On Diversity, by Russell Jacoby

I appreciate this discussion very much. My experience in a large public university over recent decades doesn’t jibe with the author’s, if I’m reading him correctly. I don’t see that the “diversity” faculty/administrators become members of a rather uniform worldview of academia. On the contrary, I see universities changing dramatically. There are not only majors that now aim to advocate for social justice, but whole levels of administration, including strategic planners, that make social justice work an ‘official’ ambition of the university as a whole. Faculty scholarly work/research allows community organizing and similar experiences to be important in evaluations and tenure decisions. I see committees or committee members who screen departments’ work along these lines. Perhaps this is the replacement of one (white, male, wealthy) power structure with another, but it’s an enormous change, in my experience. I hope this doesn’t come across as simply hostile: I have complicated feelings about these changes. I did want to point them out since they differ from the author’s view.