I brought up Bob Herbert last week because I was reading one of his columns some time ago and a sentence—which I paraphrase—lodged in my head: “To be educated in a non-diverse environment is to be poorly educated.” Though he didn’t know what he was saying, he was right! Nothing makes a person dumber than being in an environment where everyone thinks the same way and shares the same goals and comes from the same background—and Herbert is such a person.
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And Columbia is, to too great of an extent, such an environment. We are who we admit, and much of the blame must go to the admissions office’s amazingly cynical affirmative action policy. Herbert carbon-copies are ubiquitous. Let me reiterate that none of this makes them less black. But within the context of a school where there’s a glut of people from such backgrounds, it does make them less diverse. Everyone knows that color alone is the wrong basis on which to discriminate, and yet in admitting “minorities” (for all intents and purposes, blacks and Hispanics) this is what the University does. It makes skin-deep distinctions and overvalues superficial traits while willfully ignoring what really makes people different.
When we travesty the noble goal of “diversity” like this, we impoverish our plurality of experience. We create an environment where people don’t examine who they are, and we create a supposedly cosmopolitan campus with a suburban, static feeling. Education means acing your APs so you can internalize the doctrines of the Core that congratulate the Core; politics means echoing encomiums to “diverse” Obama; protesting means uninformed anti-expansion extravaganzas or vapid, gutless, coercive hunger strikes that show nothing but their participants’ security and unoriginality; journalism means sitting in an office with other people sitting in an office; life means doing what we do because we do it.
I understand that the University is a business, but as a provider of education it should also be an engine for social mobility. This rationale for admitting rich “minorities” is as feeble and unconvincing as the rationale for admitting another over-represented demographic whose virtues are over-exaggerated and yet whom it is an anathema to criticize: athletes. When, at his inauguration, PrezBo said that affirmative action in college admissions was the biggest civil rights issue since Brown v. Board of Education, he might have been right—but, like Herbert, his policies and actions have shown him to be ignorant of how right he could have been.
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Homogeneousness is bad—its logical conclusion is terrifying. A friend who goes to Berkeley Law, where affirmative action was discontinued, used the phrase “peer pressure clusterfuck.” Friends who have sat in at Chinese universities report an atmosphere where the professor drones on and the students clamor to answer questions like yearlings at Sunday school catechism. One might be a genius at memorization and regurgitation, a prodigy within the context of the class, but it’s worth remembering that true prodigies only occur in closed disciplines that reference only themselves and require no knowledge of the outside world.
This is the opposite of the kind of knowledge a university should cultivate. Decontextualized, we fail to connect our experiences and cease to imagine what it’s like to be someone or something else—and this difference is no less than the difference between childhood and adulthood, a most collegiate transition the University should be facilitating rather than resisting.
In the same inaugural address where he praised affirmative action, PrezBo also brought up the School of Journalism. Journalists, he said, should have a broad training, or context for connecting experiences. This argument forms the core of The Wire’s fifth season, which portrays a fictionalized Baltimore Sun. The Sun, like the Spec, should provide a fourth-estate presence over its domain. And yet the editors reject comprehensive coverage in favor of a sensationalized series on the homeless: Dickensian, Herbert-style journalism. The paper wins a Pulitzer Prize, awarded by Columbia University. The closing montage shows an awards gala in Low Library. And then the series ends, leaving the next generation to make the same mistakes that its predecessors did. The institutions remain static—people remain the same.
This is too often what our admissions policy does. As long as we have an affirmative action policy that cynically over-privileges the privileged, while ignoring those who have it the hardest: the poor—especially the poor minorities like those in my high school and in The Wire, the “real” victims of racism and social injustice—then we will have a more boring campus, a stupider student body, and an inferior education. By the numbers we have the “most diverse” campus in the Ivy League, but does it feel like it?
Chris Morris-Lent is a Columbia College junior majoring in English. Blood, Toil, Tears & Sweat runs alternate Thursdays. opinion@columbiaspectator.com