This seems like a perfectly noble goal for people in the business of educating others. Indeed. John Stuart Mill thought of the diversity of opinions as an intellectual “marketplace of ideas” and argued that it formed the very foundation of individual liberty. If recent events at Harvard Law School are any indication, however, what academics mean by diversity is something quite different from the noble goal we all envision.
Derrick Bell, Harvard Law School’s first black tenured professor, is the central figure leading the crusade for diversity at Harvard. Professor Bell has taken a leave of absence without pay this year and vows to stay away until “a woman of color is offered and accepts a tenured position on this faculty.” (Of the school’s 62 tenured professors, five are white women and three are black men.) Bell’s much-publicized decision resulted from his failure to persuade the law school’s tenure committee to extend a special tenure position to a visiting black female professor.
The word diversity at Harvard and other universities is used euphemistically to denote the following physical characteristics: being black, or belonging to some other racial minority; being female; being either openly gay or lesbian, and, most recently, being disabled. This physical topography might be an appropriate measure of diversity if we were selecting fashion models for the Sears Christmas catalog, but what does it have to do with the “marketplace of ideas” we hope to encounter in academia?
The assumption is that by increasing members of disadvantaged groups, diverse ideas are likely to follow. This assumption is both prejudiced and implausible. That black people think differently from white people is a racist premise. It is puzzling that this kind of racial stereotyping doesn’t offend the acute racial consciousness of progressive college campuses like Harvard. Why should we believe that a difference in people’s skin color is likely to correspond to a difference in their ideas? It may well be true that there is some correlation between people’s ideas and their backgrounds. But the color of someone’s skin is only one of many factors that make up a person’s background. The greatest divergence found in academia is among male professors, not between whites and blacks, or males and females. If college administrators truly want diverse ideas, the focus should be on people’s ideas, not their backgrounds, sexual orientation, gender or color.
The intellectual diversity of people is infinitely more complex than a diversity of physical characteristics. It is morally reprehensible to think otherwise. Indeed, it is odd that the same iconoclast academics who denounce the law for its formalism champion so formalistic a view of diversity. Proponents of diversity should concede that they are seeking not diverse ideas, but something more akin to distributive fairness, or equal representation. There may be some valid reasons for attempting to achieve this proportional representation, but achieving it in the name of diversity is disingenuous. Hiring people in a manner that reflects the makeup of society as a whole is usually referred to as a quota system. If quotas are what the academics and administrators are after, then they should be candid about it. The “coalition for diversity,” at Harvard, sounds more palatable than the “coalition for quotas.”
Liberal avant-garde: But something even more fundamental than quotas is at stake. Bell’s decision to protest came at the heels of the law-school administration’s refusal to make a special advanced tenure offer to a black female professor. It was no coincidence that the professor espoused a political agenda that was, like Bell’s, radically to the left. What lies at the heart of Bell’s demand for diversity, like many of his white male cohorts, is not pluralism nor quotas, but politics. In the name of diversity, they seek to preserve control of the liberal avant-garde that has dominated institutions like Harvard Law School for the past two decades. In one of the diversity rallies I attended, held on campus last spring, Bell denounced Harvard for giving tenure to another black professor who had published an article critical of Bell’s perspective on race scholarship. Bell emphatically declared that the law school should simply not hire black people who think like white people.
Curious that he should put it that way. Bell himself advocates views that are more representative of the white liberal establishment at Harvard Law School than those of most black people. Several polls have shown that most blacks favor the death penalty, support stronger criminal-law enforcement, are for prayer in school, are against abortion and are against quotas in hiring. Yet Professor Bell, like the majority of his white colleagues at Harvard, appears to disagree with average blacks on all those issues.
Charles Baudelaire wrote that it was by “universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree.” Perhaps if people begin to understand what some academics have in mind when they speak of diversity, there will be more reluctance to embrace it so wholeheartedly. And yet to begin to understand what is meant by diversity may be the first step in truly beginning to achieve it.
