The Downside Of Diversity

On American campuses, the dogmatic embrace of identity politics has damaged not just the pursuit of truth but the independence ofmind necessary for democracy to flourish.

“Diversity” is the most powerful word in higher education today. No other has so much authority. Older words, like “excellence” and “originality,” remain in circulation, but even they have been redefined in terms of diversity.

At Yale, where I have taught for 40 years, a large bureaucracy exists to ensure that the university’s commitment to diversity is rigorously enforced—in student admissions, faculty hiring and curricular design. Yale has an Office of Diversity and Inclusion, a Dean of Diversity and Faculty Development, an Office of Gender and Campus Culture and a dizzying array of similar positions and programs. At present, more than 150 full-time staff and student representatives serve in some pro-diversity role.

Yale’s situation is far from exceptional. “Diversity and inclusion” is a dogma repeated with uniform piety in the official pronouncements of nearly every college and university. At Dartmouth, the Office of Pluralism and Leadership “engages students in identity, community and leadership development, advancing Dartmouth’s commitment to academic success, diversity, inclusion and wellness.” The University of Michigan proclaims that “diversity is key to individual flourishing, educational excellence and the advancement of knowledge.” At the University of Oklahoma, students are required to complete a mandatory “Freshman Diversity Experience” by the end of their first semester.

That diversity should be a value seems beyond dispute. The existence on campus of a range of beliefs, values and experiences is essential to the spirit of inquiry and debate that lies at the heart of academic life. Who wants to go to a school where everyone thinks alike?

But diversity, as it is understood today, means something different. It means diversity of race, \ ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation. Diversity in this sense is not an academic value. Its origin and aspiration are political. The demand for evergreater diversity in higher education is a political campaign masquerading as an educational ideal. The demand for greater academic diversity began its strange career as a pro-democratic idea. Blacks and other minorities have long been underrepresented in higher education. A half-century ago, a number of schools sought to address the problem by giving minority applicants a special boost through what came to be called “affirmative action.” This was a straightforward and responsible strategy.

Diversity is not an academic value. Its origin and aspiration are political.

But in 1978, in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the Supreme Court told American colleges and universities that they couldn’t pursue this strategy directly, by using explicit racial categories. It allowed them to achieve the same goal indirectly, however, by arguing that diversity is essential to teaching and learning and requires some attention to race and ethnicity. Schools were able to continue to honor their commitment to social justice but only by converting it into an educational ideal.

The commitment was honorable, but the conversion has been ruinous. The effects of racial prejudice have always been the greatest slur on our commitment to democratic equality. But the transformation of diversity into a pedagogical theory has weakened our democracy by undermining the common ground of reason on which citizens must strive to meet. The crucial confusion is the equation of a diversity of ideas with diversity of race, ethnicity and sexual preference. This has several pernicious effects.

One is that it encourages minority students, and eventually all students, to think that a departure from the beliefs and sentiments associated with their group is a violation of the terms on which they were admitted to the university. If students contribute to the good of diversity by expressing the racially, ethnically or sexually defined views that members of their group are expected to share, then a repudiation or even critical scrutiny of these views threatens to upset the school’s entire educational program. It takes special nerve for an African-American student to defend inner-city policing or a gay student to support the baker who refuses to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple.

For this program to work, it is essential that students remain in the corners to which they have been assigned. Indeed, it is not enough merely to recognize that the members of each group contribute some distinctive dimension to their school’s diversity.

To reassure those whose groups have been the victims of social prejudice and discrimination, extra deference must be given to their life experience. The members of more privileged groups must be taught to “check their privilege,” and the identity of minority students must be treated as a possession that no one else may “appropriate,” in however well-meaning a way. The upshot is that students are lauded for the beliefs and feelings they bring to their school on account of their separate identities, rather than being reminded of what they all stand to gain by being there—the inestimable privilege of joining in a rational inquiry that subjects every one of their sentiments and beliefs to the same rigorous demand for explanation and justification.

In politics, group solidarity is a condition of success. But in college, it is an obstacle to the pursuit of what Walt Whitman colorfully called the “idiocracy” of individual temperament and expression that sets each of us apart from every other. The politically motivated and group-based form of diversity that dominates campus life today discourages students from breaking away, in thought or action, from the groups to which they belong. It invites them to think of themselves as representatives first and free agents second. And it makes heroes of those who put their individual interests aside for the sake of a larger cause. That is admirable in politics. It is antithetical to one of the signal goods of higher education.

