The supposed need for central planning didn’t expire with the Soviet Union. It’s alive and well in the U.S., especially in our big universities. Administrators like to look busy by crafting plans to achieve lofty sounding goals. That’s been going on at the University of North Carolina under its new president, Margaret Spellings.

In today’s Martin Center article, Shannon Watkins looks at the system’s latest plan, entitled Higher Expectations.

Watkins writes, “In developing the plan, Spellings and her team consulted student, faculty, and public feedback via online surveys and public forums held at each of the 17 university campuses. One open forum was held at UNC-Chapel Hill on November 10, 2016. Yet, public feedback in such surveys and forums tends to come from those with vested and political interests rather than a true representation of the population.” That’s the great flaw in all such “feedback” programs.

One particularly disturbing aspect of the plan is the way UNC has embraced the diversity obsession. The racial-diversity obsession has been a fixture for years, but now the system insists on greater geographical and economic diversity. Behind this push is Andrew Kelly, one of Spellings’s top assistants. Watkins explains,

Kelly advised the UNC system to make it a priority to increase enrollment from underrepresented counties. To address this issue, the UNC system aims to increase enrollment of students from rural counties by 11 percent and low-income students by 13 percent by the 2021-22 academic year.

If students who live in rural areas and come from low-income homes don’t enroll in UNC system schools at the same rate as others, so what? This is a lot like the gripes we hear that women are “underrepresented” in various occupations. Since it’s the result of free choice, what’s the problem?

And as Watkins notes, meeting this target will mean either expanding some of the system universities or rejecting some of the “over-represented” students to make room for the rural and poor students.

Her conclusion hits the nail squarely on the head: “It will be very interesting whether the UNC system will be able to achieve its highly ambitious goals. If it fails, maybe then the system will finally get governance from a more realistic perspective that accepts human limitations and motivations instead of trying to remake society.”