Diversity isn’t Working so Well at Dartmouth
The Ivy League school is trying to make things better but it’s not working out.
Dartblog reports.
Diversity Efforts Make Things Worse
If you have ever wondered how it can be that two generations of affirmative action and diversity besottedness have brought us to the worst campus race relations in memory, the Senior Fellow and Associate Director for Curricular and Research Programs at the Rockefeller Center, Ronald Shaiko, has thoughts that will make blood boil in Parkhurst (where the President and Provost seem to think about nothing else). The resurgent Review has a well crafted interview with Professor Shaiko entitled The Diversity Debacle, the contents of which expand on thoughts Shaiko first expressed in a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education: Admissions Is Just Part of the Diversity Puzzle:
Admissions officers have the power to select the ingredients for a diverse campus. But then colleges drop the ball… I have taught during the last 25 years at a variety of campuses, including a large state university, large private universities, a small liberal-arts college, and now an Ivy League institution. I can attest to the fact that the benefits of diversity do not spontaneously arise merely from the presence of a varied student body. It is amazing to me the amount of effort undertaken to create diverse incoming classes while comparatively little is done to create a “choice architecture,” to borrow a phrase from behavioral economics, that would “nudge” students into interactions outside of their comfort zones. Without such nudges, students will default to sameness or, in the words of the political scientist Robert Putnam, they will “hunker down” with students like themselves.
Comments
AA like Obamacare is only about up front head count. Enrollment. That’s the only purpose that’s the only goal. If they really wanted to rollout AA in way that reflects their own stated goals they would grant all AA students one letter grade higher automatically, they would give AA students preference for all on campus recruiting and they would get legal commitments from employers to pay more AA students more money than non AA students and to give them employment contracts.
I’ll take competition over diversity any day. I’ll take skills and a work ethic over whining and complaining about inequality. There is a difference between giving a person a chance to prove themselves capable and rewarding someone because of inherited DNA. Liberal progressive policies don’t work because they are created by idiots, defined by pity framed as compassion and lead to resentment. Teach people how to be successful and not to be envious of the success of others, since whatever is earned always has a higher value than unearned freebies.