Draft ’Em! : Release 3.0

Most of you probably thought I was joking when, a little over a year ago, I reprised a number of my calls for drafting students and assigning them where needed to promote “diversity.”

For example, as I had first argued here:

If the yield [of admitted minority students who chose not to attend the University of California] has declined over the past 10 years, that is not the result of [Prop.] 209. That is, 209 didn’t keep those who were admitted but chose not to attend from attending. That was their own choice. [Not altogether frivolous aside: If “diversity” is as important as its advocates claim, draft them! Why should they be allowed to choose not to attend a college that needs them so much when K-12 students who want to attend a different school from the one to which they are assigned are often held hostage to “diversity,” i.e., not allowed to transfer because their leaving would deprive the remaining students of the advantage provided by being exposed to them.

And here:

If our national security really depends on having more women engineers, perhaps women should be drafted and sent to engineering schools.

And here:

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?

And, again, here:

If you agree with the preferentialist assertion that education is impossible without sufficient “diversity,” drafting a few minorities and women to provide such an essential service would seem to be a small price to pay for something on which our society depends.

And finally, at least for this reprise, I noted here that if sufficient “diversity” really is a compelling national interest, then students in many schools

— indeed, almost all students in some entire states — are being woefully deprived of the education they need to succeed in our new global marketplace, etc.

With that in mind, what if the governments of, say, Michigan and North Dakota (black population: 0.7%) agreed … to pay all the expenses associated with relocating several hundred black families from Michigan (many, but not all, from inner city Detroit) to North Dakota, to provide at least a modicum of [“diversity”] there. If there were not enough Michigan volunteers, the National Guard would round up the balance, choosing those whose material conditions would be most improved by the transfer.

Frivolous? A joke? It’s not clear why, since drafting students and assigning them to “diversity”-deprived schools because of their race, after all, violates no principle that the preferentialists have not already indicated their willingness to violate when they make other young students hostages to “diversity” by refusing their requests to attend certain schools because of their race. In addition, as I concluded here,

Every time an applicant is rejected who would have been accepted in the absence of “diversity”-justified preferences, we confirm that individual choice must be sacrificed to some supposedly greater national good.

And now, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported yesterday, the unfrivolity of my Draft ’Em! suggestions has been confirmed by social science.

A study of Berea College students has found that white students who were randomly assigned black roommates as freshmen had a significantly larger proportion of black friends over their time in college than white peers whose first-year roommate was also white…. [T]he Berea findings suggest that students may begin college with misperceptions of incompatibility with students of other races that certain forms of interracial contact can help alleviate.

So, why not require that contact by prohibiting minority students from rooming with each other (on or off campus)? Sad but true, selective schools will not have enough minorities to provide all whites with the benefit of a “diversity”-enhancing roommate, but certain accommodations could lessen that problem, such as

  • increasing the number of multi-student suites, which would allow one minority student to provide “diversity” to several whites;
  • counting Asians as minorities for rooming purposes, and distributing them among the white students. Although Asians generally don’t count as minorities, one of the attractions of using them for this purpose is that it would be very easy for selective colleges to get more of them, simply by dropping the widespread current practice of requiring them to meet higher admissions standards. Holding Asians to the same standard as whites would also have the added benefit of reducing the number of whites, which is what happened at the University of California when race preferences were dropped;
  • requiring participation in appropriately “diversified” intramural athletic sports or other social activities; etc.

Oh, wait. Maybe the Berea study is a joke.

Say What?