COMMENTARY
Oct. 15, 1995
Diversity has become a form of political correctness

First, it's come to be a code word for racial preferences. Pressured by government talk about goals and timetables, employers looking for workers and universities admitting students measure diversity in percentages.
    They act as if diversity is a numerical variable that achieves its maximum value when every racial group is represented precisely in proportion to its share of the population.
    In the search for "more" diversity, the children of Appalachian coal miners and Vietnamese boat people who are, through no fault of their own, members of "overrepresented" groups, may be passed over in favor of children of underrepresented groups including Mexican farm workers and Haitian boat people.
    When people are officially chosen and valued, not for their individual qualities but for their group affiliation, the result is often a distasteful mix of mutual suspicion and resentment.
    But it's not socially acceptable to talk about the true causes of all this ill feeling. So "diversity" has undergone an Orwellian reversal of its meaning, and stands for an absolute uniformity of politically correct opinion.
    The process is especially advanced at the nation's colleges and universities. In "The Diversity Myth: 'Multiculturalism' and the Politics of Intolerance at Stanford," David Sacks and Peter Thiel have provided a case study. It's just been published by The Independent Institute in Oakland.
    The authors are both recent Stanford survivors. Sacks graduated in 1994 and Thiel in 1989. Thiel, who also graduated from Stanford law school in 1992, helped to start the Stanford Review, a conservative alternative publication, in 1987.
    The Review is now weekly and it's mostly supported by alumni donations, Thiel said in an interview earlier this month. That makes it extremely unpopular with the university's administration, he said, first because the money might otherwise be contributed directly to the school, and second because alumni are alienated when they find out about "the really crazy things that happen."
    People who affect to believe that political correctness is merely a phantom of the conservative imagination are fond of saying that
the same few isolated incidents are endlessly recycled. Stanford has contributed more than its share of these well-known controversies and Thiel and Sacks pay them due attention.
    For instance, the university replaced its core courses in Western Civilization with a new sequence called "Culture, Ideas, and Values" in 1988. The language adopted by the faculty required the classes "to give substantial attention to the issues of race, gender and class during each academic quarter" and stressed the recruitment of minority faculty, as well as those with expertise in non-European cultures, to teach the new courses.
    But expertise counts for less than ethnicity, it seems, because the university also set up a "Faculty Incentive Fund" for departments to encourage them "to make faculty appointments of members of targeted racial/ethnic groups by providing special, additional funds for such an appointment."
    The new courses are much less popular with students than the old ones, Thiel said. "When you get rid of the canon, that just allows profs to canonize their biases."
    Those biases tend to lean toward the left. In 1994, Stanford senior Adman Verjee updated an earlier study of voting records and found that more than 80 percent of the professors who were registered to vote were Democrats and fewer than 10 percent were Republicans. The score was 22-2 in history, 31-2 in English, and 20-0 in psychology.
    Such imbalances could result from deliberate hiring choices, or just from the discomfort we are all assumed to feel when confronted with persons unlike ourselves and perspectives different from our own. Or it could be the lack of role models. These are all reasons alleged, by supporters of multiculturalism, to account for the absence of certain groups on campus and to justify extraordinary measures to recruit them.
    But no one is arguing in favor of recruiting people with minority opinions, and that's the myth of diversity. It's supposed to be all about inclusiveness, but the cruel truth is that only certain kinds of diversity count.
    That message is ceaselessly imposed on students, and not just in their courses. Stanford's Residential Education office devotes itself to indoctrination in every detail of dsily life. Resident fellows and assistants see themselves primarily as educators, who busy themselves "organizing programs focused on social and political issues, multiculturalism, issues of sexuality, issues of race, gender and class, etc." as one resident fellow put it.
    Residents of several dormitories were traumatized by a series of fake kidnappings, staged to raise the consciousness of students about government brutality in Latin America.
In a freshman dorm, Donner Hall, students who were asked to redecorate the rec room covered three walls of a rec room with violent and vulgar graffiti. Students who objected to the message responded with their own graffiti, of a more conservative stripe, on the fourth wall. "Peace flamers suck granola,'' said one in response to a comment I can't put in the newspaper. But only the comments on the fourth wall created outrage.
    Sacks and Thiel present a series of such incidents, less widely reported than the uproar over Stanford's curriculum but more troubling because they show how far those in charge of universities are willing to go to intrude on students' privacy and their freedom of conscience.
    Former President Donald Kennedy led Stanford's attempt to step over into the multicultural future, and by the time he left even he was hinting that it had not worked very well.
    "From time to time," Kennedy said, "I indicated a worry that multiculturalism would become a kind of political ideology of its own."
Kennedy was right to worry.