The academic Left can't handle the truth!
Liberals,.HATE.America
By Peter Wood
March 11, 2003
In early February, the debate club at Colby College in Waterville, Maine
invited me to debate the role of "diversity" in higher education with, they
hoped, the president of the College, William Adams, who likes to be called
"Bro." President Adams declined. So did his vice president, Arnie
Yasinski, the “Associate Dean for Intercultural Affairs,” Jeri Roseboro, and
the “Coordinator of Multicultural Student Programs and Support,” Bernadette
Buchanan. In all the debate club invited 13 members of the administration
and the faculty to debate me. They all declined. President "Bro," who was
given an open-ended invitation to set the date, said that he was too busy
and needed more time to prepare than he had available. The other
administrators, who in the words of one of the students, “make their living
off of ‘diversity,’” just flat-out refused.
Colby College was one of 28 colleges that signed an amicus brief supporting
the University of Michigan in the Supreme Court case. A copy of the brief
is posted on the Colby College website (http://www.colby.edu/). One might
think that a college administration so up-to-date on the matter of diversity
to sign-on to a 30-page brief to the U.S. Supreme Court might be
sufficiently prepared for an hour-long exchange on the matter with an
academic arguing a different view. But one would think wrong. The Colby
College's diversiphile administration and faculty members apparently saw no
reason to debate.
The debate club, properly known as “The George E. Murray Debate Society,”
prides itself on non-partisanship. Its president, Dennis Kuhnel, explained
that it is “an objective organization. We are just trying to foster a
spirit of healthy and meaningful debate on Colby’s Campus, because we
believe debate is an integral part of Western society [and] democracies.”
What does a debate club in a college dedicated to free inquiry do when the
powerful advocates of a position refuse to debate it? In this case, the
club decided to turn the refusals to advantage by putting up flyers and
table tents advertising Bro's refusal.
One side of the table tent said, "Diversity. Are you tired of the 'D' Word
appearing in EVERY single document President Adams Writes? Want to hear
what the other perspective is?" The other side said, "Has Diversity ruined
America? Come listen to Peter Wood, writer and professor, discuss the way
it hasn't been talked about at Colby. See the man President Adams REFUSED to
debate. Come with an open mind."
The table tent also included a reproduction from the image on the cover of
my book, a nineteenth century graphic of five men representing the "races of
mankind." Chris La Putt, the Filipino-American student who produced the
card and put it out on the tables told me that he had been accosted by
several students for being “racist” and “insensitive.” Some of the cards,
of course, disappeared. Chris La Putt, incidentally, became an American
citizen two years ago and is the only non-white student in the Colby College
student government’s governing body.
The event went ahead on March 5. I asked the students to provide me with an
extra chair, which I set up next to the podium, and I began by explaining
that the chair appeared to be empty because president Adams and 12 outspoken
supporters of diversity appeared unwilling to defend their views in open
debate. "But don't worry. The chair isn't empty. It is occupied by the
Spirit of Diversity, or old Sod as I call him. You can see he is rather
lean; perhaps even transparent; but make no mistake, he is here."
The auditorium was packed and the only interruptions came as bursts of
applause on several occasions when I hit something that rung particularly
true. A lot of these students were pro-diversity when they arrived and
probably pro-diversity when they left too, but no longer quite so sure of
themselves and certainly no longer sure that the pro-diversity side had all
the arguments. President Bro and his administration, I think, suffered a
considerable loss of face. Although Bro was too busy to debate, he
apparently found time the following evening to spend several hours at the
campus pub drinking beer with members of the senior class.
I spoke extemporaneously, but the last part of my remarked dealt with the
amicus brief that Colby had joined. I pointed out several severe
misrepresentations of the facts and some dubious argument. For example, the
brief begins with the not so subtle suggestion that a Supreme Court decision
rejecting Powell's diversity doctrine would instantly return higher
education to the Jim Crow days: "The Court should consider the experience of
admissions before diversity was highly valued and before race conscious
approaches were employed..." I asked the students if they seriously thought
that Americans in 2003 had the same attitudes towards race and the
participation of members of all races that were widespread in the 1950s and
1960s?
I commented on the brief's mention of the "re-segregating effect [of
rejecting Powell's doctrine], probably moving black students from roughly
5-7% of the student body to 2% or so." I asked whether these statistics at
face value weren't an admission of how much the "race" was currently being
allowed to distort the fair consideration of applicants to college? The
cited ranges seem to imply that 3-5% of the current black students were not
qualified for admission on the basis of their actual performance in high
school and on tests. That means more than half of the black students at
Colby and the other 27 colleges that signed the brief were below the minimum
standard for admission of white students. Is that a good thing? For whom?
