It wasn’t just the fact of having wasted a fine Saturday afternoon indoors that bothered me. No, what really annoyed me was that I had heard it all so many times before. The seminar -- which, it turns out, was mainly about how to smooth over racial and ethnic conflict in the classroom while not seeming to take sides -- was based on a simple premise, constantly repeated: diversity in the classroom is a necessary and valuable part of the college experience.

Well, maybe. Certainly there is nothing wrong with diversity in itself. In fact, I agree with most of what diversity’s proponents have to say: in a multicultural and democratic society such as our own, a broad representation of racial and ethnic minorities in public institutions -- including the nation’s colleges and universities -- is a legitimate goal. But is it, as those who argue for "diversity in the classroom" say, necessary?

The case for diversity in the classroom -- which I had the bad luck of hearing for the hundredth time at my Saturday seminar -- is a simple one. According to those who support the notion, diversity is an essential aspect of the academic experience. The reason for this is that, without diversity, there is no difference. Since a thriving intellectual life depends upon the challenge presented by new and different ideas, it follows that diversity is a necessary ingredient of such a life. Without diversity, in other words, the intellectual climate of the university would be profoundly impoverished. So we should all just shut up and celebrate it.

When you put the case this way, it’s hard to disagree with the diversity boosters. Imagine, if you can, a world-without-diversity. It would be a place of absolute homogeneity: everyone would look alike, think alike, act alike, ad nauseum. Under these circumstances, debate and disagreement would be out of the question. Similarly with invention and discovery. The college classrooms of this world-without-diversity would be sad, boring places indeed.

So far, so good. The problem is, those who advocate diversity in the classroom aren’t talking about difference per se. Rather, they have a specific type of difference in mind: for the average diversity booster, difference counts only when it is racial or ethnic in nature. It is not obvious, however, why this sort of diversity should matter in the classroom. For genuine difference of opinion naturally arises through the independent use of the critical intelligence. Fill a room with smart people, give them all the same thing to read, stir, and in no time a variety of opinions will arise with regards to their reading. To claim instead -- as so many people do nowadays -- that difference of opinion is the result of different "perspectives" or "life experiences" and that these, in turn, have primarily to do with a person’s race or ethnicity is to commit two falsehoods at once. First, it is to suggest that smart people of the same racial and ethnic background will always agree with one another. Second, it is to suggest that smart people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds will always disagree. In both cases, the falsehood results from the assumption that every race and ethnicity has its own "perspective" and that it is in this that difference resides.

But how could that be? After all, people of the same race and ethnicity regularly disagree with one another. Are some of their perspectives more "real" than others? Even if people of the same race and ethnicity always agreed, it is not clear what their perspective would have to tell us in particular cases. What, for instance, is the African-American perspective on organic chemistry? Or the Chinese-American perspective on Greek tragedy? Or the European-American perspective on mechanical engineering? Even in the more obvious cases the question is far from clear. To say that there is, for instance, an African-American perspective on racial profiling or a Mexican-American perspective on illegal immigration is necessarily to privilege some views while excluding others. And from whose perspective are we going to make that decision?

In spite of the patent falsehood of the diversity argument, it is now widely endorsed by university administrations across the country -- with important consequences for contemporary education policy. One of the justifications for the recent drive to dismantle the SATs, for instance, is that on-campus diversity will increase in its absence. A similar argument is offered for affirmative action. Since diversity is such an important part of the academic experience, defenders of affirmative action argue, it is in everyone’s interest to support a policy which ensures a broad representation of racial and ethnic minorities on campus, even when that means that good students are turned away for no other reason than the color of their skin. In both cases, the diversity boosters are cynically trading on the momentary popularity of the idea, foolish in itself, that race equals "perspective."

Recent events at the University of California’s Boalt School of Law nicely illustrate the intellectual bankruptcy of this new consensus on diversity. Earlier this Spring, the appointment of University of Minnesota professor Daniel Farber to Boalt’s faculty triggered several days of protest on the part of Boalt students. No one present denied that Farber, a specialist in the burgeoning field of environmental law, had the credentials, competence, and desire to perform his new job. Rather, what concerned the protesters was that Farber’s appointment threatened diversity at Boalt. In part, this was because Farber, a white male, would be just another pale face on the faculty’s roster. But just as importantly, the students opposed Farber because Farber himself opposes "critical race theory," an area of activist legal studies aimed at exposing the ways in which American law is designed to perpetuate white dominance.

The irony of the protesters’ stance on the Farber appointment was that Boalt already has several prominent practitioners of "critical race theory." It was thus a little surprising that Farber’s opponents should have expressed their opposition in the language of "diversity." Though Farber adds little to the school’s diversity in crude racial terms, his appointment rather obviously contributes to the intellectual diversity of the institution. And isn’t that what counts?

Increasingly, the answer is "no." As a Boalt alumnus put it in a letter to the student paper, in the mind of the average liberal, "100 students with the same point of view but different skin colors are diverse, while 100 students with the same skin color and different points of view are not." Though the defenders of diversity in the classroom pretend otherwise, in the end the only type of diversity they care about is the kind that’s skin deep.

The fact that it is often used to mask an agenda which is fundamentally anti-intellectual is not the only problem with the discourse of diversity. Though the argument for diversity in the classroom is false to the extent that it tends to equate race with "perspective," the constant reiteration of this otherwise bad argument by persons in positions of authority has had the perverse effect of convincing many minority students that their primary intellectual allegiances should be with those who to one degree or another resemble them.

In this respect, the argument for diversity is proving to be strangely self-fulfilling. The more people believe that their ideas are the product of their racial and ethnic descriptions, the more they will tend to organize themselves into communities of thought defined along these lines. The champions of diversity in the classroom, in other words, may turn out to be right after all: the day may yet arrive when race equals perspective. If so, they will only have themselves to blame.

But it will probably never occur to them to do so. One measure of the recent success enjoyed by "diversity" is the fact that it is now nearly impossible to criticize the notion. Such criticism is worse than taboo -- it is obscure. This obscurity will only increase as time passes and the diversity boosters gain confidence, a fact which only goes to show that ideas don’t need to be good to be widely accepted as obvious and true. As I looked about the seminar room I wondered whether any of my colleagues felt the same way. Judging by their eager faces, I’d say the answer for these teachers of the future is no.