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.

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.

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.

Hat tip: Jack Sommer

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.

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.

Will LGBT status or socio-economic status become the next mania among college admissions people intent on making their campuses “balanced” and “mirroring diversity”?

As you can read here, the University of North Carolina is hosting a professor from the University of Illinois who maintains that what “minority” students need if they’re going to understand math is for it to be presented as a “social construct.”

This makes me think of the famous hoax by Alan Sokol — a published paper contending that gravity was a “social construct.” I don’t think this is a hoax, though.

Will a new Grutter case arise out of the blatant racial preferences in use by UW officials?