Last year, conservative student groups at Berkeley and UCLA held anti-affirmative action bake sales to make a point about the false economics and falser ethics of affirmative action. At Berkeley, for example, you could buy chocolate chip cookies priced according to a sliding race-based fee scale: cookies were $1.50 for whites, $1.25 for Asians, $1.00 for Latinos, 75 cents for Chicanos, 50 cents for Native Americans, and 25 cents for blacks. The events were--predictably--denounced as racist grandstanding by offended students, faculty, and even state legislators. They caused upset, outrage, and--here I speculate--no small amount of sympathetic indigestion in those who found the sale's concept difficult to stomach. But as dismissive and anti-intellectual as those denunciations were (and it is anti-intellectual to simply label that with which one disagrees racist, rather than take the time to frame a cogent argument against it), they spoke to the fact that the sales were allowed to take place on their respective campuses, and that they did spark something like the debate they were meant to spark.

Administrators at SMU aren't about to allow such a debate to take place on their campus. That's why they shut down an analogous bake sale organized by the Young Conservatives of Texas, a student group that set out to protest affirmative action by charging white males $1 for a cookie, white women 75 cents for a cookie, Hispanics 50 cents and blacks 25 cents. The sale had been going for a grand total of 45 minutes when a black student complained. Administrators shut the sale down, saying that it posed a danger to itself and others. "This was not an issue about free speech," Tim Moore, director of the SMU student center, told the Dallas Morning News. "It was really an issue where we had a hostile environment being created."

Hostile environments are, of course, whatever we want them to be. And on campuses, they are whatever certain officially aggrieved groups say they are. In this case, the "hostility" of the bake sale was lodged in what offended students were pleased to describe as its (implicitly racist) "ignorance." "My reaction was disgust because of the ignorance of some SMU students," said one black student. "They were arguing that affirmative action was solely based on race. It's not based on race. It's based on bringing a diverse community to a certain organization." For this student, a viewpoint that differs from his is not only threatening, but ignorant and wrong, a lie. No matter that this very point can be--and is being--hotly debated on campuses, in the media, and in the courts, and no matter that there is a profound irony embedded in the student's claim. Affirmative action as it is presently practiced is absolutely about race (and to a lesser degree, sex)--that's why we don't see affirmative action for political conservatives or fundamentalist Christians on campus. Those groups are under-represented in higher education, too--but they aren't organized by skin color or chromosomes, and the "diversity of viewpoint" they conceivably bring with them is neither valued nor welcome at many schools. The "diverse community" that this student so righteously references, and that SMU's administration so protectively manages, is one based on censorship of viewpoints (and, apparently, foodstuffs) that don't conform to the particular political orthodoxy of SMU's campus culture.

Don't look for anyone in SMU's administration to appreciate this point voluntarily. Don't look, either, for them to realize that by shutting the sale down, SMU has helped the Young Conservatives of Texas make an even stronger point about the true logic of "diversity" that exists at their institution and at many like it across the country. The media are now spreading a message about institutional hypocrisy and double standards surrounding politics and race that readily tops the message the bake sale--whose total profit was $1.50--was originally meant to send.

Hat tip: readers Fred R., Gabriel R., and Michael S.

UPDATE: There's more at Highered Intelligence, the Volokh Conspiracy, and The Curmudgeonly Clerk.