For decades, many American academics have been obsessed with diversity — meaning “diversity” with regard to race, to be accomplished through preferences and coercion.
A professor at Duke University has recently written a book extolling diversity, but he does not mean the artificial kind — rather, the diversity that arises naturally when people are free to make their own decisions.
In today’s Martin Center article, Jenna Robinson interviews the author, Adrian Bejan.
He states:
To let people be free to come up with ideas and gather voluntarily around ideas that are better. And then if you want to admire the association, you’ll be admiring natural diversity. The engineered diversity is not to be confused with the natural diversity. Engineered diversity is something that is a very old practice in human society. It goes by many names. The most common is the class struggle in which the different things are two: oppressed versus oppressor or proletarian versus factory worker, or underrepresented and overrepresented, minority versus majority. It’s always two antagonistic groups.
Asked why the engineered diversity has had so much appeal in our education institutions, Bejan replied, “They’re getting it wrong because the idea of the class struggle is Karl Marx 100 percent. It is attractive to the ignorant. And of course, the students are easy prey for people who preach that failed philosophy. How many hundreds of millions of victims of communism do you need in human history to alert people to the importance of saying, ‘Never again. Never again’? It is a pipe dream, and the results are well-documented in history.”
Instead of focusing on group membership, Bejan argues that we should focus on merit. What a wonderful, old-fashioned concept! I am eager to read his Diversity Through Freedom.