You've written a tuition check, carted your son or daughter off
to college, given those last minute admonitions and made those tearful good
byes. For those thousands of dollars, the anguish of seeing your 17- or
18-year-old pack up and leave home for the first time, and entrusting him to
some strangers, what are some of the things you might expect? One thing for
sure is that your youngster will encounter and be bombarded with diversity
newspeak.
Diversity is a big buzzword on college and university campuses.
Diversity has fogged and claimed the minds of campus administrators so much
so that they've created diversity fiefdoms. Harvard University Medical
School has an Office for Diversity and Community Partnership. Brown
University has a Diversity Institute. UC Berkeley has a Diversity Committee
and a Diversity Officer. At George Mason University, where I teach, there's
a Diversity Advisory Board and an Office for Diversity Programs and
Services. At most colleges and universities, there's a diversity or
multiculturalism agenda to propagandize students.
According to Merriam Webster's dictionary, diversity means:
diverseness, multifariousness, multiformity, multiplicity and variousness.
The opposite of diversity is uniformity or identity. For the bulk of
universities and colleges, diversity means race quotas, sex quotas and
programs to insure that representative forms of sexual deviancy become an
accepted norm. To insure this politically correct vision of campus life,
there's one form of diversity that can't be tolerated. That's ideological
and political diversity; there must be uniformity and identity.
According to Karl Zinsmeister's article "The Shame of America's
One-Party Campuses" in The American Enterprise (September 2002), campus
political, and hence ideological, diversity is all but absent. Mr.
Zinsmeister sampled faculty political affiliation obtained from local voter
registration records at several universities. He classified faculty who
registered as Democratic, Green or Working Families Party as members of the
party of the Left and those registered as Republicans or Libertarians as
members of the party of the Right.
The results were: Brown University, 5 percent of faculty were
members of the party of the Right; at Cornell it was 3 percent; Harvard, 4
percent; Penn State, 17 percent; Stanford University, 11 percent; UCLA, 6
percent; and at UC Santa Barbara, 1 percent. There are other universities in
the survey; however, the pattern is the same -- a faculty dominated by
leftist ideology. In some departments, such as Women's Studies,
African-American Studies, Political Science, Sociology, History and English,
the entire faculty is leftist. When it came to the 2000 election, 84 percent
of Ivy League faculty voted for Al Gore, 6 percent for Ralph Nader and 9
percent for George Bush. In the general electorate, the vote was split at 48
percent for Gore and Bush, and 3 percent for Nader. Zinsmeister concludes
that one would find much greater political diversity at a grocery store or
on a city bus.
So what does all this mean? It means your son or daughter will
be taught that the Founders of United States were racists and sexists;
capitalism is a tool used to oppress women and minorities; literature and
philosophy written by "dead white men" is a tool of exploitation, one
person's vision of reality is just as valid as another's, one set of
cultural values (maybe the Taliban's) is just as good as another, poverty is
caused by rich people, and America is destroying the planet.
Americans as taxpayers and donors have been far too generous,
and carelessly so, with colleges and universities. It's high time we began
to demand accountability, not only in the area of ideological diversity, but
in academic honesty and excellence as well. In my opinion, there is nothing
that opens the closed minds of academic administrators better than sounds of
pocketbooks snapping shut.
