Imagine you’re required to submit what’s essentially a loyalty oath to diversity dogma to qualify for a “merit”-based raise at your job. Do you bow down before the mind molesters for money? Well, the illustrious Professor Stephen Bainbridge of UCLA Law School was recently confronted with this dilemma, and his response to the academic bullies’ goodthink enforcement has raised everything from eyebrows to spirits.
What follows is his diversity oath, taken from his blog and reprinted in toto (hat tip: American Thinker):
Although I am aware and respectful of the many dimensions within which a university properly seeks a diverse faculty and student body, I have long been particularly concerned with the lack of intellectual diversity at the law school. A survey of U.S. law professors in general found that white Democratic professors (both male and female), Jewish professors, and nonreligious professors “account for most (or all) of the overrepresentation among racial, gender, religious, and ideological groups in law teaching.”[1] The groups that “account for most of the underrepresentation among racial, gender, religious, and ideological groups in law teaching” are Republicans (both male and female), Protestants, and Catholics.[2] This disparity persists even though “religious and political diversity are probably more important for viewpoint diversity than gender diversity and roughly as important as racial diversity.”[3]
At UCLA, we know that the campus as a whole leans substantially to the Left. “A study of various university faculties showed that at Cornell the ratio of liberal to conservative faculty members was 166 to 6, at Stanford it was 151 to 17, at UCLA it was 141 to 9, and at the University of Colorado it was 116 to 5.”[4] Conservative students at UCLA have been “harassed, stalked, and threatened.”[5] I recently searched the opensecrets.org donor database for political contributions made by persons who claimed UCLA School of Law as their employer. Thirty-eight of those persons contributed solely to Democratic candidates, the Democratic Party and various affiliates, and liberal PACs. One person contributed to both Republicans and Democrats. Three persons contributed exclusively to Republican candidates, the Republican Party, and various NRC affiliates. Of the faculty members who contributed exclusively to Republican candidates, the most recently hired of the two was hired in 1997. As a monetary matter, 92.67% of all contributions went to Democrats and affiliated groups.[6]
Because conservative students and students of faith often feel alienated and estranged in an environment that is so relentlessly liberal and secular, I have made particular efforts to reach out to and support such students. I have served as a mentor for leaders of The Federalist Society and Christian Law Students Association. I have given talks to both organizations. I taught a Perspectives on law and Lawyering seminar devoted to Catholic Social Thought and the Law, which gave students — whether Catholic or not — an opportunity to consider how their faith (or lack thereof) related to the law and an opportunity to learn about a coherent body of Christian scholarship that might inform their lives as lawyers. I have also tried to lead by example, such as by serving as a volunteer with the Good Shepherd Catholic Church’s St. Vincent de Paul chapter, which raises funds for distribution to poor persons who are in danger of losing their home due to inability to make rent or mortgage payments.
I’ll let you know if I get the raise.
Explaining why the professor’s statement has brought great attention and praise, American Thinker writes, “Saul Alinksy’s Fourth Rule for Radicals reads, ‘Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.’ Professor Bainbridge has added what we may call ‘The Bainbridge Corollary’ to Alinsky #4: use the enemy’s own rhetoric and logic to expose its flaws.”
Those flaws are many, too. Consider, for instance, that left-wing diversity dogma contradicts left-wing equality dogma. After all, diversity can only “strengthen us,” as is claimed, if certain groups bring to the table qualities other groups don’t — if they are, in a politically incorrect word, superior to other groups in those respects.
Yet the Left has also insisted (at least when in the right mood) that all groups are identical in terms of worldly capacities and that asserting otherwise is verboten because it can lead to stigmatization and discrimination. So which is it?
The kicker is that the Left ardently preaches a message about achieving proportionate group-association diversity. As Professor Bainbridge pointed out, however, it doesn’t live up to even that. Consider the insistence that government should “look like America” (as Bill Clinton put it in the 1990s), and then, for example, consider the Supreme Court.
Following a longstanding pattern, there are five Catholics on that bench, amounting to 56 percent of the total, even though Catholics are only 22 percent of our population. There are three Jews, 33 percent of the total, yet Jews are only 2.5 percent of our nation. For a long time there were no Protestants, and now there may be one — Justice Neil Gorsuch was raised Catholic but currently attends an Episcopalian church — despite Protestants being almost 49 percent of our population.
Diversity dogma is a lie. Aside from balkanization, all it accomplishes is to effect de facto affirmative action and quotas for politically favored groups. Yet disfavored groups not only don’t get special treatment when “underrepresented” — their underrepresentation isn’t even noticed.
Diversity has become a euphemism for not just balkanization, but also a new kind of unjust discrimination.
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