This is one of the things people mean when they say that campus life has become “politicized.” It also helps to explain the culture of grievance that is so prominent there. Examples are legion. At Yale, where the heads of the undergraduate residences used to be called “masters,” students successfully campaigned to have the title changed because it reminded them of an antebellum plantation. Last year, a yoga club at American University was disbanded after complaints that it invited a non-Indian group to perform a dance based on the Ramayana, a classical Hindu epic. At Oberlin, all classes were canceled and a communitywide gathering called when someone dressed in what appeared to be a KKK costume was spied on campus.

It proved to be a woman in a blanket. Grievance is the stuff of political life. In politics, it is normal for one group to highlight its suffering and to demand reparations from another group or a greater share of its power. This is especially true where questions of racial justice are concerned. Here, the tempera- ture is sometimes high enough to melt decorum and goodwill.

“Whatever else it may be, the truth is not democratic. We don’t decide what is true by a show of hands.

Academic disagreements are different. Important ones are often inflamed by passion too. But the goal of those involved is to persuade their adversaries with better facts and arguments—not to bludgeon them into submission with complaints of abuse, injustice and disrespect to increase their share of power. Today, the spirit of grievance has been imported into the academy, where it undermines the common search for truth by permeating it with a sense of hurt and wrong on the part of minority students, and guilt on the part of those who are blamed for their suffering.

The life of the classroom is transformed as a result. It is common to hear complaints that an assigned text is disrespectful of women, blacks, the gender-fluid or some other oppressed or marginalized group. White, male, heterosexual students are often attacked on the grounds that their comments reflect a smug and privileged view of the world. Such complaints are hardly new. I have heard versions of them at Yale for the past 40 years.

What is new and discouraging about today’s academic culture is the unprecedented weight that these grievances are given by teachers, students and administrators alike. Even to raise them puts one on a high moral ground that requires all other considerations to be put aside until the grievance has been assuaged by an appropriate act of apology or reform. Raising it amounts to a demand. It brings the conversation to a halt. It converts the classroom from an open space for the free exchange of ideas into a political battleground.

In today’s academic culture, grievances are given unprecedented weight by teachers and students alike.

Yet even this does not fully capture the harm that the contemporary understanding of diversity has done to our colleges and universities. The greatest casualty is the idea of truth itself, on which the whole of academic life depends. Whatever else it may be, the truth is not democratic. We don’t decide what is true in mathematics or history or philosophy by a show of hands. The idea of truth assumes a distinction between what people believe it is and the truth itself. Socrates drove this point home in every conversation he had. It might be called the Socratic premise of all intellectual inquiry.

A corollary is that I am not entitled to call something true merely because I believe or feel it to be true. My beliefs and feelings are not trumps that I can play in a debate about the truth of any claim. It wrecks the Socratic adventure to say that as a (female, black, Jewish, Muslim, gay or trans person—fill in the blank) I see things from a point of view to which others have no access and that my perspective is authoritative because I have been the victim of hatred and mistreatment. In a genuine search for the truth, my feelings and beliefs must be subjected to the same review as everything else. They may be a source of information and an indication of how strongly I hold the view I do. But they can never, by themselves, validate my position.

For college students, the search for truth is important not because reaching it is guaranteed—there are no such guarantees—but as a discipline of character. It instills habits of self-criticism, modesty and objectivity. It strengthens their ability to subject their own opinions and feelings to higher and more durable measures of worth. It increases their self-reliance and their respect for the values and ideas of those far removed in time and circumstance. In all these ways, the search for truth promotes the habit of independent-mindedness that is a vital antidote to what Tocqueville called the “tyranny of majority opinion.”

The relentless campaign for diversity and inclusion on campus pulls in the opposite direction. Motivated by politics but forced to disguise itself as an academic value, the demand for diversity has steadily weakened the norms of objectivity and truth and substituted for them a culture of grievance and group loyalty. Rather than bringing faculty and students together on the common ground of reason, it has pushed them farther apart into separate silos of guilt and complaint.

The damage to the academy is obvious. But even greater is the damage to our democratic way of life, which needs all the independent- mindedness its citizens and leaders can summon—especially at a moment when our basic norms of truthfulness and honesty are mocked every day by a president who respects neither. Tocqueville was an enthusiastic admirer of America’s democracy. He thought it the most just system of government the world had ever known. But he was also sensitive to its pathologies. Among these he identified the instinct to believe what others do in order to avoid the labor and risk of thinking for oneself. He worried that such conformism would itself become a breeding ground for despots.

