A group of students at Lehigh known as “the Movement” is protesting that institution’s lack of “diversity,” but the target strikes me as somewhat unfocused.
A year ago, Lehigh University received nearly 800 applications from underrepresented minority students, and admitted about 350. In the fall, just 53 enrolled. That low success rate at an institution where 4 percent of students are black or Hispanic has set off a series of protests, culminating this week in a march across the Bethlehem, Pa., campus that ended with the students tacking a list of demands to President Gregory C. Farrington’s door.
What do they want the president to do? Track down the 300 students who probably got better offers and demand that they attend Lehigh?
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if “diversity” is important enough to the education of non-minority students at selective institutions to justify sacrificing the right of applicants to be free from racial discrimination, it’s important enough to draft some minority students and require their attendance at those schools. Why should their merely personal and individual interest in their own freedom of choice trump the needs of large numbers of otherwise diversity-deprived students to be exposed to them, especially since the trespassing on the drafted minorities’ freedom of choice would affect only a relatively small number of individuals. (See this recent post for the relevance of this last point.)
And we should force men into elementary education majors and women into physics. Those darned people, picking their majors based on their own preferences, without thinking of the gender balance! How dare they!