Diversity’s False Solace
The New York Times
April 11, 2004
By WALTER BENN MICHAELS
The university where I have taught for the last three years — the University of Illinois, Chicago — is a large, increasingly underfinanced public university. Our classrooms are overcrowded. Our physical plant is deteriorating. Many departments cannot afford to hire any new professors.
But as we, like other universities around the country, send out our final admissions letters this month, there is at least one bright spot, one area where we have done well and are poised to do even better. Seemingly every piece of literature that U.I.C. distributes about itself announces that we have been ”ranked among the Top 10 universities in the country for the diversity” of ”our student body.”
And that diversity, the literature goes on to point out, ”is one of the greatest aspects of our campus.” The bad news about our current condition is that you may be jammed into a classroom so full that you can’t find a place to
sit. But the good news is that 46 percent of the people jammed in there with you will be Caucasian, 21 percent will be Asian, 13 percent will be Hispanic and 9 percent will be African-American.