DIVERSITY AND UNITY IN EDUCATION: This post from temporary Volokhonspirator (hmm, sounds too much like a dinosaur really) Eric Muller is right but not right enough. Muller notes, “[M]y own personal experience of teaching for four years at a racially homogeneous law school (the University of Wyoming) and now at a racially integrated one (UNC) tells me that racial diversity does in fact contribute importantly to full and rigorous discussion and debate in a law school classroom.” I expect in many situations that’s accurate; while race isn’t a terrific proxy for diversity of experience and perspective plus ability to articulate that experience and perspective, it is a partial proxy.

The unanswered questions, though, are: 1) Are there other proxies for diversity of experience and perspective that would be equally or more useful to the university classroom? (e.g. diversity of economic background, religious belief, political view, regional background, national origin?)

2) Is it possible to cut the use of proxies entirely, perhaps by relying more heavily on essays and interviews? (That’s part of what my earlier post, linked below, explores.)

3) Is the educational value gained from diversity greater than the educational value gained from unity? By “unity” I don’t just mean the lack of diversity–I mean an actual, consciously chosen similarity in viewpoint among students. For example, when I was a freshman I took a course on the history of Christian doctrine. I’m about 95% sure that I was the only non-Christian in my section, if not in the class. One of the reasons the class was so great was the sense of a common project: All of us (including me) were convinced that understanding this material was crucial to our futures. A high degree of cultural unity can provide some of the same sense of a common project, though less pronounced and less conscious, therefore probably less intellectually stimulating; I would guess that that’s part of what students are seeking when they choose historically black colleges, with race again being used as a proxy for experience and perspective.

More on affirmative action here. A big post on college admissions and affirmative action, ending with what I think is a good way to combine the benefits of unity and the benefits of diversity, here.