Peter Wood, an anthropology professor at Boston University, will be publishing a book entitled Diversity: The Invention of a Concept next month (read Chapter One here). If the (subscribers only) article culled from the book and currently running in the Chronicle of Higher Education is any indication, Wood's book promises to be a timely and much-needed analysis of how the slippery and often self-discrediting terminology of diversity came into being.

Wood's piece in the Chronicle centers on the hypocritical logic of private women's colleges that sell themselves as havens of multiculturalism. Wellesley, Smith, Mt. Holyoke, and Bryn Mawr are all committed to a selective, internally contradictory, and ultimately indefensible concept of diversity, Wood argues. They exclude men even as they tout their commitment to non-discrimination; they promote themselves as places where sheltered young white women can have transformative encounters with people from different ethnic and racial backgrounds even as they promise nonwhite applicants respect, community, and identity; they engineer a safe and nonthreatening McDiversity of skin color for students that does more to shelter them from difference than to educate them about it.

Some excerpts:

...to avow the ideal of admitting diverse classes of students and to simultaneously reject, for purposes of admission, one of the most basic forms of actual human diversity is hypocritical and reveals a deep confusion of guiding principles.

I can well imagine that the exclusion of men or women from a particular college could be ethically, as well as educationally, justifiable. As it happens, however, the elite women's colleges that I have cited do not offer much in the way of credible ethical explanations for their exclusion of men. Moreover, their current infatuation with diversity would probably make them recoil from the best justification for single-sex education: that some forms of diversity can impede learning for some students, and that perhaps a women's college fosters a sense of group identity that promotes intellectual development.

[...]

Colleges are complex institutions that serve multiple purposes, but beneath every legitimate purpose in higher education ought to be a profound commitment to the pursuit of truth. Institutions that wed themselves to the self-serving lie of promising real but delivering fake diversity deserve to be excoriated. That lie breeds other lies. It gives the public-relations staff a rationale for publishing staged or phony pictures of racial and ethnic harmony. It tempts colleges to betray their admissions standards and to lie and insist that they haven't. It underlies corrupt choices about grades, courses, faculty appointments, and whole academic programs --Ýwhich, in turn, perpetuate a deeper dishonesty throughout society.

This large hypocrisy eats away at the foundations of American higher education. Clearly, one answer is to hold colleges to the spirit of real diversity. If diversity is such a good thing, why not, as at least part of the effort to create a diverse institution, eliminate artificial barriers that exclude some categories of intellectually able and otherwise qualified people? In that light, why shouldn't Smith and the other women's colleges that extol diversity go coed?

UPDATE: John Rosenberg has more.