Unidiversity Education

Mark Bauerlein notes a Steve Chatman’s study , which seems to show that students majoring in ethnic studies tend to have a less-diverse—ah, that word!—college experience, interacting less often than do, say, math majors, with students of other ethnic backgrounds.

What’s more, they have a lessened respect for people in those other groups. Who would have thunk it? Bauerlein writes:

Chatman even draws a logical possibility that might appall area and ethnic studies instruction, that is, that the climate in those fields is a lot worse than it is in engineering classes and labs. One wonders how area and ethnic studies professors would feel if they were ordered to undergo diversity sensitivity sessions themselves to try to straighten out their problems.

Chatman draws no policy conclusions, only calling for further research. But his findings certainly challenge the automatic assumption that more diversity sensitivity equals better undergraduate experience. It also introduces a needed critical element in the understanding of diversity itself. The term has acquired so much psycho-political freight that its usefulness for constructive discussion of higher education is practically zero. Such complications as those unveiled by Chatman are not a setback to rational understanding of campus social life. They are an advance.