Posted on 10/02/2019 5:59:37 AM PDT by karpov
In his new book The Assault on American Excellence, Yale law professor Anthony Kronman traces many of the current woes of American universities back to the use of one word in one opinion in one court case.
That word is “diversity” and the opinion was Justice Lewis Powell’s in the 1978 Bakke case about minority admissions. To consolidate a five-vote majority, Powell’s opinion allowed race to be considered as one factor in the admissions process but ruled out the use of racial quotas or separate minority admissions programs.
Powell’s opinion has, Kronman says, “reshaped every aspect of educational policy and experience. It has bred bureaucracies and changed the mood on campus in ways that undermine the ideas of academic freedom and individual self-discovery that Powell puts at the center of his defense of diversity as an academic good.” Kronman himself supports affirmative action, which he regards as constitutionally permissible “in order to help cure the lingering effects of past discrimination in society at large.” But he argues that Powell’s particular argument for race-consciousness is catastrophically wrong.
The problem, Kronman argues, is that Powell conflated two quite different things.
On the one hand, democracy depends on a premise of equality. As a matter of civic principle and racial justice, all are created equal. But a university is not a democracy. It has teachers and students. It has better students and worse students. It has hierarchy. It is, in a word, an aristocracy—not a social or hereditary aristocracy, but an institution in which individual quality matters and comparisons and rankings require no apology.
It was a tragic mistake, Kronman argues, to impose the rules of democracy in academia. The alleged consequences of this conflation ripple through the book, through its discussions of excellence, speech, diversity, and the renaming of memorials.
(Excerpt) Read more at jamesgmartin.center ...
“It was a tragic mistake, Kronman argues, to impose the rules of democracy in academia”
Yesterday Harvard was accused of not accepting a proper number of Asian students.
I’m thinking that a private university can have any admission policy it wants.
Why is there no mandatory provisions in sports to insure the percentages of athletes match the population? Get back to us when the sports idiots try that.
...Diversity is an anti-religion, and anti-ideology, a nepotism which promotes everything except one's own family.
Diversity therefore equals the destruction of any and all religions and of all positive ideologies.
Because Diversity can only be destructive: whatever IS is insufficiently or inexactly diverse.
Whatever IS must therefore be destroyed in order to make it MORE Diverse.
And there is no conceivable or measurable end to it. Yesterday's Diversity is today's intolerable lack of Diversity.
Diversity is the destruction of Good; and it is the destruction of all types of Good - however defined. All are chewed up and spat out by Diversity.
Diversity is the promotion of chaos by the destruction of Good; and then there-naming of chaos as Good.
heads up
Thanks.
My oldest daughter is teaching English in an EU country for the next year, house sharing with a Chilean and a German.
She now appreciates (as do I) the catastrophic changes in US high school and baccalaureate education between my years there and hers.
What a disaster.
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