Don't make diversity the enemy of excellence
Yale finally changed the name in 2017 to honor another Yale grad, computer scientist Grace Murray Hopper.
As with Bloom's book, I think Kronman raises important points worthy of further discussion and argument, especially when I disagree with him. Like Bloom, he talks a lot more about student protests than he does about what the student protests are about.
Kronman criticizes affirmative action, too, mainly for devaluing individuals in its pursuit of equity for "groups." Yet, that's hard to avoid when you're trying to solve a mammoth problem that, at bottom, is all about groups. We can respect individuals and value diversity in pursuit of excellence, not by opposing it.
Again, we need to talk about such challenges. Unfortunately, free speech is more than some young people can tolerate. Some of them were in the black student union that interrupted a program for 45 minutes in which I participated a few years ago at the University of North Carolina. I was more upset by their promptly leaving after reading off their demands. They didn't hear me quote Marshall McLuhan's observation: "Propaganda ends where dialogue begins."
Too bad. I, too, thought as a student that I knew all the answers. After graduation, I learned about the questions.
Yet I've spent too much time with students in recent years to be grumpy about their impatience. Some are great at telling me what they believe. But, as Kronman and Bloom point out, students also need to be challenged to tell me why they believe it.
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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)
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