From this week’s NY Times Magazine, “Forget Diversity: Affirmative action isn’t about a nice mix of college students. It’s about fixing our failure to educate minorities.”
And my impression from talking to students at two campuses of the University of California, and at the University of Texas Law School, is that for most white students diversity is a pleasant side benefit, like a nice library. It was, on the other hand, a tremendous boon to minority students, who otherwise would have attended less elite institutions….
I’m not even sure what to say about that first bit. Many (but not all) white folks don’t care about diversity and what that brings to their educational experience? I bet those same people don’t even realize how different their campuses would be were it not for the presence of minority students. It mirrors what Richard Florida talks about in Rise of the Creative Class. While someone may not be inclined to participate in all the various diverse cultural opportunities a city may have to offer, just the fact that it’s there makes a city a much more appealing place to be.
In addition to the longstanding problem of disadvantaging some in order to advantage others, the diversity rationale also insultingly assumes that black students bring a black ”point of view,” Asians an Asian one and so on, thus reifying the very barriers of race and ethnicity that affirmative action is meant to erase. And why should racial and ethnic ”points of view” outweigh those forged by class or culture? Why, as a professor recently suggested to me, shouldn’t the presence of the R.O.T.C. on campus be seen as a means to ensure representation of a ”military” point of view otherwise absent from elite universities?
When I was in school, I heard the concept of socioeconomic class-based considerations kicked around a lot, mainly because of the above paragraph. I didn’t live much of a “black” upbringing and I sure don’t feel like I bring much of a “black point of view” as that’s not really the world I exist in. Appearances are not everything.
Diversity distracts us from a simple but painful truth, which is that persistent black educational failure (and Hispanic failure, to a lesser extent) has made it impossible for the most selective schools to become substantially integrated using their own traditional criteria of merit. The problem is minority access to elite institutions, not white access to minority students.
This nicely complements the point that elminating race-based consideration in college admissions only perpetuates the already jacked up secondary education system.
Sometimes I feel like we could make everyone happy if they just knocked the “minority bonus” down to 10 points (instead of the 20 points that it is now) or whatever it is that Yoopers get for being a Yooper and legacies get for being legacy and women get for being women. And why don’t gay people get to check a box?
