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In 2005, a consortium of higher education organizations issued a statement affirming the importance of intellectual diversity. A survey by ACTA found, however, that not a single institution had taken concrete steps to further that goal. This report is designed to help boards of trustees and their institutions address the issue of intellectual diversity and to do so in a way that is sensitive to academic freedom and shared governance.
In October 2022, ACTA’s ATHENA Roundtable Conference in Washington, DC was highlighted by two panels featuring extraordinary higher education thought leaders. Today we present the first of those panels – headlined as DIVERSITY DONE RIGHT, and hosted by our good friend Jonathan Rauch – Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution.
“Affirm and guarantee . . . that the institution will not use a diversity statement or any other assessment of an applicant’s commitment to specified concepts in any hiring, promotions, or admissions process or decision.” So reads Senate Bill 83, recently introduced in the Ohio Legislature. Its sponsor, Senator Jerry Cirino, remarked in our interview: “This bill is about what is best for students. It is about the quality of their education and about enabling them to become independent thinkers, ready for citizenship in a free society.”
Stanford University’s Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative (EHLI) debacle showed that Stanford bureaucrats, like their Orwellian prototypes, are eager to make a Newspeak dictionary with ever-fewer approved words. But they are doing something even more sinister:...
There are some ideas so ludicrous and mischievous that only an academic would take them seriously. One of them is diversity. Think about it. Are you for or against diversity? When's the last time you said to yourself, "I'd better have a little more diversity in my life"? What would you think if y...
Without exception, every official in higher education cites the need for diversity. Most usually mean racial, ethnic and geographic diversity, but occasionally intellectual diversity enters the picture too. However, there is a disparity between racial diversity and intellectual diversity now reac...
Mark 2005 as the year that the dirty little secret of higher education became part of the public conversation. Most of us on college campuses have long known that there is little intellectual diversity in higher education, especially when it comes to political ideas. But we learned to live with i...
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