| Summary: | The article focuses on diversity at Ivy League universities in the United States. Tom Wolfe's novel about a young student, "I am Charlotte Simmons", is a depressing read for any parent. Wolfe clearly exaggerates for effect. But on one subject he is guilty of understatement: diversity. On the one hand, colleges bend over backwards to hire minority professors and recruit minority students, aided by an ever-burgeoning bureaucracy of "diversity officers". Yet, when it comes to politics, they are not just indifferent to diversity, but downright allergic to it. The Center for Responsive Politics notes that in 2004 two universities--the University of California and Harvard--occupied first and second place in the list of donations to the Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry campaign by employee groups. Meanwhile, a national survey of more than 1,000 academics shows that Democrats outnumber Republicans by at least seven to one in the humanities and social sciences. In 1978, Justice Lewis Powell argued that diversity is vital to a university's educational mission, to promote the atmosphere of "speculation, experiment and creation" that is essential to their identities. The more diverse the body, the more robust the exchange of ideas.
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