The Diversity Profession: YOU SPELLED ‘RACKET’ WRONG

Posted at 7:10 am by Ed Driscoll   

YOU SPELLED ‘RACKET’ WRONG: The Diversity Profession.

In the 1960s, universities caved to the demands of radicals on campus by expanding academic departments to include women’s studies, black studies, and, more recently, “queer studies.” These programs are college mainstays, making up in ideological vigor what they lack in academic rigor.
But it wasn’t until the ’80s and ’90s that universities began to expand their support of nonacademic centers offering extracurricular programs to promote what they called diversity and inclusion. In practice they did just the opposite. Universities such as Cornell offered students race-specific dormitories. The goal was to make minority students feel more at home on campus. And though schools couldn’t officially discriminate regarding who was placed in these race-designated dorms, self-segregation resulted.
Today, most of the ferment on campus comes not from academic departments—even the most politically charged ones—but from diversity centers and the faculty and administrators who staff them. At Yale, for instance, the Afro-American Cultural Center hosts a “Black Solidarity” conference each year. Its Social Justice programming includes a Black Lives Matter series. The emphasis of these centers is not just academic study but social action.
Another such diversity outfit at Yale is the Intercultural Affairs Council, which sparked a controversy last October with an email to students warning them not to wear racially or culturally insensitive Halloween costumes. One contrarian lecturer made the mistake of disagreeing. Protests ensued. By the time the fuss was over, the university had committed $50 million for diversity training and recruiting.

The student “activists” are usually just tools of these educrats. Plus:

Rather than offering them more resources, college administrators should reduce their ranks and eventually get rid of them altogether. As professors Jonathan Haidt of New York University and Lee Jussim of Rutgers recently noted in the Wall Street Journal, most of the diversity-promotion efforts on campus actually increase resentment on the part of both white and minority students. “There may be academic reasons for creating these ethnic centers,” Haidt writes, “but if the goal of expanding such programs is to foster a welcoming and inclusive culture on campus, the best current research suggests that the effort will backfire.”

Yes.

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