Here is a recent announcement at Cal State Chico:
Conversations on Diversity – Spring 2012
As you begin preparing your coursework for Spring, please consider incorporating Conversations on Diversity into your syllabus and encouraging your students to attend. The Conversations on Diversity series (COD) focuses on the complexities of group and individual identities and how they influence one another. The gatherings provide a safe space for members of the campus community to consider the often sensitive issues surrounding identity. COD has been the committee’s attempt to expose and treat the various ills we see reflected on our campus and in our community–xenophobia, homophobia, racism, sexism, classism, ignorance, apathy, etc., as well as celebrate our differences.
The series will be held from 12:00 – 1:00 pm in BMU 210 on 2/22,3/7,3/28,4/11,4/25 (COD Awards). Themes and topics will be announced soon.
According to this Bloomberg story, Americans of Asian ancestry are finding it harder than ever to get into top California universities because school administrators have decided to admit large numbers of foreign students who are Asian (especially Chinese).
This is very hard to square with the supposed need for more diversity (which is why “overrepresented” students of Korean, Japanese, Chinese or other Asian groups have evidently run into ceilings that keep them out, despite superb academic records), but easy to square with the desire on the part of officials to maximize revenues.
In today’s Pope Center piece, Notre Dame philosophy professor James Sterba gives his counter-arguments to the case I made against enshrining “socio-economic diversity” as another goal for elite colleges to attain through admissions preferences. We both participated in a forum back in September at Pomona College where that was the topic. I presented my case against that in a piece we published in October. Professor Sterba responds and I respond to him.
I remain convinced that “affirmative action” — whether to achieve “better racial balance” or to get more students from poorer families into top schools, has minimal and mostly imaginary benefits that come at substantial cost.
Fred Reed has written a delicious little satire on America’s mania for diversity and imagines the effects of the “Look Like America Bill” on college classes, symphony orchestras, and other institutions.
It seems that quite a few of them ought to resign so that their positions could be filled by others who better “mirror the diversity of society.” At least that’s the implication of this recent Dartblog post. I’m guessing that the theory ceases to apply when it comes to the non-diverse people who form the backbone of the diversity-enforcement crowd.
Hat tip: Jack Sommer
According to this piece in the Yale Daily News, Yale’s med school is jumping aboard the bandwagon for increasing diversity in its student body, aiming to include more LGBT students.
I can’t see how aiming at quotas (or “goals” or some other euphemism) for this or any other type of student will improve the overall competency of the medical profession. I can see the reverse of that.
NAS is a “friend of the court” in what could be a landmark case on the diversity rationale for racial preferences in college admissions. Our press release outlines the argument in the amicus brief we joined, written by the Pacific Legal Foundation. An excerpt:
In January 2011, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld racial preferences, but one of the judges on the panel, Emilio M. Garza, wrote a 30-page “special concurrence” to accompany his decision. He wrote that although he felt that the 2003 decision in Grutter v. Bollinger bound him to decide as he did, he considered Grutter a “misstep” which only the Supreme Court could rectify. He wrote, “Yesterday’s racial discrimination was based on racial preference; today’s racial preference results in racial discrimination.” Garza’s opinion may have set up an opportunity for the Supreme Court to at least clarify, if not repeal race-based preferences.
The admissions director at Elmhurst College thinks so.
Will LGBT status or socio-economic status become the next mania among college admissions people intent on making their campuses “balanced” and “mirroring diversity”?
A new study by the Center for Equal Opportunity finds that racial preferences at the University of Wisconsin are particularly acute.
Will a new Grutter case arise out of the blatant racial preferences in use by UW officials?
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