Prior to Bakke and the constitutionalization of "diversity" blather in the late 1970s, people knew what affirmative action was actually about: a kind of reparations for the world-historic injustices suffered by African-Americans, for example. "Diversity" was cooked up in corporate HR departments in the 1970s, and then declared the sole permissible rationale for affirmative action in college admissions by Justice Powell of the Supreme Court. These facts probably do have something to do with the kind of grading rubric for the illegal "diversity statements" that Berkeley has proposed. A graduate student elsewhere, seeing the connection, writes:
Leaving aside the many legitimate worries that required diversity statements raise: I have been active in the graduate employee union during my time in my PhD program. Many schools emphasize that diversity statements should mention volunteer work done in the name of diversity. And my own union has done remarkable work in this area. Just a couple brief examples: we have fought administrative efforts to lower or eliminate tuition waivers, which have a disproportionate effect on underrepresented groups being able to attend grad school; we have made progress in child care provisions and nursing provisions, both of which disproportionately help women, who are chronically underrepresented in many programs; and, by gaining wage increases, we have disproportionately benefited international students who, as they are on student visas, cannot work jobs over the summers. And yet, I know that many of those administrators who impose the diversity statement requirement would be unhappy to read that I was active in the union. Increased wages, strong bargaining units, solidarity between various interest groups within the academic community: these are not the sorts of action admins are interested in, as they (correctly) view them as a threat to their excessive power. Hence, I haven't been mentioning my significant amount of activism, because I know it's not the sort of activism that is really desired. This should give progressive advocates of diversity statements pause. After all, diversity statements generally read like the sorts of things corporate lackeys at Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola, Starbucks, and Bank of America could get behind. And this should give the lie to the idea that these diversity statements are anything other than ideological cover for the professional-managerial class.
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