Intellectual Diversity at Brown: A Sea Change?

Intellectual diversity has been all the rage at Brown this semester. So far, the Brown Daily Herald has featured no fewer than six articles directly addressing the subject. President Ruth Simmons devoted the better part of her Spring Semester Opening Address to issues of intellectual diversity at Brown. Even many professors have been recently opining on their support for this suddenly chic phenomenon. Given all the newfound interest in intellectual diversity at Brown, one is tempted to believe that there are good reasons to be hopeful for the University’s future.

And indeed there are. It is a significant development in itself that the Brown community has begun to associate “diversity” with differences which are more than skin deep. President Simmons’s choice of topics for her Opening Address was more than symbolic. It marked the first time since the dawn of the politically-correct era that such a high-ranking administrator has admitted that the lack of intellectual diversity at Brown is a tangible detriment to the quality of education offered here. A lazier administrator could have easily stopped at that point, but Simmons took the extra step of proposing concrete solutions to a real problem. The new fund she created to address this very issue has already been put to good use; it was crucial in funding the March 14th appearance by Dinesh D’Souza.

Despite such positive steps, much remains to be done. Perhaps most disappointing is the failure of many in the Brown community to reach a true understanding of what conservatives actually mean when we speak of intellectual diversity; perhaps some of that failure is our own. In calling for the university to rededicate itself to its mission of providing a truly liberal education, conservatives should be clear that we are not in favor of extending affirmative action to the realm of ideological viewpoints. Such a move could result in nothing other than, in the words of Dinesh D’Souza, an “Illiberal Education.”

What proponents of intellectual diversity, liberal or conservative, should be calling for is an end to the iron-fisted reign of overt political agendas over certain university departments and centers. Brown’s freshman orientation program remains mired in political correctness, and the entirety of racial and gender politics at this institution still have not advanced far beyond crude socialist theories. Intellectual diversity will score its greatest victory the day that the Third World Center exists, as it already claims to, for the betterment of all students of color, without assumption as to what their political beliefs are or should be. That day has not yet come, but given recent developments, cautious optimism is a reasonable sentiment.