<p>Oh wise elders, please guide us, your young ones, as we prepare to sally forth into the world on this most tender of topics. </p>
<p>With our best schools nearly paralyzed by the fiend of “political correctness” and the pall of “diversity” so thick and ever-present that it chokes the life out of everything, please discusss and debate this quote by noted Yale educator Anthony Kronman:</p>
<p>The more a classroom resembles a gathering of delegates speaking on behalf of the groups they represent, the less congenial a place it becomes in which to explore questions of a personally meaningful kind, including, above all, the questions of what ultimately matters in life and why. In such a classroom, students encounter each other not as individuals but as spokespersons instead. They accept or reject their teachers as role models more on account of the group to which they belong and less because of their individual qualities of character and intellect. And the works they study are regarded more as statements of group membership than as creations of men and women with viewpoints uniquely their own. </p>
<p>I guess the question that the quotation begs is whether a student admitted, in part, because they are a URM or because they are from South Dakota can shed that identity and participate as, simply, a human being.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t want someone from South Dakota to shed his or her identity. A student from S.D. can have something very valuable to teach someone from a different part of the country. For example (a real story, I didn’t make it up) an incredibly bright, well traveled student at a college not many miles from my home, thought that turkeys were male chickens. Similarly someone from a different country can teach Americans about their cultures. I know I did, just as I learned from being in classes with Americans and students from different countries. We don’t have to be spokespeople for our own “group,” whatever it is. But it is better to have diverse viewpoints stemming from having different backgrounds and experiences than having exactly the same opinions. Where is the debate and discussion when everyone agrees with everyone else?</p>
<p>There is a difference between people having unique and different points of view as individuals and acting a representatives of groups. I personally would not want to be in a college where all I was perceived to bring to the table was my South Dakotaness. (by the way I have never been to South Dakota and I don’t mean to be picking on South Dakotans). I don’t know about you, but I have participated in lively wide ranging debates in groups that were regionally, racially, economically, and ethnically homogeneous. My region, race, ethnicity and class don’t define me (at least I hope they don’t).</p>
<p>No, they don’t. But the prof being quoted assumes they do. </p>
<p>My point, however, is that people of different backgrounds bring different experiences to a discussion. People who are over 6 feet tall don’t always understand what life feels like if you are 5ft or under. Men don’t really understand what it feels like to be pregnant. Until one has actually lived in 100 degrees heat and 90% humidity, one cannot really understand how it feels to live and work in such conditions, as people do in many parts of the world, and without air conditioning. Conversely, people who have not experienced winters that last half the year cannot really understand how winters affect you physically and psychologically. Books and even visual materials can only take you so far. I have actually heard some supposedly bright students who thought that villages, rural, and countryside were totally different and separate concepts and had not understood that peasants lived in the countryside.</p>
<p>This is just an observation (I am not arguing for anything here) but people’s religious background, or lack thereof, may have a more significant effect on their views on the meaning of life than region, race, ethnicity and class but we tend to avoid using this as a criteria for diversity in admissions.</p>
<p>I agree that religious beliefs are an important aspect of one’s personality but classes are not just about debating “the meaning of life” even though Prof. Kronman may think they are. I don’t know if religious beliefs are totally ignored in admissions decisions. It’s hard to say as there are various ways of establishing or guessing at someone’s religious affiliation.</p>
<p>It’s kind of hard to debate this issue out of context. An appropriate response to “How many stars do you see in the sky?” depends in part on whether one is standing in Central Park or in the mountains fifty miles west of Colorado Springs.</p>
<p>My uncle (now deceased) was of sound and independent Midwestern stock. To my knowledge he only left his home state once in his 86 years, and in that trip chose to badger his hosts over the unsatisfactory lives Northeastern city-dwellers lived. One example: “I don’t know your criminals don’t simply turn themselves in and admit their crimes. After all, that would be the morally correct thing to do.”</p>
<p>My children were in the far minority religion wise throughout HS and now are no longer. It has been a profound experience for them as throughout HS they needed to be circumspect. What that aspect of their life meant to them and what they chose to reveal to others was very important in terms of what it said about them and their relationships with the people they shared with. In the ‘token’ role they were in they were very mindful of their representative status, but what they shared was entirely personal- because this was their experience of their religion.</p>
<p>Who a person is is much more complex than their passport country, their religion, their place of birth. What meets the eye in the quest to ‘diversify’ is hopefully only the tip of the iceberg. That is my presumption anyways.</p>
<p>Tony Kronman has spent almost all of his career at one university, and I am very familiar with the corner of it he occupied exclusively, at least until recently. The passage quoted above does not describe anything he could possibly have experienced on a day-to-day basis. If there was ever a place where no one was allowed to act as a “delegate” for anyone other than him- or herself, it is Yale Law School. The very notion of students or faculty as unidimensional representatives of something or other is about 180 degrees from the ethos of that place, where quirk, originality, and critical thinking directed at your political allies as well as your opponents are the essence of daily discourse. </p>
<p>Which, by the way, was largely why Kronman was there in the first place, since he never fit comfortably into any discernible academic-political camp. His whole career is a testament to the irrelevance of political correctness in an actual elite university. So it’s a little hard to tell whether he’s complaining about something that actually exists, or attacking a mythological straw person to sell books.</p>