In July, the IWF presented a panel on Capitol Hill to a packed crowd of congressional summer interns to discuss a new book, The Diversity Hoax, edited by Marc Berley and David Wienir, past and present law students at the University of California at Berkeley. It is a collection of essays by students describing their frustrating encounters with diversity prejudice on campus. Several groups joined us in organizing this event: the Foundation for Academic Standards and Tradition (FAST), the Center for New Black Leadership, the Center for Equal Opportunity, and the Federalist Society.
Mona Charen
Columnist and Panel Moderator
There is a terrible sense of sadness that I feel about what diversity has become in America, because the original goals of the civil rights movement were so clear, so moral, so accessible to everyone: namely, that people would not be judged on the basis of color, but rather on the content of their character. It’s sad that this has been so turned on its head.
What happens on college campuses, and in all too many areas of American life, is that those who call themselves advocates of diversity actually want the reverse. They want people who are dark-skinned to think one way, and they want people who are Indian to think another, and they want people who are Asian to be only interested in Asian things. They want everybody who is of a certain ethnic background to stand for only that. And, it is such a narrow and limiting thing to do to people. It’s great if you celebrate your own heritage, but it’s also great if you view the inheritance of human civilization as your inheritance because you’re human. That is what universities do when they’re at their best.
Marc Berley
Co-editor ofThe Diversity Hoax and President of the Foundation for Academic Standards and Tradition
We published The Diversity Hoax in order to let students talk about, in the most revealing terms, the real costs of the ongoing attack upon freedom and standards in the university. It’s a sad thing to say, but to speak freely in American universities is a heroic act these days. Polite dissent has become alarmingly unwelcome in college classrooms. And if a law student is no longer permitted to argue both sides of every question, then legal education is more than significantly diminished.
This candid little book is an important document, both as an inspirational handbook to students and as a historical account of the climate of American education at the end of the 20th century. It tells those who run our universities that students know what they’re up to. Students know that diversity is a buzz word which means anything but support for true diversity; that what is sought is not a celebration of differences but rather a party-line orthodoxy, a politicized dogma that often resorts to a new brand of racism which threatens to separate and bring out the worst in us. Diversity as conceived by administrators at universities is, in short, a hoax. Now, often, the students are more enlightened than their teachers. They know that there exist no white ideas, no black ideas, that we all have ideas bad and good, and that we can sharpen them and improve them only through free and open debate. Students won’t allow universities to continue perpetrating this hoax forever.
Tags: American education, new book, students