Diversity, an Undefinable PropositionBy Ward Clark
July 24, 2023
Diversity has been a hot-button issue for some time now. The Biden Administration intends to spend even more millions of our grandchildren’s money pushing the issue, and while there is some encouraging evidence that the private sector is finding the whole thing increasingly tiresome, be assured that the federal government will continue pushing the issue.
Here’s the problem: The very people pushing the nebulous concept of “diversity” can’t even define it, except in that they want to make sure that it doesn’t include diversity of thought.
“Diversity” is all the rage these days. It even attracts support across the ideological spectrum: demographic diversity on the Left and viewpoint diversity on the Right. For some, it has a magical quality. As Harvard’s president recently announced, to defend the university from those who claim it racially discriminates, “We write today to reaffirm the fundamental principle that deep and transformative teaching, learning, and research depend upon a community comprising people of many backgrounds, perspectives, and lived experiences.” Another defender of diversity opined, “Diversity of all kinds, but especially geographical and racial diversity, is part of what makes education at America’s elite colleges and universities a unique and highly sought-after experience.”
Unfortunately, these demands neglect to mention who should be included in the diversity recipe—the “many backgrounds” that Harvard’s president celebrates—and, equally important, to specify the optimal mix of diversity. Imagine that a group of chefs sought the best recipe for boeuf bourguignon (French beef stew). Nobody would suggest, for example, “only the best ingredients” or “only fresh ingredients.” They would instead focus on the specific cuts of beef or the ratio of onions to carrots. The same is true of diversity—absent details, it is just a vague, useless word. In modern education, diversity is an instrumental value, a means to an end, not a terminal value that exists for its own purpose.
Take a look at that last sentence: “In modern education, diversity is an instrumental value, a means to an end, not a terminal value that exists for its own purpose.” This is precisely correct, although it’s more important to look at university faculty than students. And lo and behold, college faculties are overwhelmingly Democrat.
My sample of 8,688 tenure track, Ph.D.–holding professors from fifty-one of the sixty-six top ranked liberal arts colleges in the U.S. News 2017 report consists of 5,197, or 59.8 percent, who are registered either Republican or Democrat. The mean Democratic-to-Republican ratio (D:R) across the sample is 10.4:1, but because of an anomaly in the definition of what constitutes a liberal arts college in the U.S. News survey, I include two military colleges, West Point and Annapolis. If these are excluded, the D:R ratio is a whopping 12.7:1.
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Source:
https://redstate.com/wardclark/2023/07/24/diversity-an-undefinable-proposition-n781422
