I’ll take a crack at the free Discriminations prize.
>>>Integration today does not mean assimilation. Rather, it means a recognition of the value of a pluralistic society in which ideals are shared at the same time that different identities are values.”
Actually, this statement makes perfect sense if you follow the DEFINITIONS of the terms. Without cutting and pasting Websters, to “integrate” basically means I “live with you”, while to “assimilate” is to “become like you.” There are aspects of American culture that go beyond proximity. I live in a city that has a large Hispanic population. There were no legal restrictions to my living, commerce and transactions here, so I have successfully “integrated.” Today is May 5th. I have not taken part of any of the festive Cinco de Mayo celebrations downtown, I speak very little Spanish, and have little to do with the cultural traits and mores of the Puerto Rican and Dominican majority here, so I haven’t successfully “assimilated” here.
Dove-tail into the next paragraph by Lehman–
“They involve a recognition of the fact that integration does not describe the static demographic mix but rather involves a dynamic process of dialogue. This is a powerful and, to my mind, vital contribution to our society’s understanding of diversity and I want to endorse it wholeheartedly.”
Again, using my scenario in Perth Amboy, NJ. I believe the writer is saying that my NOT assimilating into the predominantly hispanic culture should not “discredit” or “render inferior” my status as a viable citizen of Perth Amboy, nor lessen my contributions to the community. In fact, my “diversity” becomes a plus factor, that MAY lead to alternative perspectives and viewpoints to the town’s public discourse. I say ‘MAY” because it’s not a rule set in stone, and as I’m sure some of the regular posters will quickly point out that “diversity of thought” isn’t neccessarily reliant upon “physical diversity.” The Vegas line however, would probably favor my take on the odds.
–Cobra
Readworthies III
A handful of interesting, informative, and insightful articles: news, editorials, columns, essays.
You people have been far too free with the word diversity © . We own all rights to the word diversity © and require forthwith all users of this word to submit full and fair compensation to us, the diversity promoters. For you see, the power to promote diversity © is the power to define diversity © . This is the power to shape societies, and we do not surrender this power to anyone. So, pay up please!
Richard, I don’t disagree that Lehman was being intentionally obfuscatory. Even good people intentionally lie, or exaggerate, or cloud.