The latest trend in the campus diversity frenzy has arrived: in addition to wooing minority students with free campus visits, separate dorms, special campus centers, and so on, colleges are now actively recruiting gay students. The first ever college recruitment fair for gay high school students was held in Boston last Saturday. Harvard, Yale, Brown, Stanford, Grinnell, and a host of other schools participated.

Gay teens, college recruiters are saying, are often very high achieving students. Coming out makes them more mature, hones their leadership skills, and challenges them to cultivate their individuality. Recruiters do not have any statistics to back this claim, but they make the claim nonetheless: "Schools are inviting these students because they question the norms," says Judith Brown, who directs the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Center at Tufts. "They make people question their own assumptions, and that's a key to learning and growing as people."

If I've got this straight (no pun intended), the logic here is this: the presence of a gay, or lesbian, or bisexual, or transgendered individual on campus in and of itself improves the learning environment for all students, and it does so because gayness, or bisexuality, or lesbianism, or transexuality in and of themselves make people question their assumptions and thus grow. Maybe so, but only if you agree to one of two equally peculiar premises. The first is that gay people somehow are their sexuality in the same way that, in the logic of multiculturalism, people are somehow their race. The second is that homosexuality is an enriching activity that will enhance the campus culture in the same way that being a musician, or an actor, or an athlete, or a science fair champion, will enhance campus culture. In this logic, being gay is a kind of skill or talent that deserves special recognition.

Neither of these premises is at all attractive, though the first has become so commonplace that many people have become innured to its uglier insinuations. Hence the widespread belief that campus diversity can be measured in terms of the percentage of minority students decorating its dorms and greens and classrooms--and not, for example, by the variety of intellectual and political viewpoints espoused by students and faculty. Under this logic, gay students are desirable on campus because the fact of their gayness forces non-gay students to confront their homophobia (which is taken as a given), and to learn tolerance (which, it is assumed, they have not already learned elsewhere, and would not acquire without the confrontational aid provided by gay students). In this logic, gay students--like minority students--are, oddly, expected to act as inspirational props for straight students' ongoing sensitivity training.

The second premise, that homosexuality is an enriching talent, is positively laughable--but it is nonetheless the thesis of some college recruiters, who are operating under the assumption that being gay is somehow on an extracurricular par with being good at science, or being especially smart. As the Boston Globe article puts it, "In the cutthroat world of admissions recruitment, where schools try to build diverse freshmen classes by targeting teenage subgroups like female science enthusiasts and poor students with high SAT scores, gay students are emerging as an appealing new niche." I can see the admissions committee meeting now. There is Mary, who plays the oboe. There is Joseph who runs cross country. There is Jack, who edits the school newspaper, and there is Jill, who sings in the school choir. Then there is John, who is gay. Who do you choose? They are all so creative! They are all so motivated, such individualists, such leaders! Unless John submits a sample of his "work," I don't see how he can compete with the others. But that is just what admissions officers seem to be suggesting he do.

The flaws in their reasoning do not trouble recruiters, whose desire to do good seems to have cut off the flow of blood to their analytical abilities. Instead, the only real problem recruiters seem to be struggling with is how to find the gay students they want to recruit. After all, unlike race and sex, homosexuality can be pretty hard to see. Unlike most black and Hispanic students, and unlike women, gay students are not readily identifiable unless they want to be. Many are in the closet. Others do not yet know they are gay. There is no box for gay students to check on their application forms, and there is no guarantee that gay students would check a box so offered--though the Globe notes that there are admissions officers who are advocating doing just that. "If we truly want these students, it's vital to ask the question," says a recruiter from the University of New Hampshire. "It will help us really tailor a message of support to them." Under the guise of doing good, college recruiters are devising ways to ferret out gay applicants. Under the guise of welcoming those applicants, they bid fair to make them feel targeted and exposed.

And as such, they completely miss the point. Gay students are hard to identify because being gay--or being straight for that matter--is a private matter. Gay students should not feel that they have to out themselves in order to make their best application to college. Nor should they ever have to feel that colleges want them on campus because they are gay. They should never have to wonder what the "beneficiaries" of affirmative action must often wonder: whether they have been accepted not because of their hard work and their intellectual promise, but because they are expected to help make the campus culture more colorful.

I use the word "colorful" pointedly: it strikes me that one way colleges could identify gays more readily is if all gay students had to wear bright yellow stars to identify them as members of this exotic, unusually successful group. But wait--the yellow star has already been taken, and it already has worked, very successfully I might add, to identify members of another exotic unusually successful group. (The analogy is not so terribly forced: as John Leo notes, Jews have recently become hot commodities at Vanderbilt, where administrators imagine that they can raise the school's profile by increasing the numbers of Jews on campus. As Vanderbilt's chancellor observes, Jews are lively, interesting, hardworking, and have such a rich culture.) My point is that tokenism and stereotyping are never a good thing, not even when they are done, as they routinely are, in the name of "diversity" or "multiculturalism." Whether the motivation behind it is "good" or "bad," the logic is essentially the same, and essentially scary.

As misguided as the gay recruitment push is, though, it may ultimately be a good thing precisely because it is such a clear exemplar of how invasive the logic of diversity is. Women and minorities can't escape the condescending logic of the inclusive label. Their names and skins and bodies announce them as members of oppressed groups who require special treatment, and so, whether they want to or not, they walk through life stigmatized as victims in need of social assistance, chased by an unctuous good will that might better be called pity, dogged by the rightful resentment of those whom they unfairly displace, and embarrassed by the feral way certain members of their group exploit their privileged status for petty personal gain.

But gay students have a choice about when, and where, and how, and whether, they make their sexual choices public knowledge. Here's hoping that instead of parading their sexuality before admissions officers who would make their erotic tastes the stuff of academic assessment, they choose to conserve their dignity and just say no.