Wood: 'Diversity' cloak for group rights

WASHINGTON, March 27 (UPI) -- Two scholars agreed that racial preferences masquerading as "diversity" are damaging and pervasive but disagreed about the prospects of ending them.

"We can win this thing," said Peter Wood, associate professor of Anthropology at Boston University.

Stephan Thernstrom, Winthrop professor of History at Harvard University, was less optimistic.

Institutionalized preferences going under the euphemism of "diversity" have deeper roots and are perhaps more intractable than Wood's analysis suggests, he said.

The two spoke at a Heritage Foundation forum Wednesday occasioned by the publication of Wood's book "Diversity: The Invention of a Concept."

Wood said "diversity is everywhere" in the sense that it has penetrated and transformed almost every institutional context in American life: schools, colleges, church, businesses, government, the military, the art world, popular entertainment, and the law.

He traced its origin to Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell's "strange, unsupported, stand-alone opinion" in the 1978 case of the Regents of the University of California vs. Bakke. The Medical School of the University of California at Davis had two admissions programs for the entering class of 100 students -- the regular program and the "special" program. In 1973 and again in 1974, Allan Bakke, a Vietnam War veteran, applied under the general admissions program and was twice rejected. In both years, "special" applicants were admitted with significantly lower scores than Bakke's.

After his second rejection, Bakke filed suit in state court, saying the special admissions program operated to exclude him on the basis of his race (white) in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, the California Constitution, and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The California Superior Court found that the special program operated as a racial quota and that Davis could not take race into account in making admissions decisions. The trial court did not order Bakke's admission, however, for lack of proof that he would have been admitted but for the special program. The California Supreme Court, on the other hand, both affirmed the special admissions program as unlawful and ordered Bakke's admission. The order was stayed pending review by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Powell, in a lead opinion, announced the judgment of the court. He said the California Supreme Court's decision was affirmed insofar as it ordered Bakke's admission to Davis and invalidated the special admissions program but reversed insofar as it prohibited the university to take race into account as a factor in its future admissions decisions.

Powell found merit in the university's invocation of the right it claimed under the First Amendment to select those students who would contribute the most to the "robust exchange of ideas" -- even in medical school.

Wood said it is a "strange, ignorant, silly idea" that our race is going to tell us what we think. The claim in education that racial diversity will provide "viewpoint difference" is really a form a stereotyping, Wood said, because it's based on the assumption that each ethnic group has one point of view and a handful of representatives of that point of view will make a difference.

The assertion that race is merely one among many factors in university admissions "is an outright lie," Wood said. "This is not what admissions departments do." Rather, race has been the determining factor in countless decisions over the years.

Diversity has become a popular ideal on its way to becoming a quasi-constitutional principle, the anthropologist said. It frequently trumps claims that all men are created equal and that we are basically a free people.

"When push comes to shove, we find that 'diversity' is doing a lot of shoving. It is telling us that the founding principles of the country were defective," Wood said.

"It has become part of the personal identity of millions of young people who see themselves not as holders of their own rights, but as people who obtain their rights by virtue of membership in groups."

Wood said "diversi-crats" and "diversi-philes" decide who we really are, divide us into categories and allocate rights according to those categories.

The practice results in "simmering resentment" among the supposed beneficiaries in part because "it doesn't deliver." Instead of making one's life richer and fuller, it makes one's life more barren and "puts you in situations of perpetual hostility." The resentment is expressed in most extreme for in the reparations movement, Wood said. It becomes a "slow poison" in society.

But diversity admits of no mistakes. "If it doesn't work, throw another virgin in the volcano."

It's like communism, Wood said. "Give us a few more decades and a few more millions in the gulag, and we'll get it right."

Diversity hollows out college curriculums, the professor said, and makes air travel more dangerous because of Transportation Secretary Norman Mitetta's prohibitions against profiling for potential terrorists.

"The United States is not a place that is defined by common ancestry. ... We are united about a common set of principles about who we are. Diversity wants to take that away from us."

Taking the global ethnographic view, Wood said diversity is destructive in that it is based on the untruth that we are a multicultural society, "when by any reasonable anthropological perspective, we just aren't. The differences we have among us are microscopic by any kind of world scale. But that has to be wiped from our minds. We have to be taught that we are different from each other in irreconcilable ways in order to make palatable the idea that our rights are to be granted through groups."

The engine of diversity is higher education, Wood said, and the university is the mother ship.

Wood said almost every job listing in the Chronicle of Higher Education bears the tagline: "Proven commitment to diversity a must." For the last 20 years or so, almost every college administrator in this country has had to take a loyalty oath before he gets a job, the professor said. Expect resistance from them. They will do everything they can to thwart a Supreme Court decision such as the University of Michigan cases now being considered.

But Wood concluded on an upbeat note.

"We can win," he said. The Bakke decision is only 25 years old. "Another decision is coming. We must keep up the pressure.

"We can take it to the high ground. ... We are, after all, standing for the founding principles of this country."

Stephan Thernstrom was more pessimistic. He is author with his wife, Abigail, of "America in Black and White" and editor of the "Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups."

The historian quoted a statement this week from the president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, Carol Geary Schneider, whom he did not name:

"Diversity has become as basic to our work as the study of science and the humanities."

"Think about that," Thernstrom said. Imagine if a university were faced with a choice. "Either you can give up racial preferences in admissions, or you can eliminate all instruction and research in science. She's saying: 'That's a really tough choice.'

Thernstrom said diversity is a much older idea than Wood suggests. "It is perhaps best conveyed by the related term, 'multiculturalism'. "

He traced the thinking to the early 20th century and mentioned the work of several intellectuals, including Horace Kallen, a student of pragmatist philosopher William James.

In 1916, Kallen wrote an essay in the Nation called "Democracy vs. the Melting Pot." Kallen rejected the idea that U.S. democracy was the essence of the melting pot and advanced the notion that society should be organized and governed in accord with the theory of cultural pluralism.

"According to him, ethnic and racial identity is primordial," Thernstrom said. "Each group has what he called its inalienable selfhood. Thus he argued that the United States should become 'a great federation of nationalities.' "

Thernstrom said Kallen never spelled this out in any programmatic way. But by means of analogy, Kallen thought the United States should become like a great symphony orchestra. The different instruments and sections will all play together, Thernstrom said. But who calls the tune? Who would ensure that everyone played in harmony and at the right tempo?

In the 1960s, well before Bakke, there began "shrill denunciations of the very idea of a common American national identity, denunciations of the melting pot, and assertions of the centrality of ethnic identity."

A positive development, Thernstrom concluded, was the reduction of bigotry and an increase in tolerance.