Few feel-good terms top the hierarchy of campus mumbo jumbo than “diversity.” We must have diversity. Our goal is diversity. There is no greater good than diversity. But what is diversity?
Here’s a succinct definition from economics Professor Thomas Sowell: it’s group quotas. Writing in National Review, he points out the subversive nature of this feel-good term, noting diversity benefits racial quotas, enforces bias and creates inequity:
In the early 20th century, the principle of geographic diversity was used to conceal bias against Jews in the admission of students to Harvard and other leading academic institutions.
Fast-forward to today. It is common, at colleges and universities across the country, for the test scores of Asian-American students who have been admitted to a given college to be higher than the test scores of whites or of blacks or of Hispanics. … In short, something very much like the quota limits that were applied to Jews in the past are now being applied to Asian Americans — and, once again, are being justified by diversity.
But what justifies diversity? Nothing but unsupported assertions, repeated endlessly, piously, and loudly. Today, as in the past, diversity is essentially a fancy word for group quotas. It is one of a number of wholly subjective criteria — such as “leadership” — used to admit students to colleges and universities according to their group membership, rather than according to their individual qualifications.
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