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March 11, 2007

"The mantra of diversity" is "nostalgia for battles already won"

Walter Benn Michaels, an English professor at the University of Illinois, is also angry, but he has a different view of where the problem begins. He directs his anger not so much at the admissions or development office as at the entire culture of academia, which, in his view, has settled somewhere between insouciance and hypocrisy with regard to the widening class divide. "Poor people," he writes in The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality,

are an endangered species in elite universities not because the universities put quotas on them...and not even because they can't afford to go to them (Harvard will lend you or even give you the money you need to go there) but because they can't get into them.

This is basically true, as Bowen and his colleagues demonstrate. What Michaels adds to the discussion is the idea that many academic liberals have been deceiving themselves about this uncomfortable truth while--unwittingly, perhaps--abetting it.

What he means is that the academic left (which he tartly calls the "supposed left") expends its energy rallying against such phantom enemies as racism and sexism--erstwhile evils that he believes barely exist today, at least not in the narrow social stratum from which college students come. As a result, "progressive politics" too often "consists of disapproving of bad things that happened a long time ago." But Michaels does not stop at chiding the "supposed left" for indulging in nostalgia for battles already won. He thinks that by obscuring the real issue--the class divide--that persists behind all the smoke and noise over "diversity," the academic left has become complicit with the broader political right in rewarding the rich and penalizing the poor.

Michaels is fed up with the mantra of diversity, and it is hard to blame him. In the past, one obstacle that kept minority students out of college was patent racism--the asserted association between external physical characteristics (skin color, facial features, body type) and inherent mental capacities or tendencies.[12] Today, however, this kind of pseudoscience has been discredited, and the word "race" tends to be employed as a synonym for culture--an equivalence based on the dubious, or at least imperfect, premise that a person's ancestry tells us something important about how that person experiences the world. The problem with "this way of thinking about culture instead of race," Michaels says, "is that it just takes the old practice of racial stereotyping and renovates it in the form of cultural stereotyping."[13] People of African ancestry are expected to prefer blues to Brahms. People of Asian ancestry are lumped together in the category "Asian-American" even though they might identify themselves primarily as Laotians or Christians. In any event, they are supposed to prefer engineering to poetry.

Michaels argues that nothing much has changed by substituting the idea of particular cultures for the discredited idea of race. For pragmatic as well as analytical reasons, he wants the left to forget about this kind of diversity, whether we call it racial or cultural ("diversity, like gout, is a rich people's problem"), and focus instead on poverty. A satirical verse (quoted in another recent book by another English professor, Michael Berubé of Pennsylvania State University) nicely captures Michaels's point. It might be called the Song of the Abject Affluent, and a lot of people at elite colleges are singing it:

I'm sorry for what my people did to your people
It was a nasty job
Please note the change of attitude
On the bumper of my Saab.[14]

Quite apart from the question of who "my people" and "your people" are at a time when more and more Americans claim multiple racial descent, this mixture of guilt and pride is mostly for show, just like the car.

"Scandals of Higher Education," by Andrew Delbanco, The New York Review of Books, March 29, 2007

Posted at March 11, 2007 11:07 AM | Categories: Bigotry

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