Diversity, more precisely, the ideology of diversity, has become the most dominant force in America’s institutions of higher learning. It is a massive project, developed over several decades, designed to provide America’s marginalized minorities with educational opportunities previously denied to them by an oppressive white America. Applying diversity principles such as social justice, fairness, and inclusion, as well as disparate admission standards and curricula, pedagogical elites assert, will enrich the education of all students (including the white majority) by preparing them to be better global citizens in an increasingly multicultural world. During four years of embracing one another’s “race, ethnicity, gender, religion, sexuality, language, ability/disability, class or age,” marginalized minority students will achieve academic success; white majority students will reject bigotry; all will learn that what people have in common is more important than their differences. Diversity, therefore, will produce both educational and social benefits.
And grief. Mostly grief, and vast quantities of it. On America’s campuses, the most notable products of diversity doctrine are the diversity czars, who preside over what historian Arthur Schlesinger, in his 1992 book The Disuniting of America, prophetically called “a quarrelsome spatter of enclaves, ghettos and tribes.”
Marginalized minority students will achieve academic success; white majority students will reject bigotry; all will learn that what people have in common is more important than their differences.
Princeton student groups recently issued a statement condemning “racism, white supremacy, Nazism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, ableism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, transmisogyny, transmisogynoir, xenophobia, and any oppression of historically marginalized communities” that plagues America and their “white-serving and male-serving institution.” Such behavior, they say, exposes its underserved “students of color, LGBT and non-binary students, women, undocumented students, students with disabilities, and low-income students” to horrific grief.
Princeton is not the only campus to witness such expressions of universal grief. The promotion of diversity has achieved no harmony. Instead, it has perpetuated what Mr. Schlesinger found — in 1992! Aggrieved factions huddle in safe zones and cringe behind Orwellian speech codes, trigger warnings, and behavior intervention teams that protect them from offensive language or the grief of microaggression.
The University of Michigan’s Inclusive Language Campaign includes “insane,” “retarded,” “gay,” “ghetto” and “illegal alien” as offensive terms, since they “offend the mentally ill, the disabled, gays, poor minorities and illegal immigrants, respectively.” “Kinky” is an example of a term that only offends black students. “America is the land of opportunity” is an example of a phrase that offends all students. The phrase “I want to die” is proposed for banning. It offends a new campus identity group (one whose rapid growth in recent years has perhaps been propelled by Diversity’s milieu of depression and anxiety): Suicidal-American students.
On America’s campuses, the most notable products of diversity doctrine are the diversity czars.
But no aspect of American education has experienced more grief than intellectual diversity. Diversity proponents reject intellectual diversity, especially the conservative and libertarian variety. Conservatives and libertarians are virtually absent from administrations and faculties, ensuring that students are not exposed to ideas that might challenge the dogma of social justice. Protests, often violent protests, are reflexively launched against speakers from outside diversity’s intellectual bubble.
Alas, grief has even spread to the bowels of Diversity. According to a recently published study, diversity educators are victims of burnout, compassion fatigue, and racial battle fatigue, inflicted by “the emotional weight” of their jobs. Their “consistent exposure to various microaggressions,” no doubt “from unruly students” aggrieved by juvenile, overbearing diversity policies, is considered to be a form “of assault and torture” — ironically, and deservedly, so.
Imagine a beleaguered diversity educator taking shelter in a campus safe house from a heavy rainstorm. He takes off his jacket as he passes the coloring book and Play-Doh area, and lies down on a nearby couch to relax. He thinks about his officious day of soothing the aggrieved, censoring speech, sniffing out bias, and, in general, carrying out the morass of rules designed to ensure intellectual and social conformity at his institution. “Compassion fatigue” brings sleep, and dreams of his pompous job, of what Tocqueville would have called “soft despotism” — the effort, as he said, to enforce “a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd.” He wakes abruptly, snapping upright, quivering in a cold sweat, having mistaken a bolt of thunder for the clash of ideas, and the rush of rain for his dignity swirling around the drain.
