An Amazing Diversity Plan at Madison
John Leo
A
remarkable article on the University of Wisconsin (Madison) appeared yesterday
on the John William Pope Center site. In it, UW economics professor W. Lee
Hansen writes about a comprehensive diversity plan prepared for the already
diversity-obsessed campus. The report, thousands of words long, is mostly
eye-glazing diversity babble, filled with terms like “compositional diversity,”
“critical mass,” “equity mindedness,” “deficit-mindedness,” “foundational
differences,” “representational equity” and “excellence,” a previously normal
noun that suffers the loss of all meaning when printed within three words of
any diversity term.
But Professor Hansen noticed one very important line in the report that the
faculty senate must have missed when it approved this text: a call for
“proportional participation of historically underrepresented racial-ethnic
groups at all levels of an institution, including high-status special programs,
high-demand majors, and in the distribution of grades.” So “representational
equity” means quotas at all levels. And let’s put that last one in caps: GRADES
WILL BE GIVEN OUT BY RACE AND ETHNICITY.
Professor Hansen writes: “Professors, instead of just awarding the grade that
each student earns, would apparently have to adjust them so that academically
weaker, ‘underrepresented racial/ethnic’ students perform at the same level and
receive the same grades as academically stronger students.
“At the very least, this means even greater expenditures on special tutoring for
weaker targeted minority students. It is also likely to trigger a new outbreak
of grade inflation, as professors find out that they can avoid trouble over
‘inequitable’ grade distributions by giving every student a high grade.”
So diversity, quotas and social transformation of the campus are more important
than learning anything. The faculty senate, professors, administrators and
students who signed off on this are either OK with the plan, or haven’t been
paying attention.
John Leo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the editor of
MindingTheCampus.com, a web magazine dedicated to chronicling developments
within higher education in an effort to restore balance and intellectual
pluralism to our American universities. He is also a contributing editor at the
Institute's City Journal. His
popular column, "On Society," ran in
U.S. News & World Report for 17 years, and was syndicated to 140
newspapers through the Universal Press Syndicate.