STAFF EDITORIAL: Defending Diversity

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STAFF EDITORIAL: Defending Diversity
Differences between ideological, racial, and gender
September 20, 2005

The creation of a $15 million fund for the promotion of racial and gender diversity demonstrates the (great) importance Columbia administrators place on having a faculty with racial and gender diversity. The administration�s refusal to hire a single overtly conservative professor in the face of demands from conservative student, demonstrates the (nonexistent) importance this form of diversity has to them. In other words, this University gladly spends millions of dollars to promote one form of diversity while casting aspersions at those who try to promote another­­­­�which is exactly correct.

The lack of racial and gender diversity in Columbia�s faculty is deplorable. Systemic forms of discrimination have prevented many scholars from breaking into the circles from which Ivy League professors are typically drawn. Overt discrimination still confronts those who have made it past prior obstacles, even at Columbia and even today. $15 million won�t make these broader issues go away, but it will help, and Columbia will be better for it.

Although essentially different from racial and gender diversity, ideological diversity would also benefit Columbia outside of the classroom. Conservative students would have some institutional support at a time when they sorely lack it, strengthening undergraduate debate. Outspoken advocates for conservatism on campus would also challenge those who don�t share their views to more thoroughly understand their own beliefs.

But creating this diversity poses too great a danger to the classroom itself. Most perniciously, it risks changing the current understanding of what a professor�s role in class should be. In their research, the conclusions professors reach, or even the questions they ask, can undoubtedly be influenced by their politics. This is why most labor historians, for instance, don�t support corporate plutocracy. But in the undergraduate classroom, politics shouldn�t matter, because a professor should strive to teach students how to think, not what.

Ideally, Columbia would have professors with a wide variety of viewpoints who allowed their research to speak for itself inside the classroom and actively defended their individual beliefs outside it. If, however, that requires hiring people for what they think�even if what they think has nothing to do with their scholarship�the danger to academic freedom is too great. Some, though, when arguing against the promotion of ideological diversity, have inadvertently harmed the case for racial and gender diversity. At times, they have seemed to say that hiring decisions are made solely on the basis of scholarly ability. But at the same time, Columbia has dedicated $15 million to hiring eminently well-qualified academics partly for non-academic reasons. Common sense dictates that more factors than scholarship, for instance, teaching ability, goes into the hiring process.

Professors should proudly affirm that diversity, rightly considered, is now one of those factors.