The Assault on American Excellence
In 1978, when the Supreme Court upheld race-based admissions in the Bakke case, there was just one Justice who said that the attainment of a diverse student body was a compelling state interest. Today “diversity” is no longer so obscure. Indeed, it is “the most powerful word in higher education today,” says Anthony Kronman.
Kronman is a Yale Law professor and former dean of the Yale Law school. His politics are liberal yet he has not been fooled by the diversity cult. The Assault on American Excellence is his new book, which he previewed in a recent weekend review section of the Wall Street Journal.
Kronman defines diversity in intellectual terms. After all, “who wants to go to a school where everyone thinks alike?” Yet that isn’t what diversity on campus is understood now to mean. Diversity now has political meanings—of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation—and plenty of people to enforce commitments to them.
“The demand for ever-greater diversity in higher education,” writes Kronman, “is a political campaign masquerading as an educational ideal.” Moreover, “the transformation of diversity into a pedagogical theory has weakened our democracy by undermining the common ground of reason on which citizens must strive to meet.”
Kronman discusses the grievance culture on campus, pointing out that what is new and discouraging about it is “the unprecedented weight” grievances are given by “teachers, students and administrators alike.” They bring conversation to a halt and remake the classroom into a political battlefield.
Yet the worst damage diversity has done has been to “the idea of truth itself.” Kronman reminds that truth is not democratic and that it assumes a distinction between what people believe it is and the truth itself.
The Supreme Court has justified racial preferences in terms of their ostensible educational benefits. Diversity admissions thus are supposed to promote cross-racial understanding, break down racial stereotypes, and enable students to better understand persons of different races. Their presence, says the Court, is supposed to make classroom discussion livelier, more spirited and simply more enlightening and interesting when the students have the greatest possible variety of backgrounds.
This is what you find on campus these days. Either that or more assaults on American excellence.
