DIVERSITY IS NOT A CURRICULUM.

That ought to be obvious, but, then, over the past thirty years, higher education has built up massive institutional inertia dedicated to the proposition that Diversity is Our Highest Value.  Mark Bauerlein elaborates.

Educators took down Western Civ, but diversity prevented them from devising anything to take its place. What appeared during the 1980s to be an invigorating and just revision of a narrow curriculum turned out to be no curriculum at all.

And students realized it. The protesters in 1987 got all the attention, as they always do, but in fact, the Western Culture course was quite popular because it gave students a coherent story, an overarching structure. The diversity approach scrapped it because the identification or “construction” of a lineage, a canon or a core excludes other things.

And that’s true, one lineage excludes others, but that exclusion is necessary to a successful course in the humanities. This is a cognitive matter, and perhaps an aesthetic one, too, wherein learning is enhanced by the materials being learned having form and unity and design. It is not a political issue.

Professors who want to diversity their syllabi should have recognized this long ago. If they are tired of the West, of WASP America and of dead white males, they must replace them with new materials but set them within a similar structure. A grab bag of “diversity” won’t work -- it hasn’t worked. Teachers should drop the language of diversity and inclusion entirely and instead speak of the heritageof African art, the canon of feminist philosophy, the tradition of the Latin American novel …

The diversiphiles probably won’t do this, because a rich multicultural sense of the past was never their aim. They wanted to tear down Western Civ, not build up non-Western curricula. But if they can’t change their minds, they will continue to see their classrooms shrink, and their influence, too.

The two words, higher education, coexist in that description for a reason.