The Left Suddenly Discovers the Diversity is Bad...When it Thwarts Their Ends: Lisa Saraganian, "Seven Theses Against Viewpoint Diversity"

What a huge, steaming pile of crap.

Now, I don't like the phrase "viewpoint diversity"--we just have to jettison the now-malignant term "diversity" entirely. If we don't, the PC left will use it as an entering wedge for their nefarious projects.

Just ditch it.

That won't solve everything, obviously. But it'll help avoid one kind of problem.

  Look, here's the short of it:

  "Diversity" in the mouth of the progressive left always meant:  More of what we like, less of what we don't. That is: more leftist and left-friendly stuff, less traditional scholarship and science.

In the academy (and elsewhere, too), this meant, first and foremost: hiring more nonwhites and women, especially other than Jews and Asians, promoting more leftist ideas, fewer non-leftist ones, more anti-West, anti-American, anti-capitalist stuff, more kinky sex masquerading as scholarship...just in general: more weird, politicized, relativist-nihilist antics by kinds of people the left prefers...less serious scholarship by boring olds and whites and guys. Less, e.g., dreary, sober, philosophy of science, more flamboyant trans/drag/queer/feminist "science studies."

   But the chiefest of these has always been, roughly: more blacks, fewer whites.

   Now, when challenged, the main defense of this nonsense has always been a sideways appeal to "viewpoint diversity"--though not so called: blacks have a different perspective on things than whites.

   The other extremely important argument has involved confusing "diversity" with affirmative action--i.e. misinterpreting "diversity" as a means of redressing past wrong. But that's not what it's supposed to be. Affirmative action is affirmative action, and "diversity" is "diversity"...it's supposed to be forward-looking. AA is backward-looking. The great lie on which the obsession with "diversity" was built is: even if we pretend to ignore our all-consuming obsession with "social justice," and merely (" ") focus on making the university better by traditional standards, hiring more non-old, non-white, non-males will help do that.

   Total nonsense. But that's the almost-never-explicitly-stated idea.

   But anyway...one of the central ideas of "diversity" programs has always been: Race is a proxy for viewpoint.

   That's the main defense of this madness--once much confusion and intentional obscuration has been cleared away.

   There's a lot more to say about that, but I've said some of it in the past, and am disinclined to say it here.

   Bottom line: now that their bluff is being called, and Trump is demanding actual viewpoint "diversity," it takes virtually no time at all for some leftist hack to spit out an anti-"diversity" screed.

   The old view: it's impossible to "do" universities without diversity!!!111

   The new view: "diversity"? Ridiculous! Conservative! Trumpian!

   Saraganian's argument functions as a premise for the following bigger argument: a variety of perspectives is valueless in academia...but more non-whites is absolutely necessary...

   What a crock of shit.

   Now, the AAUP is crap--in the way that much of the rest of academia is shit--it's a progressive-left organization pretending to be a scholarly organization. Though Academe has published a few good things in the past (notably, McCaughey and Welsh, "The Shadow Curriculum of Student Affairs"), and AAUP has done other good work, it's mostly gone over to the dark side. And this Saraganian piece fits right into their overall orientation.