The College Fix

Two social psychologists have penned a lengthy article explaining how campus diversity programs do not bring about the togetherness and Kumbaya they purport to create — and moreover are likely dividing students and creating larger racial schisms among peer groups.

The Wall Street Journal article, published Saturday, was written by Jonathan Haidt, a professor of business ethics at New York University, and Lee Jussim, a professor of social psychology at Rutgers University.

In it, they detail a wide variety of negative effects various diversity programs have had on campuses, and criticized university presidents who have pledged tens of millions of dollars for additional diversity efforts in the wake of student protests without exploring whether such programs have been empirically shown to work.

Among their main points:

Diversity efforts create an “us” vs. “them” mentality among students of different races, shifting students into competition with each other, prompting “zero-sum thinking and hostility.”

Agreeing to demands to admit more black students would mean administrators would have to “reach deeper into its pool of black applicants, admitting those with weaker qualifications, particularly if most other schools are doing the same thing. This is likely to make racial gaps larger, which would strengthen the negative stereotypes that students of color find when they arrive on campus.”

Creating ethnic enclaves on campuses backfire, as a study has shown “membership in ethnically oriented student organizations actually increased the perception that ethnic groups are locked into zero-sum competition with one another and the feeling of victimization by virtue of one’s ethnicity.”

Microaggression training is “likely to backfire and increase racial tensions,” because when coupled with “bias reporting systems” it means “faculty and students of all races grow more anxious and guarded whenever students from other backgrounds” are present.

“The policies and programs that universities have pursued over the past half-century don’t seem to be working, at least as judged by the recent campus unrest, so reflexively expanding them probably isn’t the answer,” the professors write.

Read the entire article.

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