LET US CALL IT WHAT IT IS: MAKE-WORK FOR FAILED SCHOLARS.

Minding the Campus contributor Robert Weissberg draws a felicitious comparison between cooking a stew and curating a matriculating class.  Reduced to one sentence, it would be something like "bean counting aggregates among fava, great northern, green, lima, and pinto; and there are some that enhance a chili but would fail in a casserole."

Imagine a cookbook-like course description that specifies in advance the demographic and ideological mix of those to be enrolled. In sum, there is no guarantee that whoever shows up will be the optimal mix for improved instruction.

“Diversity” is an empty vessel whose main purpose is to advance a political agenda, and it has always been that way. When Harvard in the 1920s decided that there were too many urban Jews of Eastern European extraction, it “diversified” its student body by admitting “more well-rounded” young men residing outside the big eastern cities, who excelled in leadership and sports. The number of big-city Eastern European Jews fell, and the WASP ascendency continued, at least for a few more decades. Today’s Left predictably prefers to diversify schools exclusively with students drawn from groups that overwhelmingly vote Democratic, namely, blacks, Hispanics, women, and gays.

This “diversity game” might be played across the ideological spectrum. Conservatives should abandon viewpoint diversity—which is hopeless, given the multitude of beliefs on everything “conservative”—and instead focus on diversity of life experiences to advance their agenda.

It's a fool's errand, he concludes. Perhaps, as Reason's Emma Camp suggests, the best thing to do with all those diversity hustlers is turf them out.

The survey provides further support for concerns that American college students are increasingly unwilling to tolerate political opinions they disagree with. Most troubling, it seems that the bounds of what is deemed "offensive" has continued to expand. Not only do students now bristle at tolerating truly hateful speech, but they also seem unable to stand even basic observations on popular political issues.

An easy way to fix this problem would be for universities to stop making it so easy to tattle to administrators over minor political disagreements—and stop setting students up with the expectation that any offense deserves administrative involvement.

However, that would require scaling back the huge bureaucracies that have exploded at many colleges for the express purpose of refereeing student and faculty speech—something most universities are unwilling to do.

No, those bureaucracies have to justify their existence, and their catechism, excuse me, their priors, like those of the Holy Inquisition, insure that there will always be demons to exorcise.  "Catholic university teaches 'transphobia' and 'fatphobia' are products of racism perpetuated through religion."  Am I supposed to be grateful that "Thou shalt have no other gods before Me" is not a constraint on the curriculum, or troubled that the priors structuring the workshop are tighter than stretch pants on Hillary Clinton's tush?

This workshop will explore the ways that systemic racism creates, co-creates and perpetuates all intersectional forms of oppression and marginalization by systematically limiting access to the agency, autonomy, opportunity, health, information and even pleasure necessary to dismantle oppressive systems; which promotes divisiveness both against and between targeted groups. Together we will explore how we can use our positionality in conscious, daring dialogue to explore our intersectional privilege and oppression through the lens of the most marginalized/vulnerable voice of the moment.

I seriously doubt that that "daring dialogue" includes "privilege and oppression comprise a false dichotomy."  The "learning objectives" are a narrowing of the notion of Original Sin:  "Briefly learn the historically racist roots of several ongoing forms of oppression including–but not limited to–racism, sexism, homophobia/transphobia, fatphobia, classism, ableism, ageism and more, through systems including education, religion, eating disorder treatment, gender-based violence, toxic masculinity, health care access and more."

If any of those secular sins overlap with the sins the priest recognizes, wouldn't it be simpler for the Worst Sinners in the workshop to go to confession and say a few Hail Marys?