Merit-Based Natural Diversity vs. Social Engineering

In response to Columbia President Lee Bolinger's (formerly president of the University of Michigan) article in the Chronicle for Higher Education (subscription required) "Why Diversity Matters," Dinesh D'Souza writes "Why Diversity Doesn't Matter:"

Consider two scenarios for UC-Berkeley or UCLA. In the first, the campus is 45% Asian, 48% white, 4% Hispanic and 3% black. In the second, the campus is 30% Asian, 55% white, 7% hispanic, and 8% black. Does the second scenario strike you as markedly more diverse than the first?

Actually it isn't. The fraction of minorities is roughly the same. The difference is that the first scenario is produced by merit. It represents merit-based diversity. It is a pretty good picture of what Berkeley and UCLA look like now. The second scenario is produced by racial preferences. It represents socially-engineered diversity. It is how Berkeley and UCLA used to look in the era of racial preferences.

The advantage of natural diversity is that it achieves its goal without sacrificing merit. The disadvantage of socially-engineered diversity is twofold: First, it is unfair to qualified students who are denied admission. If you want to raise the proportion of under-represented groups, you have to lower the proportion of over-represented groups. But who are these over-represented groups? Basically they are Jews and Asian Americans. And they are over-represented not because they are discriminating against anybody but because they are out-performing everybody. So why should they suffer?

The second disadvantage of ethnic and racial preferences is that they often hurt the students they seek to help. How? By putting them into competition with students against whom they are mismatched. A Hispanic student who can do the work and compete effectively at San Francisco State University is admitted to Berkeley, where he is completely overwhelmed by the work and ends up at the bottom of the class, or worse, dropping out. California’s public universities had scandalous black and Hispanic dropout rates in the era of affirmative action.

The bottom line is that Bollinger is wrong. Yes, diversity is good for higher education, but the issue raised by affirmative action is not one of "diversity" versus "no diversity." It is a matter of the natural diversity produced by talent and hard work, versus Bollinger's type of socially engineered diversity. The National Football League doesn't look like America, the U.S. Congress doesn't look like America, Hollywood doesn't look like America, so why is it so important that UCLA or Columbia look like America? In this country what matters is not how you look but what you can do.