John Fund questions the desirability of "diversity" on campus.
As argued by the President of the University of Michigan, diversity sounds like something that is necessary for a good education, like a good library. I wondered if he wasn't suggesting that the reason we need diversity is more for the benefit of the wel-qualified students than for the "diverse" ones.

A day or two ago, I heard one of Michigan's lawyers argue to the Supreme Court that for diversity, you have to have a critical mass of minorities so that they won't feel isolated or lonely. What kind of diversity is that? It seems that this theory would intensify the feeling among minorities that they're only there for the benefit of those who didn't need affirmative action to get in. If these students feel lonely and isolated, and need others of their own race to overcome that, don't these Affirmative Action students hang together and basically become a clique? The theory is that they will mix in with the rest of the student body and diverse cultures will enrich each other. But the way the arguments are presented, they sound more like quotas. Can one really say that one's education was better because there were black or hispanic students who never only marginally mixed with other racial groups? I don't know.

These days, I'm not all that convinced that an educationf from a lot the elite schools isn't as valuable as the contacts and network one builds and the mystique of their names on one's resume. The real action is in high school. That's where you really learn how to learn, develop study habits, etc. I would rather see us put our money and effort into improving the effectiveness of these rather than granting favors to those we've already failed in public schools.