Real Diversity

I'm sure many of you may have heard about the recent stunt at Columbia by the Conservative Club when they staged an "affirmative action bake sale." For those of you who missed it, I'll recap: The Columbia College Conservative Club, also known as CCCC, staged a bake sale on campus to protest the use of affirmative action in the University's admissions policy. On a kiosk set up outside Alfred Lerner Hall, CCCC members sold baked goods, such as donuts and cookies, with a skewed price system in what the CCCC president called "a practical application of affirmative action." The baked goods were sold for $1 to white men and $.50 to white women while $1.50 to Jewish and Asian men, and $1.25 to Jewish and Asian women. Black and Hispanic men were asked to pay $0.75, women $0.25; while Republican men paid $0.10 and women $0.05. Similar events have been held at Berkeley, Texas, Texas A&M, Northwestern, Michigan and Indiana.

In order to highlight how misguided they thought the affirmative action policy was, CCCC claimed that by the same logic of affirmative action that give preferential treatment to minorities, Republicans should be charged less for cookies so they can "receive equal representation on campus."

The rub is that when attempting to define diversity with regards to college admissions you get stuck in a quagmire of politics and social uncertainty. The entire admission process and the extent to which universities use affirmative action is too vague and murky to properly analyze. Preferential treatment is inevitably handed out to a host of conventionally "diverse" and not so "diverse" social factors such as race, ethnicity, legacy (or according to Teddy Kennedy, "white affirmative action") and country of origin.

If a bake sale is going to attempt to properly and accurately represent, or even merely "parody" the admissions process, then we would have to know a lot more about it and take these factors into account or else they run this risk of looking ignorant. If however, the sole purpose of the bake sale was to make us think about the issue of diversity and force us to reexamine our own prejudices and moral convictions, then it has been effective.

More importantly, CCCC raised the important question of just how far colleges should go to define a diverse campus. By including Republicans under the blanket of minority in order to make a mockery of the affirmative action process, the CCCC unwittingly highlighted the fact that diversity includes not only ethnicity but diversity of perspectives.

When molding a diverse class, should admissions practices also include intellectual diversity or is that an inherent quality based on other social factors?

As you may have read, last week the 'Prince' reported that "The Princeton Tory" received a large grant from the University's Bildner Fund for Diversity to help bring conservative columnist George Will GS 68 to campus. In my opinion, the fund should be commended for giving the "Tory" the money as the fund adhered to its tenets by creating "meaningful enquiry, interaction and learning" in an attempt to "promote intergroup dialogue." Regardless of whether or not you agree with the magazines's opinions and beliefs, the writers do bring an intellectual diversity to our campus.

What the Bildner Fund pointed out was that too often the question of diversity gets reserved for questions of race and ethnicity. But intellectual diversity should be treated as equally important.

College admissions is obviously much larger a topic than can be properly addressed in a bake sale or in a 700-word column, but what the Bildner Fund has shown us is that diversity should not be reserved merely for ethnic and racial differences. It has demonstrated that diversity, above all, should reflect minorities from all scopes of the social and intellectual spectrum.

Whether intellectual or ethnic, diversity should be about bringing these underrepresented views to the forefront of our campus dynamic. Only then can we truly boast a diverse campus. Chris Berger is a sophomore from London. His column runs every other Thursday. You can reach him at cberger@princeton.edu.