HEATHER MAC DONALD
The department head deals with a lot of socializing problems. Last
year ... we had a teacher that got beat up in the classroom. We have
teachers that are trying
to
get through material and who are spending
time now on conflict resolution and on being clear about setting
limits, and on being able to present material in ways that are careful,
so as not to antagonize students.
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Apparently one of the ways to antagonize students is to expect that
work be performed on time. Teachers find that weeks into a course, stu–
dents may not have obtained the required books and haven't done work
assigned at the beginning of the semester. The school's response? Retrain
the teachers! The college has begun providing training sessions to "help
faculty members better understand the cultural diversity in their midst."
The fact that, in the
Chrollicle's
delicate phrasing, the students "seem not
to appreciate traditional academic values" is of less concern than teaching
the professors to appreciate the anti-academic values of the students.
There is a massive disjuncture in this culture between the well-known
problem of minorities' low educational achievement and the interpreta–
tion of their subsequent performance in the economy.
It
is as if as soon
as minorities enter the job market, their test scores suddenly rise twenty
percent and they acquire college degrees. Supporters of affirmative action
even argue that minorities hired under affirmative action pressure are
more
qualified than their white counterparts, though where all these su–
perqualified minorities are coming from is never explained.
One of the main functions of the diversity movement is
to
ensure
that the fact of minorities' underachievement in education is never
brought to bear to explain their economic distress.
It
does so by bran–
dishing the charge of racism early and often.
In
a diversity regime racism
is established by numbers alone. To ask what ought to be the next ques–
tion - "but what is the proportion of available
qualified
minorities?" - is
absolutely taboo; even the accused institution will not raise the point in
its defense but will penitently promise to make amends.
In
the view of
diversity advocates, "qualifications" is a "code word" for excluding mi–
norities and women. Lawrence Korb of the Brookings Institute recently
called for a chairwoman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, brushing aside con–
cern for "seniority and experience" as the outmoded posturing of
"traditionalists." Faced with a threatened lawsuit by black agents, the
Federal Bureau of Investigation has changed its policies to ensure a
higher rate of promotion for blacks, even though the number of blacks
in administrative positions matched or exceeded the number of blacks
qualified for those positions.
An institution that hires by the numbers, however, still can't breathe
