Dartmouth Does Diversity

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A bad idea whose time has come . . . again and again and again.

Dec 2, 2002, Vol. 8, No. 12 • By HEATHER MAC DONALD

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THE COUNTRY IS ON THE BRINK OF WAR, it faces the likelihood of another terrorist attack, and the New York Times is worried that Americans are not paying enough attention to race and gender. Two front-page articles on November 12--one on college diversity programs, the other on a golf club's all-male membership policy--offer a stunning demonstration of the loony irrelevance of Howell Raines's Times.

The academic obsession with "racial difference" has been an exhaustively documented feature of campus life for over two decades, yet the Times offers its story on the alleged necessity of college diversity training as a scoop. The article, "Colleges Find Diversity Is Not Just Numbers," leads with a freshman orientation program at Dartmouth College that focuses on racial difference. The Times presents the program as part of Dartmouth's "new push" to "embrac[e] diversity." That "push" is itself part of a broader trend across colleges to respond to difference, announces the Times.

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