Especially:
It is a striking work. If you don't have time or energy to study fundamental works on the subject, read at least these
One of the earlier studies. Fun to read as everything by brilliant D'Souza. From the press release: The author's thesis is that affirmative action policies in college admissions, and the higher education establishment's zealous pursuit of a curriculum that reflects the new orthodoxy of multiculturalism (which calls for increased minority admissions and privileges, more minority-based classes, more minorities on faculties) promote ignorance and racism. D'Souza, a former White House domestic policy analyst, supports his views with extensive interviews and studies conducted on six college campuses. The new victims, he feels, are the high academic achievers who are assumed to rejected for fear of overrepresentation (various Asian minorities).
By an anthropologist and former university administrator (BU). Thorough, with occasional subtle humor. It's really the biography of a concept. Book description: Diversity is America's newest cultural ideal. Corporations alter their recruitment and hiring policy in the name of a diverse workforce. Universities institute new admissions rules in the name of a diverse student body. What its proponents have in mind when they cite the compelling importance of diversity, Peter Wood argues in this elegant work, is not the dictionary meaning of the word---variety and multiplicity---but rather a set of prescribed numerical outcomes in terms of racial and ethnic makeup. Writing with wit and erudition, Wood has undertaken in this entertaining book nothing less than the biography of a concept. Drawing on his experience as a social scientist, he traces the birth and evolution of "diversity." He shows how diversity sprawls across politics, law, education, business, entertainment, personal aspiration, religion, and the arts, as an encompassing claim about human identity. It asserts the principle that people are, above all else, members of social groups and products of the historical experiences of those groups. In this sense, Wood shows, diversity is profoundly anti-individualist and at odds with America's older ideals of liberty and equality. Wood warns that as a political ideology, diversity undercuts America's long effort to overcome racial division. He shows how the ideology of diversity has propelled the Neo-racialists on the political Right as well as those on the multi-culturalist Left. But even if the diversity movement did not exacerbate racial and social division, he believes that it would be a questionable cultural ideal. As Wood points out, "Our liberty and our equality demand that we hold one another to common standards and that we reject all hierarchy based on heredity---even the hierarchy that comes about when we grant present privileges to make up for past privileges denied."
Usually many interesting recent materials on diversity (and other topics).
The site of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Higher Education. Materials not always directly related to the topic but often are (see examples below).
From the abstract: This article first examines the ideological composition of American university faculty and then tests whether ideological homogeneity has become self-reinforcing. A randomly based national survey of 1643 faculty members from 183 four-year colleges and universities finds that liberals and Democrats outnumber conservatives and Republicans by large margins, and the differences are not limited to elite universities or to the social sciences and humanities. A multivariate analysis finds that, even after taking into account the effects of professional accomplishment, along with many other individual characteristics, conservatives and Republicans teach at lower quality schools than do liberals and Democrats. This suggests that complaints of ideologically-based discrimination in academic advancement deserve serious consideration and further study. The analysis finds similar effects based on gender and religiosity, i.e., women and practicing Christians teach at lower quality schools than their professional accomplishments would predict.
Beginning of a trend or just a fluke?
Short article with self-explanatory title. The incredible story of university administrator's revenge against the author of the article can be read here
If you know of interesting refernces we missed, e-mail me at klesh@uoregon.edu .
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