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Thomas Sowell Calls Diversity in Higher Ed a Fraud

Thomas Sowell Calls Diversity in Higher Ed a Fraud

“something very much like the quota limits”

http://m.wsj.net/video/20150103/010215uksowell/010215uksowell_1280x720.jpg

The great Thomas Sowell has written a new column which focuses on diversity in higher education as a meaningless buzz word.

From Investor’s Business Daily:

Thomas Sowell: We’re Being Fooled By The ‘Diversity’ Fraud

My own first encounter with the idea of geographic diversity occurred more than half a century ago, when I was an undergraduate at Harvard, and worked as a photographer for the university news office, in order to help pay the bills.

The instructions I was given were to concentrate on taking photos of students from other parts of the country, rather than from the east coast, from which Harvard already received more than enough applicants. The idea was to encourage applications from places that would produce a geographically diverse student body.

It struck me as an odd idea at the time, but I was being paid to take pictures, not make university policy. Moreover, I had no idea how such a policy had originated and, by the 1950s, it might have been continued from inertia, for all I know. Meanwhile, I could enjoy seeing publicity photos I took appearing in newspapers in Chicago and elsewhere beyond the east coast.

Fast forward to today. It is common, at colleges and universities across the country, for the test scores of Asian American students who have been admitted to a given college to be higher than the test scores of whites or of blacks or Hispanics.

That may not seem strange, since that is true of test scores in general. But, at any given institution, applying the same standards to all, the test scores of students at a particular institution would tend to be similar. More Asian Americans would be admitted to higher ranked colleges and universities, however, if the same standards were applied to all.

In short, something very much like the quota limits that were applied to Jews in the past are now being applied to Asian Americans — and, once again, are being justified by diversity.

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Comments

No wonder why colleges no longer think it appropriate for students to read classics such as Orwell’s “Animal Farm”.