The diversity mania is ruining American higher education. Not only does it lead to the admission of many lesser-qualified students and the hiring of faculty merely because they happen to have the right ancestry, but it also obstructs the search for truth. After all, “diversity” exalts feelings of supposedly oppressed groups, and if those feelings might be hurt by a line of inquiry, then it needs to be stopped.
In today’s Martin Center article, Professor Alexander Riley looks at this disturbing phenomenon.
He writes, “The perspective in question — that some sizable quantity of scientific research is causing undefined harms and must therefore be prevented on ethical grounds — has become widespread. It marks a significant departure from an earlier academic culture that celebrated the open-ended pursuit of truth as the fundamental value of higher education.”
Institutional review boards are part of the problem. The people running them are often more sympathetic to the imagined feelings of sensitive groups than to the importance of pursuing research and dealing with the truth. So is the National Institutes of Health, which won’t release data to researchers unless it’s sure that the data won’t be “misused.”
Students are also part of the problem. Riley writes, “These students are perfectly confident that their moral desires to prevent exploration of, for example, the possible consequences of human genetic diversity have nothing in common with the Marxian crusade against “bourgeois” science. Yet experts in human genetics have decried moralizing efforts to enforce woke sensibilities on such research and have pointed to immense potential harm in the failure to tailor policy to the search for scientific truth.”
As “woke” forces continue to gain ascendancy in our universities and research institutions, more questions and data will become “off limits” to exploration. We should allow scholars to search for the truth no matter how it might make some people feel.