The Diversity Profession

n May, Tennessee lawmakers banned all funding for the Office of Diversity and Inclusion at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. The $436,000 that had been budgeted for the office will instead be put toward scholarships for minority students in engineering. The UTK diversity office was sponsoring “Sex Week," a program of lectures and demonstrations on, well, "innovative" sex practices. Sex Week started at Yale more than a dozen years ago and has since been presented on campuses from Harvard to the University of Kentucky.

It should come as no surprise that the Office of Diversity brought embarrassment to the university. Diversity enclaves like this are supposed to promote tolerance and understanding among students, but in reality they are a main source of turmoil at schools across the country, including protests at the University of Missouri and Yale this last school year. The administrators and faculty who run these diversity programs have a vested interest in disruption—making the protests go away usually entails boosting the budgets of the diversity offices that were behind the protests in the first place. As long as schools sponsor such centers and offices, there will be no peace on the American college campus.

In the 1960s, universities caved to the demands of radicals on campus by expanding academic departments to include women's studies, black studies, and, more recently, "queer studies." These programs are college mainstays, making up in ideological vigor what they lack in academic rigor.

But it wasn't until the '80s and '90s that universities began to expand their support of nonacademic centers offering extracurricular programs to promote what they called diversity and inclusion. In practice they did just the opposite. Universities such as Cornell offered students race-specific dormitories. The goal was to make minority students feel more at home on campus. And though schools couldn't officially discriminate regarding who was placed in these race-designated dorms, self-segregation resulted.

Today, most of the ferment on campus comes not from academic departments—even the most politically charged ones—but from diversity centers and the faculty and administrators who staff them. At Yale, for instance, the Afro-American Cultural Center hosts a "Black Solidarity" conference each year. Its Social Justice programming includes a Black Lives Matter series. The emphasis of these centers is not just academic study but social action.