The greater irony is that it is far from clear that diversity is good for
black students either. Peter Kirsanow, a member of the U.S. Commission on
Civil Rights, notes that there is now ample empirical data showing that the
supposed benefits of diversity in education are fleeting when real and often
are simply nonexistent. Black students admitted to universities above their
skill level often do poorly and fail to graduate in high numbers. UCLA law
professor Richard Sander found that nearly half of black law students reside
in the bottom 10 percent of their law-school classes. If they went to
schools one notch down, they might do far better.
Kirsanow asks: "Would college administrators continue to mouth platitudes
about affirmative action if their students knew that preferential admissions
cause black law students to flunk out at two-and-a-half times the rate of
whites? Or that black law students are six times less likely to pass the
bar? Or that half of black law students never become lawyers?"
But all this misses the point. Today's diversity doctrine was contrived as a
means of making racial preferences permanent. After all, affirmative action
was intended as a temporary remedy for the tragic mistreatment of
African-Americans. But as affirmative action drifted into racial
preferences, it became constitutionally suspect because racial preferences
are by definition discriminatory. If I give extra credit to Joe because he's
black, I'm making things just that much harder for Tom because he's white.
The brilliance of the diversity doctrine is that it does an end-run around
all of this by saying that diversity isn't so much about helping the
underprivileged, it's about providing a rich educational experience for
everyone.
When the University of Michigan's admissions policies were being reviewed by
the Supreme Court, former school president Lee Bollinger explained that
diversity was as "as essential as the study of the Middle Ages, of
international politics and of Shakespeare" because exposure to people of
different hues lies at the core of the educational experience. That's
another way of saying that racial preferences are forever, just like the
timeless works of the immortal bard. That business about redressing past
discrimination against blacks is no longer the name of the game.
It's difficult to put into words how condescending this is in that it
renders black students into props, show-and-tell objects for the other kids'
educational benefit.
There was a time when condescension, discrimination, arrogant social
engineering along racial lines and the like were dubbed racism. And, to
paraphrase Shakespeare, racism by any other name still stinks.