Sometimes it seems as if "diversity" is going to replace "the" as the most often used word in the English language. Yet the place where this word has become a holy grail -- academia -- shows less tolerance for genuine diversity of viewpoints than any other American institution.
In a book titled "The College Admissions Mystique," an admissions office official at Brown University is quoted as setting ideological litmus tests for applicants. An outstanding high school record would not be enough get admitted, because such records were seen as signs of people who had sold out to traditional ways of thinking -- and who envisaged careers in establishment professions. He called such students "Reptilian."
What the admissions official wanted were "with it" kids, socially and politically aware -- "bellwethers" who "would have a following later on." In other words, he did not want pillars of society but politically correct pied pipers who could head ideological movements.
In other words, diversity of viewpoints is not welcome. Diversity of physical appearance is the be-all and end-all, but diversity of thought is no more welcome than it has been under the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Such narrowness is not confined to Brown University. Nor is it confined to admissions offices. Increasingly, ideological litmus tests are applied to the hiring of professors. Candidates for faculty positions report being asked openly ideological questions.
One young scholar who has published very careful and important research that reached politically incorrect conclusions reports being treated with calculated discourtesy and boorishness during job interviews. It was not enough for the cultural commissars to turn him down, they had to try to humiliate him.
This particular scholar has now been hired by a conservative think tank on the east coast. But the real harm that has been done has been done to students who will never learn that there is a factual and reasoned alternative to the one-sided propaganda they will hear in their classrooms.
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