Mark Bauerlein notes a Steve Chatman’s study, which seems to show that students majoring in ethnic studies tend to have a less-diverse—ah, that word!—college experience, interacting less often than do, say, math majors, with students of other ethnic backgrounds.
What’s more, they have a lessened respect for people in those other groups. Who would have thunk it? Bauerlein writes:
Chatman even draws a logical possibility that might appall area and ethnic studies instruction, that is, that the climate in those fields is a lot worse than it is in engineering classes and labs. One wonders how area and ethnic studies professors would feel if they were ordered to undergo diversity sensitivity sessions themselves to try to straighten out their problems.
Chatman draws no policy conclusions, only calling for further research. But his findings certainly challenge the automatic assumption that more diversity sensitivity equals better undergraduate experience. It also introduces a needed critical element in the understanding of diversity itself. The term has acquired so much psycho-political freight that its usefulness for constructive discussion of higher education is practically zero. Such complications as those unveiled by Chatman are not a setback to rational understanding of campus social life. They are an advance.
May 13th, 2010 | 9:18 pm
Math majors have higher IQs and SAT scores than students who major in ethnic studies.
I think people who are simply more intelligent don’t indulge in stupid behavior, such as ethnic prejudice. Additionally, more intelligent people evaluate others on the basis of their skills and their comprehension of subject matter, not on personal characteristics. Your religion, gender, sexual preference, racial heritage and national origin is irrelevent to whether or not you can prove a theorem in topology or partial differential equations. If you visit the math, science and engineering majors, you will find all sorts of ethnic persons writing equations on blackboards or firing lasers at things.
On the other hand, people who major in ethnic studies have no basis for judging other people than their own feelings. The whole topic of ethnic studies is the history of historically accumulated grievances, and the tests one takes are how well one can describe those grievances. No wonder ethnic studies majors are unpleasant and hard to get along with. Everybody to their mindset is either a victim or an abuser, and the victims have to vie with each other for the honor of being the most victimized.
(By the way, I am a former math major and an Asian-American immigrant.)