As a partial antidote, Tocqueville stressed the importance of preserving, within the larger democratic order, islands of culture devoted to the undemocratic values of excellence and truth. These could be, he thought, enclaves for protecting the independence of mind that a democracy like ours especially needs.

Today our colleges and universities are doing a poor job of meeting this need, and the idea of diversity is at least partly to blame. It has become the basis of an illiberal and antirational academic cult—one that undermines the spirit of self-reliance and the commitment to truth on which not only higher education, but the whole of our democracy, depends.

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British final High School exams: Science scores low

Encouraging more pupils to take science A levels has been called into question by research that suggested it is harder to secure a respectable pass in these subjects than in most other options.

An analysis of last year’s A level results found that chemistry, biology and physics had among the lowest proportions of students securing a C grade or above. The C grade is considered the lowest respectable pass. While a D or E grade is technically a pass, it signals a weak grasp of the subject and makes it hard to get into a good university.

After years of campaigning, this year’s results, out on Thursday, will show thousands more pupils are taking physics, chemistry and biology. The subjects all attracted more entries this year than the year before, despite a demographic dip that led to falls in most subjects. However, the researchers say that those of weaker ability may be better off doing other subjects.

In 2018, 11 per cent of pupils got an A* in physics, 9 per cent in chemistry and 8 per cent in biology. In history, only 6 per cent got A*s. However, 27 per cent of pupils taking physics and biology got a D, E or U and 22 per cent in chemistry. This compares with 12 per cent in geography and history.

“In the sciences we thus have a pattern of the high-flyers hoovering up top grades but the general performance being below average,” Professor Alan Smithers, director of the centre for education and employment research at the University of Buckingham, said. “Take-up has been rising in recent years in response to the drive to increase the numbers studying STEM [science, technology, engineering and maths]. But the relatively poor average performance raises the question of whether too many are being drawn in when their abilities do not lie in this direction.”

Examiners have more scope to give pupils the benefit of the doubt in the humanities, social sciences and the arts.

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Australia: Young people who skip university and pick up a trade will make MORE money in their lifetime than their friends saddled with student debt

Young people who skip university for vocational courses could find themselves better off with higher wages and no HECS debt, according to a new report.

Research taken out by the Grattan Institute, in Victoria, found that students are being told inaccurate information about employment.

Grattan's program director Andrew Norton said well-paying trade jobs are facing a skills shortage while those students undertaking degrees in science and humanities are struggling to get jobs.

Those enrolling in university courses has increased by a third in the past decade with more students with lower ATAR scores attending than ever before.

Meanwhile students taking trades-based courses has plummeted 43 per cent in the past five years.

It is estimated that Australia will need up to a million workers with vocational qualifications by 2023 if it is keep up with demand.

Grattan's researchers found that young men with low ATAR scores were at a significant disadvantage if they didn't pick up a trade.

'I think there is a lot of cultural pressure to go to university, kids often need a good reason for why they are not going to go to uni rather than why they should go,' Mr Norton said. 

'What often happens in these (professional) careers is that people struggle to secure the higher position jobs and end up falling down to lower level positions that earn less.'

Mr Norton said that engineering-related industries, such as maintaining equipment in the field, construction and working in telecommunications offered some of the best career opportunities.  'A lot of people can earn a couple of thousand (dollars) a week in these jobs.' he said.

However women often struggle in trade industries with few pursuing the male dominated careers and those that do, struggle to maintain a career long term.

'It really seems like there are big barriers to these fields, employers aren't sympathetic to part time work or maternity leave so women often go elsewhere,' he said.

Instead women with low ATAR scores are better off pursuing options such as teaching and nursing that offer far more career stability.

'Even though you are never going to be rich you are going to have a reliable career and that makes it very attractive to some people.'

Mr Norton said there is misconception often held by teachers and parents that students will perform better in university regardless of their skill set or ability.

'Career advice in schools is often patchy at best,' Mr Norton said. 'Schools need to give students better career advice alerting them to these possibilities – and governments should end funding biases against vocational education.'

The report said universities often take in students regardless of their ATAR score which is often to the student's detriment. 

'They are more likely to fail subjects and get low marks, and when they finish their courses are less likely to find professional jobs or earn high salaries,' the report reads.  

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