When “Diversity” Means Conformity

[Valin]

Power Line:

Steven Hayward

5/31/13

 

I wrote here the other day about how diversity has become a latter-day Stalinist concept, when it doesnt imply downright hate from the left, just as multiculturalism is cover for self-loathing of Western civilization rather than a genuine curiosity about what might be learned from other cultures. (I think it was Allan Bloom who pointed out, for example, how few of the devotees of multiculturalism actually bother to learn a foreign language.) Above all, the diversity mongers demand absolute conformity to their creed, making a hash of an otherwise worthy concept.

 

More evidence of the complete fraud of diversity comes this week out of Massachusetts, where Gov. Deval Patrick is being slammed for appointing a white person to be chairman of the trustees for Roxbury Community College in Boston. The Boston Herald reports:

 

A community activist is challenging Gov. Deval Patricks pick for board chairman at the troubled Roxbury Community College because the new leader is white, but the administration is standing by the appointment.

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As it happens, Ive lately been re-reading, for the first time in almost 30 years, John Stuart Mills On Liberty, which these days can be read as a conservative treatise. (Indeed, William F. Buckley Jr. did so in Up From Liberalism, to the dismay of the critics.) The closing passage of chapter 3 (On Individuality) is worth recalling in connection with the mania for diversity in higher education today:

 

The demand that all people shall resemble ourselves, grows by what it feeds on. If resistance waits till life is reduced nearly to one uniform type, all deviations from that type will come to be considered impious, immoral, even monstrous and contrary to nature. Mankind speedily becomes unable to conceive diversity, when they have been for some time unaccustomed to see it.