Derb Dissects a Diversity Seminar

University of Alabama SGA candidates weren't the only ones enduring a diversity seminar this week. NRO's John Derbyshire sat down among the diversitoids recently, too.

Sitting round in the horseshoe like that, I got a closer look at my fellow participants. The women were, of course, the most enthusiastic. The whole affair, in fact, was running on estrogen. The general atmosphere was that peculiar mix of insistent niceness and angry menace that women are so good at. We are frail, sweet, and sorely oppressed, and you had better be nice to us... OTHERWISE WE WILL SMASH YOU TO PIECES. There was much talk of "sensitivity" and "understanding"; words like "efficiency," "measurement," "standards," came up only as pejoratives. The idea that excellence could be quantified was greeted with unanimous scorn and laughter. A person foolish enough to let slip the word "objectivity" was quickly hooted down by the others. There is no such thing as objectivity! I made a quiet, uncollectable bet with myself that I was the only person in the room with a degree in anything more mathematically rigorous than sociology.

...The diversity ideology is, as Peter Wood pointed out in his fine book on the subject..."a closed loop of thought and experience. Once one enters this loop and accepts the main propositions of diversity, it is difficult to see out of it."

Diversity is, in short, a cult; and I started to feel that if I hung out in that room much longer, I should be in need of some serious deprogramming. In any case, it was time for my own event. I snuck out quietly, leaving the pod people all ululating in happy unison at someone's mention of Larry Summers.