"Diversity" and Affirmative Action

I gotta say it again: I'd prefer straightforward quotas to the diversity cult in academia. Quotas are honest. The diversity cult believes something that's outright crazy/dishonest, and it pervades and corrupts much of academia. That belief is that, by admitting more individuals from groups favored by the left, universities will become better at pedagogy and scholarship. That simply isn't true. If your goal were improving pedagogy and scholarship, increasing racial/sexual heterogeneity would not be in the top-100 list of suggestions.
   It's as if universities had been banned from having sports teams, but an exception had been left open that allowed them to do anything that advanced their primary aims...so the entire university suddenly became pervaded by the cultish belief that having a football team improved learning, and having a basketball team improved scholarship. It makes no sense. It's actually counterproductive, for chrissake.
   I'd be happy to have more, say, American Indian students. But if those students were making the cut, we'd already be taking them. To take ones you aren't already getting, you've got to lower standards.  (Ignoring recruitment changes--which aren't really at issue here.) I think there are decent reasons for doing that. But you have to understand and admit what it is that you are doing--and that includes admitting the costs. There are decent social reasons for wanting universities to help us avoid a situation in which the vast majority of college-educated people are all from one or a few races/ethnic groups. But the actual academic / intellectual advantages of admitting people on account of race are modest to the point of near nonexistence. And you're forced to take students who don't make the cut under normal conditions. I understand people having a hard time admitting that. But it's creep as hell to see academicians so easily deluded by their political preferences in such a widespread way. In fact, it's one of the creepiest damn things I've ever seen in my life.