Rush is Right - Part 2

In my last post I said that I agreed with Rush Limbaugh that proponents of diversity position heterosexual white males as Pharaoh. That’s not the way Rush would put it, of course. He’d say it more directly: the “feminazis” and multiculturalists demonize heterosexual white males and blame them for everything.

That’s a more extreme characterization than I offer, and it takes no account of the fact that the Exodus trope *forces* diversity advocates into insisting that at least one category of human being must not and shall not be part of human diversity. But that insistence is needless, intellectually bankrupt, and in moral terms a failure of nerve.

As used within academe, “diversity” tracks back to the 1978 US Supreme Court decision of Regents of the University of California versus Allan Bakke. Bakke was a 35-year old white male who sought admission into the UC-Davis medical school, and when turned down challenged the rejection of his application as being discriminatory. He argued—successfully, as it turned out—that the affirmative action policy of the University of California—which in the case of the UC-Davis medical school reserved 16 seats for minority students—was unconstitutional. That seemingly knocked the props out from under affirmative action policies in general, and certainly in terms of academic admissions.

Justice Lewis Powell, however, was able in large measure to rescue affirmative action by arguing that the state has a compelling interest in securing the best possible higher education for students, that this requires exposure to a wide variety of life experiences and points of view, and that this in turn requires that universities should encompass a diversity of students. The lower court decision in favor of Bakke was thus affirmed in part but also reversed in part, and the reversal was mainly the result of Powell’s intervention.

Powell was by and large a conservative, and he would have thought it absurd that heterosexual white male students could not, by definition, contribute to the wide variety of life experiences and points of view he regarded as of such importance. But proponents of affirmative action essentially embraced Powell’s formula for the preservation of affirmative action while ignoring logical consistency in applying the underlying principle.

Over time, that has had expensive consequences, and needlessly so. When the Rushes of the world get exercised over diversity it is not about affirmative action, it is about the moral hypocrisy of affirming the validity of everyone’s point of view except that of heterosexual white males. I am not saying that Rush would not object to affirmative action. I would be highly surprised if he didn’t. But affirmative action is a tool to achieve a goal—that of diversity and inclusion—and few would argue any longer that minorities ought to be excluded from higher education. If affirmative action is a problematic tool there can be a rational conversation about what might be a better tool. But the villainization of white males, as Rush would put it; or consigning them to the role of Pharaoh, as I would put it, is not rationally defensible. It is an article of faith, and it simply excites the invocation of a countervailing article of faith, namely that the advocacy of diversity is a mere power play.

The conventional formulation of diversity is not only unwise, at a personal level it is offensive. I myself am a heterosexual male, and in that respect I’m barred from the world of diversity. But I also have bipolar disorder, which falls under the category of a disability, and persons with disabilities *do* contribute to diversity. My mental illness thus gives me an entry into the world of diversity. My contribution, however, is limited to my experience of mental illness: the project of diversity tacitly insists that this must be a core component of my identity. To the extent that I have life experiences and opinions that derive from anything other than mental illness, then within the realm of diversity they do not matter.

This takes us to my second area of agreement with Rush. I also agree with him that there is such a thing as “political correctness” and people who approximate a “diversity police.”

The charge of political correctness is thrown around far too freely. It is generally used as a way to instantly invalidate the viewpoint of any group that makes conservatives uncomfortable. I bridle when anyone uses the term.

But on some subjects a conversation that touches upon diversity simply cannot be had.

Within the realm of diversity the concept of “implicit bias” is now much in vogue. And justifiably so: it brings into bold relief the many ways in which our views and behaviors manifest prejudices that lie outside our conscious awareness—unless we make an effort to bring them to awareness.

The logic of the concept is that *everyone* is vulnerable to implicit bias. If this is true, it may help to explain why the groves of academe—of the humanities, at least—are overwhelmingly populated by liberals. It is possible, of course, that most conservatives do not self-select into the humanities. It is theoretically possible (although vanishingly unlikely) that most conservatives somehow do not reach the intellectual threshold required for admission to graduate studies or faculty appointments.

But implicit bias suggests that those already within academe systematically reject and exclude conservative voices—and therefore that this is a hypothesis that merits consideration. On several occasions, however, I have wondered aloud about this, and have been instantly shut down, always reflexively and often quite rudely. Certain aspects of diversity are very plainly policed, and in that respect, a self-appointed diversity police must, in the nature of the case, exist.