Ideal diversity, the quest for a prescribed rainbow of race and ethnicity, is making little headway at CU, the Denver Post reported on Aug. 17. Who's surprised? You can't make water run uphill. Despite President Hank Brown's diversity task force, a new vice-chancellor dedicated to the issue, and 80-plus diversity programs at a cost of $22 million, people are going to do what they're going to do about higher education (and many other life choices). Nor is that a bad thing. No less an acute social observer than Harvard's Robert Putnam -- hardly a conservative -- reports data that highlight the downside of diversity-by-design, according to a column last week by Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal.
When that downside is pushed to an extreme by well-intended schemes that ignore groups' aversion to mixing, mass bloodshed can result, as military historian Ralph Peters bluntly reminds us in a not-for-the-squeamish National Review piece, "Better than Genocide: Ethnic Cleansing in Human Affairs." (See print edition 8/13/07, or this link; subscription required.)
The keynotes for a free and good society, all history teaches us, are individual liberty and individual responsibility, not engineered social mixing. America has largely lost sight of that truth, however. Our state and nation need leaders with the moral courage to say it and the political skills to enact it as policy.
We the people can take one step by petitioning to the 2008 ballot, and then adopting, the Colorado Civil Rights Initiative.
[Cross-posted at the Gang of Four blog on PoliticsWest.com]