The Answer Is Diversity

When the higher education establishment and its enablers focus a hard self-critical lens on themselves, they see what they want to. Thus, the American Psychological Association publishes something called the Journal of Diversity in Higher Education that features articles such as:

• “Are Engineering Schools masculine and Authoritarian? Their Mission Statements Say Yes.”

• “Does Diversity at Undergraduate Institutions Influence Student Outcomes?”

• “Everyday Discrimination in a National Sample of Incoming Law Students,” and

• “Color-Blind Racial Attitudes, Social Dominance Orientation, Racial-Ethnic Group Membership, and College Students’ Perceptions of Campus Climate.”

The ladies assailing the engineering schools—Emmeline and Lisette de Pillis—toil at, respectively, the University of Hawaii and Harvey Mudd College. Abigail Panter, whose work we have covered, collaborated on the second of these studies and is the sole name on the third.

The Diversity-Outcomes opus was the product of a quintet of authors she worked with including:

• Nicha Gottfredson and Charles Daye, who like Panter, labor at UNC-Chapel Hill;

• Linda L. Wightman of UNC-Greensboro; and

• Walter R. Allen and Meera E. Deo of UCLA.

A quartet of scholars banged out the last of the aforementioned projects;

• Roger L Worthington of the University of Missouri;

• Rachel L. Navarro of New Mexico State University who graduated from the University of Missouri at Columbia;

• Michael Loewy, an economist at the University of Florida; and

• Jeni Hart, assistant professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis at UMO-Columbia.

That’s 11 scholars from 8 mostly state universities on both sides of the Rockies. To borrow a phrase from a great man, it almost suggests “a conspiracy so immense.”

Interestingly, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni found Worthington, Navarro and Hart’s stomping grounds to be somewhat lacking in terms of intellectual diversity. “That’s about what ACTA found when we commissioned a scientific study of undergraduates at the two largest public universities in Missouri,” the group reported.

“Fifty-one percent of the students reported ‘courses in which students feel they have to agree with the professor’s political or social views in order to get a good grade.’” I’ll bet the Worthington-Navarro-Hart triumvirate is worried sick about that trend.

Of course, it doesn’t help matters when lecture hall indoctrination comes at the expense of the transmission of knowledge. Thus it is not unusual to find young women who graduate college able to identify the gender stereotypes in the illustrations that accompany the narrative in Little Red Riding Hood but unable to read the actual text.

Or young men who think that Pearl Harbor is the name of a porn star.

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.