Peter Wood’s remarks on the officially instigated mobbing of Roger Clegg at the University of Wisconsin on September 13 contain some sharp clarifications of the real meaning behind today’s propagandistic buzz words, such as “diversity,” “equality,” and “fairness.” At the beginning of the excerpt below, Wood refers to two reports from Clegg’s Center for Equal Opportunity that point to the egregious level of racial preferences employed at UW (emphases added):

One would have to be very naïve to think that the University of Wisconsin will be moved by the two CEO reports to mend its admissions policies; or that it will hold Vice Provost Williams and Dean Berquam accountable for abusing their authority; or that it will discipline the students involved. There is in Williams’ subsequent statements a glow of satisfaction that things came off very much as he hoped. And the absence of broader press coverage points to the usual fate of such stories. They are just too awkward to fit with the official narrative of how “diversity” enriches American higher education. When we think of diversity, we are not supposed to think of gross discrepancies in admissions standards, unfairness to applicants, and “mismatches” between admittees and institutional standards, let alone flash mobs organized to intimidate critics, or university officials purveying falsehoods to whip students into taking illegal actions.
So what happens next? Maybe nothing at the level of University of Wisconsin administrators, but the story feeds that other narrative that informs most of what I write about on the Innovations’ blog: the rapidly growing cultural defection of many Americans from higher education. It is a defection driven by the recognition that our colleges and universities are antagonistic to basic American values of fairness and equality. Many in higher education, of course, pride themselves on being champions of these very values, but they get to that pride by redefining the terms in ways that most Americans regard as nonsensical. “Fairness” achieved by racial classifications, quotas, and subterfuges that institutions struggle to keep out of public view is not fairness. “Equality” that is defined by reducing people to identity group affiliations is not equality.