And I concluded by reading from a section near the end of the brief in which
Colby College and its fellow amici claimed that Powell's opinion sketched
out "a permissible approach (which five justices plainly supported)..."
This is an outright lie, and I said so. No other Supreme Court justice
supported Powell's idea of a permissible approach, not when the decision was
reached and not to this day. President Adams, in signing the brief, made
himself and Colby College party to an obvious falsehood, which anybody in
the audience could check for himself. Bro was either intentionally
misleading the students or just in way over his head.
During the questioning period, when a student asked me what I thought about
the future of Colby College, I upped the ante a little more. I said I
didn't know the College well enough to say much, but I would worry about the
future of any college whose leadership was participating in an attempt to
propagate a major historical falsehood in connection with one of the most
significant legal cases of our time. Mendacity is not a good foundation for
a college's future.
Colby College appears to have one of the worst cases of the disease I've
ever seen. The students are taught to hector each other in an unrelenting
search for "micro-aggressions"--incidents that may be too small to even
describe but which are felt by members of minority groups on campus to
create an unwelcoming climate and even a fear of violence. Students who go
to “diversity training” get to wear buttons and have stickers for their
doors to advertise their improved multicultural consciousness.
The campus was in a particularly high state of tension during my visit
because someone had either poured a glass of beer or spilled some beer on a
keyboard belonging to a gay-lesbian-bisexual-transgendered (GLBT) group,
whose office is in the Pugh Center, a hive of victim clubs, next door to the
campus pub. This came on top of an anonymous insult on an instant messaging
system, some possible jeers in a dining hall, and some petty vandalism in
the offices of the feminist club and another group. President Bro,
predictably, had sent a letter to the whole campus denouncing the
beer-on-the keyboard and the other alleged vandalism as a “hate crime” that
would be “actively investigated by outside authorities.” I don’t know if
that means the Waterville constable or the FBI. I’m also not sure exactly
what other sexual persuasions are under attack, when Bro calls the Colby
campus to a rally “in support of GLBTTIQ/queer persons at Colby.”
I told my audience that they need not worry about "micro-aggressions” from
me; for I intended to provide the macro- kind. That got applause. These
kids are waiting for some adult to give them permission to reject the utter
diversiphile nonsense that their administration has imposed on them.
The debate club president, Dennis Kuhnel, tells me that some of the
diversiphile students think they scored a point or two with me in their
assertion that a place like Colby College can be a place apart, a little
multicultural utopia in a racist society. I suppose I didn’t rise to every
morsel of bait that was temptingly dangled that night. But if any of these
students are reading, here’s my answer.
Far from being little utopias, liberal arts colleges in the grips of
diversity are islands of totalitarianism in the ocean of a free society. I
understand the attraction for some people of life in those islands: the
world is arranged just so, at least in appearance and a pleasant illusion
can be sustained for a while that something real is happening.
But the illusion is an illusion. The diversiphile utopians extol the goal
of all people learning peacefully from each other, but pursue policies of
segregation, racial exclusion, and hair-trigger sensitivity to sleights.
What the members of the "utopian" community really learn is to ache with
resentment towards each other while repressing any open expression of their
views. Another part of the illusion is that the little utopia is supposed
to prepare people for life in the larger world. This is usually justified
with the twin rationalizations that Patricia Gurin, the University of
Michigan's expert witness, calls "critical thinking" and "preparation for
citizenship."
The diversiphile version of critical thinking, of course, is actually its
opposite: uncritical acceptance of the diversity dogma itself and
determination to transform every aspect of culture into the language of that
dogma. The "citizenship" diversiphiles have in mind merely means political
commitment to force the dogma on everybody else. So is the campus utopia of
diversity really preparation for "life"? To the contrary, it produces
narrow-minded, ill-educated people full of self-conceit about their superior
insight into a society they have lost touch with. It takes many of the
graduates years to get re-grounded in reality and to begin to respect the
good sense and decent values of their countrymen and to give up the insipid
illusion that, as “liberally educated” people, they know better. The
diversiphile administrations and faculty who teach this stuff have a lot to
answer for. But then again, they are usually people who themselves could
never thrive in the world outside their petty despotisms.
That's my report from the frontier of diversity.
Peter Wood is associate professor of anthropology at Boston University and
the author of Diversity: The Invention of a Concept (Encounter Books.
2003).
--
"It is the soldier, not the reporter who has given us the freedom of the
press. It is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us the freedom of
speech. It is the soldier, not the campus organizer, who gives us the
freedom to demonstrate. It is the soldier who salutes the flag, who serves
beneath the flag, and whose coffin is draped by the flag, who allows the
protester to burn the flag." ~Father Dennis Edward O'Brien, USMC
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