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.


 
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Diversity Efforts Make Things Worse (Dartblog)