Diversity

Modern liberals are afflicted with a Pavlovian obsession for diversity. Like freedom and democracy for previous generations, diversity excites a religious fervor among its followers. Diversity is especially enchanting because it represents the fusion of the most enduring passions of recent human history —the trinity of liberty, equality, and fraternity Such words, in the observation of one sociologist, “mark the distinctive channels of faith and thought” of an age and possess “symbolic values which exert greater influence upon the nature and direction of men’s thinking than the techniques used in the study or laboratory,” Diversity exercises a similar power in contemporary American society: in social theory, the idea of diversity emerges as multiculturalism; in its most exalted intellectual form it appears as postmodernism; and in philosophy, diversity calls us to moral relativism.

Nowhere is diversity more sacred than in our elite universities, especially at Brown. And it is during Orientation that the University displays its unconditional devotion to the doctrine of diversity. The third official class meeting — titled “Rethinking America: Understanding and Respecting Difference” —epitomizes the attitude. The event features historv professor Evelyn Hu-DeHart who exemplifies the diversity ideal in her life and work —she immigrated to the United States from China when she was 12 and in college she studied in Brazil. As a professor her research has extended to the Yaqui Indians of Mexico and Arizona, Chinese immigration to America and the Caribbean, women and minorities in higher education, and the politics of multiculturalism.

We do not deny that diversity; and its moral concomitant, tolerance, are necessary components of civil public discourse. Rather, we object to the centrality of diversity and tolerance in Brown’s academic ethos. When these ideals constitute our creed, they fully realize their destructive potential. In the absence of any mediating principles, diversity and tolerance, taken to their conclusion, compel us to ascribe equal worth to cultures, norms, and beliefs. Ultimately, this relativism will yield to nihilism, for if everything partakes of the same value then the idea of value ceases to have any meaning. Consequently, tolerance becomes —in the words of G. K. Chesterton —the “virtue of men who no longer believe in anything.”

It is little wonder then that the University has pursued diversity with such schizophrenia. The expression of racial slurs is a potential cause for expulsion, yet pornographic posters annually published by the LGBTQ remain uncensored. And after September 11, many professors railed against “patriotic correctness,” yet when the Brown Daily Herald printed an advertisement which criticized reparations for slavery, these same professors fulminated against “hate speech.” At Brown, diversity has just become yet another species of discrimination.

Lest we forget, the whole point of a liberal education is to embrace the unity connoted by “university.” For most of Brown’s history, this unity was anchored in the ideas and values that are enshrined in the Western canon. Now decontructionism has set the university adrift, leaving it vulnerable to the “Vandals and Visigoths” of multiculturalism. Yet, as TS Eliot wrote, “there is no such thing as a Lost Cause, because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause.” Thus, conservatives and traditional liberals must maintain an eternal vigilance to keep Western civilization alive.