T. J. Rodgers' campaign for the Board of Trustees of Dartmouth deserves attention. It has certainly tickled the Wall Street Journal ("Mr. Rodgers' Neighborhood," Review and Outlook, March 26), which cheekily described the attempt of the head of a billion-dollar corporation to sit on the board of a multi-billion-dollar college as "insurgent." Rodgers' platform promises to eliminate diversity objectives in admissions, to end diversity programming, and to liberate the student body from the servitude of political correctness. He has declared that gender and race have no place in admissions -- and presumably hiring -- deliberations, which should only be based on merit. The current situation cannot be what Martin Luther King intended in his "dream," he laments.
Although Rodgers points to his own company, Cypress Semiconductors, as a model of merit-based and therefore "healthy" diversity, he avoids defining "diverse" and "minority" since white women and American racial minorities have had mixed success in his industry. Asked about diversity, Rodgers lists the many nations from which his employees are drawn. Asked about diversity, Rodgers strings together explosive and divisive terms -- "quotas," "mandate," "coercion" -- to show that any other strategy is unfair and "demeans" the intended beneficiaries. Asked about diversity, Rodgers declares that merit produces a natural harmony. However, since Cypress Semiconductors is currently searching for a human resources manager to head up "employee relations," it is clear that even Rodgers' foolproof diversity formula needs facilitators.
Rodgers exploits a perceived tension between the successes of recent immigrants of color and the claims of traditional American minorities; however, these groups' interests are not actually in conflict. I proudly celebrate the achievements of recent immigrants of color, especially because civil rights and affirmative action struggles expanded their immigration, education, and employment opportunities. In short, Rodgers' preferred path to diversity is actually the offspring of the programs he attacks.
What Rodgers labels "merit-based diversity" in hiring and promotion is possible only because public and private institutions across the nation have opened their doors to previously excluded racial minorities and white women. In truth, his boast about merit-based diversity embraces the same illogic that bedevils those people who take pride in the achievements of Colin Powell or Condoleezza Rice but then reject the affirmative action programs that produced Powell and Rice.
In his passion to be elected, Rodgers strikes out rather wildly at anything that might attract a vote. He accuses the administration and faculty of abandoning teaching for research, socially engineering the student body, and suppressing political opinion across the campus. The first insult does not concern me here, for faculty and officers can defend themselves. The remainder begs a response. Rodgers' attack on, what he calls, "engineered diversity" is philosophically inconsistent with the founding mission of Dartmouth College. Moreover, it is unseemly for a nominee to the Board of Trustees to announce antagonistic intentions toward a group of students who would be under his charge if elected.
He protests that he wants to substitute "color" with "merit." The absence of color is not merit; the absence of color is segregation. As the United for Equality and Affirmative Action Legal Defense Fund eloquently argued in Grutter v. Bollinger (the recent University of Michigan case), affirmative action programs were and are the means to gender and racial desegregation even at elite institutions of higher education like Dartmouth. Race- and gender-sensitive mechanisms function with numerous other admissions considerations to produce a multi-faceted and multi-talented student community, to establish optimal teaching and learning environments, and to open long-closed doors to a few extraordinary students from communities suffering intergenerational exclusion from educational and economic opportunity.
Since he needs the votes of alumnae, Rodgers often drops gender and focuses on color. I will not. His anti-diversity rhetoric targets students of color on this campus, but his malice also threatens the gains of white women in the faculty and student body.
Many people who share Rodgers' views would neither recognize nor welcome a meritocracy. He has chosen to assail a program that impacts a tiny non-white minority while ignoring entitlements--for legacies (the children of alumni/ae), for endowment development, and for athletics--that routinely alter and restructure admissions standards at elite schools for far greater numbers of students from the most privileged backgrounds. These admissions programs discriminate by color and class: white students from the wealthiest communities monopolize their benefits. At Dartmouth and other highly selective colleges and universities, these entitlements have a vastly greater effect on the student body than any race-sensitive diversity strategies, and the administrative structures that sustain them eclipse the handful of advisors whom Rodgers excitedly labels "diversity bureaucracies."
I have no interest in criticizing these admissions policies. Rather, I only want to expose the odd emphasis of Rodgers' candidacy. He poses as the lion among those whose outrage is completely out of proportion with the alleged trespass. He mounts a public pulpit to cast Dartmouth's modest diversity plan as the mortal sin of college policy. This is accompanied by targeted assaults on anything that smacks of the interests of minorities or women, including an onslaught on a small, voluntary diversity training program that creates rare opportunities for students to actually exchange the "differing ideas" that he insists are being smothered.
Affirmative action did not produce derision or any resulting erosions of self-worth. Color-sensitive mechanisms break down closed doors and exclusionary policies that were long justified by racist and sexist claims that non-white people and white women were incapable of achievement. Affirmative action creates opportunity; bigots contribute scorn.
Rodgers' platform masks social Darwinism in the language of social justice. He even invokes the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., as if it is reasonable to associate Rodgers' campaign with a man who was murdered for his relentless and intrepid pursuit of economic and political justice. Contrary to Rodgers' assertions, Rev. King advocated and authored race-sensitive remedies to desegregate workplaces, schools, and public facilities, and to maintain their integration. T. J. Rodgers' decision to pretend that race and racial injustice do not exist or cannot be addressed is absolutely incompatible with Martin Luther King's life and legacy. I suspect that Mr. Rodgers does not quote Dr. King while pursuing his other daily business. Perhaps, he seeks to profit from mischief without being accused of malfeasance. Perhaps, he realizes his need for moral cover.
There are serious conversations that Dartmouth's students, alumni/ae, administrators, staff and faculty must have. There are decisions about harnessing the creative tension between teaching and research that will transform this college, there are demands to make space for new intellectual and pedagogical initiatives on a campus with a fairly fixed academic geography, there are urgent needs to adjust to revolutionary changes in the availability and cost of information and there are allocations of professional and physical resources that must be reexamined in an open and constructive atmosphere. Recycling reckless notions will not help us meet these challenges.
