The problem with this idea is that the diversity that liberal academics love to go on about — racial and cultural diversity — is at best a poor substitute for the type of diversity that actually matters in a liberal arts education: diversity of thought.

Charles C.W. Jang at the Dartmouth Review has the story:

Faculty Diversity at Dartmouth

At a termly meeting of faculty on October 20, the Administration proposed to hire more minority and foreign-born professors. Its five-year plan states that the percent of such faculty will be twenty-five percent by 2019.  Provost Carolyn Dever decried that “as of 2012, minority/international undergraduate student representation was at 42.9% [while] faculty representation was 17.5%.” President Phil Hanlon announced that the College would spend one million dollars to help achieve this goal. (Clearly, achieving a nineteen percent return on our endowment this year has left Parkhurst with burning holes in its pockets.)

It is of note that this thrust is not considered inconsequential, a single bullet point in an interminably tortuous PowerPoint presentation–rather, President Hanlon emphasized this as “paramount to our academic excellence,” and Provost Dever made it the main topic of her remarks to the two hundred professors in attendance. She worried that “high profile departures … could contribute to a widespread concern among students and faculty that we’re falling further behind,” (as if she were a Lyndon Johnson of academia, decrying the Diversity Gap).