This Campus Reform piece on the controversy about the choice of the new president at Stanford is illuminating.

The search committee selected former Stanford faculty member and Rockefeller University president Marc Tessier-Lavigne to head the university. Despite his apparently superb qualifications, the usual crowd of complainers is upset because he’s a white man. That of course means that the school has blown it. “We remain disappointed,” the piece quotes the campus critics, “that Stanford, a school that touts diversity in its admissions brochures, failed to take advantage of a crucial opportunity to bring underrepresented groups into its highest level of leadership.”

That sentence tells you a lot about the tribal mentality of the diversity zealots. To them, the most important consideration should be a person’s ancestry and someone who happens to fall into an “underrepresented” group must be preferable to anyone who doesn’t.

The author of the piece, Philip Clark, writes, “Even if diversity were important, however, there are dozens of different types of diversity that need to be optimized for in a Presidential candidate, from academic breadth to managerial expertise across a range of tasks.” Yes, but every person is unique — “diverse” in a great number of ways — so it isn’t diversity that needs to be optimized, but rather competence to do the job.