14
Jul
Wall Street Journal: Academia lying about diversity benefits.
CofCC.org News Team
Diversity in the classroom offers no benefits.
From NationaPolicyInstitute…
Two weeks ago, Chronicle reporter Peter Schmidt penned an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal that is one of the strongest statements you can find about the benefits of diversity in the college classroom. It’s entitled “America’s Universities Are Living a Diversity Lie,” but Schmidt doesn’t argue against the basic human good of diversity. Instead, he targets the most popular defense of race-based admissions in higher education: namely, that a multi-racial classroom produces better academic outcomes for students. Proponents of affirmative action in college admissions affirm the learning advantages of a diverse classroom as if it were patently true, and a small industry of “diversity research” has developed to back them up.
It wasn’t always so, though. Back in the 1970s, when affirmative action hit the courts, the educational rationale for diversity was a minor one. Schmidt writes: “In the mid-1970s, when colleges talked about the educational benefits of race-conscious admissions, what they had in mind were the benefits reaped by minority students. And tellingly, the University of California had said nothing about the educational benefits of diversity in defending the UC-Davis medical school’s strict racial quotas against the lawsuit brought by Allan P. Bakke, a rejected white applicant.”
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