Legal Commentary

Where Will This End?

We?ve seen (most recently here, citing six earlier discussions) that the New Haven Fire Department refused to promote anyone to lieutenant or captain because no blacks passed the required exam.

Now, thanks to Roger Clegg?s note on NRO?s Bench Memos, I see from an article in the Washington Post that the College Board has dropped an Advanced Placement exam in Latin, explaining that its decision ?was related to the number of minority students taking the exam.?

So, no promotions because not enough blacks passed an exam; then no exam because not enough minorities take the exam. If this principle is valid, shouldn?t cost-conscious colleges begin dropping courses, or maybe even whole departments, because an insufficient number of minorities enroll in them? Wouldn?t doing so increase the number of classes that are ?diverse??

If ?diversity? is as essential as its proponents claim, after all, how can such un-?diverse? classes be worthwhile?

ADDENDUM

Now that I?m thinking about it (see, thinking about ?diversity? is frequently a mistake), perhaps what colleges need is a new ?diversity? distribution requirement. No, not the ?diverse? subject matter that many of them already require (?Diverse People in American History,? ?Race, Class, and Gender in Post-Colonial Aboriginal Societies,?etc.), but a requirement that a certain percentage of one?s classes contain a ?critical mass? of, or at least a few, ?diverse? students.

Of course such a requirement would force registrars to keep close tabs on the racial identity of students, but since that information is already heavily used by the admissions offices updating the computers shouldn?t prove that difficult.

ADDENDUM II

To have the most beneficial effect I think the new DDR (Diversity Distribution Requirement) would have to, in the manner and spirit of all ?diversity? measures, treat the ?diverse? and the un-?diverse? students differently. The un-?diverse? students would be required to take a certain number of courses in which there were also some number of ?diverse? students. The ?diverse? students, by contrast, would have a ceiling imposed on the number of courses they could take in which more than a certain number of ?diverse? students enrolled, in order to prevent the academic self-segregation that so often occurs. This latter aspect of the DDR would have the added benefit of increasing the number of ?underrepresented? minorities in math, science, and engineering courses, and hence being poured into the pipeline for possible careers in STEM fields.

True, the DDR would reduce the amount of choice and control over their courses allowed to students, but all distribution requirements do that. Moreover, the demand for ?diversity? long ago established the principle that it is legitimate, or even required, to include, exclude, and otherwise distribute students based on their race.

Full post as published by Discriminations on May 19, 2009 (boomark / email).