Diversity/Difference. posted by Richard Seymour

Diversity is not, in itself, a virtue. It is to be lauded wherever it is presumably because of secondary benefits it brings, or because of the harmful effects of homogeneity. A couple of tediously obvious examples:

1) If black people are under-represented on campus or in the employment figures, that could be evidence of an underlying social injustice.

2) If your country has never had a gay President, that could be to do with public and establishment prejudice.

If, in the same country, black people have been slaves and homosexuality has been illegal, I'd say there's a strong likelihood of statements one and two being right.

On the other hand, when David Horowitz's neoconservative Front Page magazine reproduces an article from the American Enterprise Institute complaining of 'employment discrimination against Republicans and Christian conservatives', at least one eyebrow is sent aloft:

"Imagine opening your newspaper one morning and reading a Supreme Court opinion that puts a startling new twist on an old civil rights tactic. The Court declares that some prominent university has violated equal opportunity laws by "engaging in a pattern of employment discrimination...against Republicans and Christian conservatives. Of the university's 1,828 professors, there are only eight Republicans and five Christian conservatives. Such statistical evidence of gross political and ideological imbalance has been taken as a telltale sign of purposeful discrimination in many previous civil rights cases. In this case as well it provides prima facie evidence that individual rights are being systematically violated on arbitrary grounds. Justice demands compensatory action to protect the rights of these groups. Is this a right-wing pipe dream? It may not be as far-fetched as you think."

The gay-bashing Republican senator Rick Santorum was similarly concerned, and made serious moves, to amend Title IX of the Higher Education Act so that it would enshrine "ideological diversity" alongside "sexual equality" and so on. The idea behind it was allegedly to combat "rising incidents of anti-Semitism and an increasingly anti-Israel agenda among college professors". That's an ugly little conjugation, so let's decouple the two. If there's a need to combat anti-Semitism, then that is a move aimed against diversity - and quite right too. If the aim is to obliterate anti-Israeli viewpoints, then what we are talking about is authoritarianism, not diversity. On the other hand, if we are insisting on having a few anti-Semites, a few other kinds of racist, a few liberals, a Trotskyist or two etc., then why not extend the logic even further?

Majikthise today brings distressing news of a report that, once again, Republicans are under-represented among the academia. She quotes Aaron Swartz :

Scary as this is, my preliminary research has discovered some even more shocking facts. I have found that only 1% of Stanford professors believe in telepathy (defined as "communication between minds without using the traditional five senses"), compared with 36% of the general population. And less than half a percent believe "people on this earth are sometimes possessed by the devil", compared with 49% of those outside the ivory tower. And while 25% of Americans believe in astrology ("the position of the stars and planets can affect people's lives"), I could only find one Stanford professor who would agree.

There aren't enough idiots in the academia, then! It would be an interesting social experiment to calibrate both the academic and student intake on campuses according to the latest poll results and census surveys. For instance, given the number of court cases that have ended in large settlements for aggrieved porkies, there has to be a large number of people in America who always thought McDonalds' was healthy food. We have to get those fuckers into the universities.