The Diversity Tapdance - John

The Diversity Tapdance - John Fund, on how badly the "diversity" movement has failed to convince even liberal college professors of its value - and the lengths they're going to in covering their tracks:

That negative attitude may be wholly the result of the methods used to produce diversity. Those methods have silent majorities opposing them. A majority of faculty members oppose relaxing academic standards in order to promote diversity. Even administrators, who oversee diversity policies, are sharply divided, with a full 48% opposing racial preferences. While two-thirds of administrators don't believe that admitting minority students with lower academic qualifications affects academic standards, those who believe they have a negative effect outnumber those who think they have positive effects by a margin of 15 to 1. "Those who argue that diversity will improve the education of everybody haven't made their case," concludes Mr. Rothman. "The data do not support them."

Maybe that's why an obviously frantic University of Michigan felt compelled to collect a record-breaking 78 friend-of-the-court briefs supporting its position...

...The briefs backing Mr. Bollinger came from dozens of leading companies, labor unions, three former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and members of Congress. All of them cite diversity's benefits, but they offer scant evidence and little data.

Indeed, some engage in outright deception. Peter Wood, a professor of anthropology and author of "Diversity: The Invention of a Concept," was appalled at what some of the material in the briefs--and he looked at only a few of them. Indiana University's law school, for example, claimed that it gave great weight to law school board scores and undergraduate grades in determining admissions. The school claimed that race was at the end of a long list of "other factors" it looked at. In reality, half of the students are admitted on the basis of their test scores and half of those go into a pool where race is a prime factor in the decision. The Hoosier Review, a student publication, quoted a former admissions committee member as saying that "to meet de facto quotas, we leapfrog less qualified minority applicants over approximately 330 more qualified nonminority applicants." An internal law school memo mentioned the "concern that a minimum of five blacks per section of the first years class is needed." But in practice the quota is a ceiling as well as a floor. Indiana University has seen the number of black applicants to its law school nearly double in the past three years, but the number of blacks admitted is a rigid number (52, 52 and 53).

I'll be writing - maybe later today - a piece on how this movement has reflected itself in the St. Paul Public School system.

Posted by Mitch at April 3, 2003 07:11 AM