Diversity Without Dissent

There is one type of diversity that university officials are manifestly hostile to: diverse viewpoints critical of the policies which they are pursuing.

“I’ve tried opposing affirmative action and I’m no longer invited to sit on committees,” University of Pennsylvania law school professor Amy Wax said at the Cato Institute on September 15, 2016. Anyone who dissents, as a she did, faces a university “monoculture,” and risks “marginalization, even ostracism.”

That universities are wedded to the idea is particularly ironic, Wax noted at the Constitution Day conference, because “Few universities have competitive entry in admissions.” They don’t reject that many applicants to begin with.

Moreover, “Affirmative action has long ceased to be a tie-breaker in Civil Rights,” Wax asserts. Indeed, she notes that studies, such as one done at Duke a few years ago, show that blacks often do better in Historically Black Colleges and Universities, particularly in the hard sciences: They tend to drop out of them when in the universities that make the U. S. News top ten lists.

Nevertheless, “Universities don’t care if minorities drop out of Physics as long as they stay [in the university system], even in another major,” Wax alleges, and she is in a position to know.

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