Higher Education vs. Competency and Diversity: An Afterword constitutional ideal of a classless and castless society. But when the issue ceases to be explicitly political, it's turned over to the administrators and their expert guidance. They know best what compliance to the demands of diversity means at any particular moment. And they get away with implicitly branding deviations from their diversity scripting as offenses against justice, as if they were wise men and women in possession of the whole truth about that political virtue. On an increasing number of campuses, prospective faculty must, in effect, pledge allegiance to diversity as a condition for employment. That's not about not being racist or sexist or homophobic or whatever. It's about agreeing in advance to submitting to whatever the administrative scripting to come might bring. The conservative and radical takeaway that the reduction of higher education to competency and diversity is all about the sacrifice of controversy to public relations. They are, after all, the twin standards of our multicultural corporate world dominated by our cognitive elite. The real point of being guided by those two standards alone is to reduce the amount of real moral and intellectual diversity that has been the saving grace of the American system of higher education. The real problem at many or most of our elite schools was captured well by William Deresiewicz in the American Scholar: "Unlike the campus protestors of the 1960s, today's student activists are not expressing countercultural views. They are expressing the exact views of the culture in which they find themselves (a reason that administrators prove so ready to accede to their demands)." I'm not dissing the longing of activists to find the way to make a real difference on relatively soulless campuses; it's just that they're now serving the establishment cause. modernagejournal.com 147http://www.modernagejournal.com