Diversity

From whence came this religion of forever-expanding "diversity?" When I was younger and attending an all-male college, diversity then was defined mostly in geographic terms ... since the majority of my classmates were middle- to upper-class whites ... religious diversity (particularly in regard to Judaism) having been a previously-enacted reform. The next push at my alma mater was for ethnic diversity ... primarily African-American, Native-American, Hispanic  and Asian. This, of course, automatically helped the college also effect improving economic-class diversity. Then, in the early 1970's, the College on the Hill decided that women were needed to round out its diversity menu. When admissions were opened up to females, it was promised that they would never total more than 30% of the undergraduate population. It is now over 50%.

Having eliminated all these obvious demographic profiles, the college's administration could not contain themselves ... next came a push for sexual-orientation diversity ... gays and lesbians needed to be represented in the student body at least as they existed in the general population ... and, of course, the college's curriculum needed to be revamped to accommodate these new hooking-up preferences. Aha, you think that now we are done with this remake. But no, you narrow-minded bigot. There is still the notion of gender-identity to accommodate. So if you are a woman in a man's body or vise versa, you are now the newest required diversity target. So now the undergraduate body has been fully Balkanized beyond reason ... to the point where it has become almost impossible to represent all these diverse pigeon-holes of our population in the next entering Freshman class ... given that there seems also a modest desire to maintain a least some modicum of academic standards.

But, there is still one diversity cross-section that has been ignored in both the pedagogical and student populations ... and that is political diversity. How about it Dartmouth ... can you take this one last and logical step in completing your pathological pandering to diversity?

Afterward: This obsession with diversity is not just at the college level. It also seems to have permeated our governance ...  witness a seeming national requirement for representation of all these diverse categories in our political leaders. That is why the more of these diversity boxes candidates can check, the more likely their election ... political persuasion and administrative competence be damned. This clearly is a sign of the times and one on which Hillary Clinton seems to be relying.