See, on many campuses, even elected student senates now have “seats” set aside only for specified, aggrieved minorities. To reserve a seat, all a group needs to do is show it is a minority and it has suffered mistreatment or discrimination as a result.

No problem, thought Theodore Hertzberg, a junior at Amherst College in Massachusetts and chairman of the Amherst College Republicans. Who is more aggrieved as a minority on campus than the student conservative? And who has suffered more persecution on campus, where conservative newspapers are routinely stolen and burned and conservative students are not just ridiculed but sometimes threatened?

So Hertzberg made his pitch to the student Senate for a conservative diversity seat at the table. After all, he objectively met the guidelines and requirements that the other groups listed above needed to meet, and arguably more than the others.

Underrepresented? Conservatives at Amherst, like other universities, have almost no voice in campus government. Of the college’s 160 professors, only one on staff this year is a registered Republican. Imagine the protesting chants if there were only one black professor or only one gay professor out of 160.

Mistreatment? A stack of Amherst’s conservative student newspaper, the Spectator, was burned outside the editor’s dorm room, sending a dark message of intimidation that few other minority groups have endured in recent years.

Case closed, it would seem. But not to the Amherst student Senate, which approved all of the diversity set-aside seats except for conservatives.

Hertzberg may have lost the vote, but he won the point.

The diversity movement isn’t really about diversity at all. It encompasses a lot of largely superficial differences — skin color, ethnicity, gender — but its ideology is pretty uniform. A liberal Hispanic, a liberal black, a liberal woman, a liberal gay, a liberal disabled person and a liberal bisexual are considered a rainbow of diversity. The problem, of course, is that you get them all in a room, they will agree on most every important issue. The thinking will be monochrome. The only rainbow of diversity will be in skin color, gender and choice of sexual partners. And that results in a definite lack of diversity.

Hertzberg said he wasn’t trying to win the seat, much less expecting to. He wanted to highlight the insincerity and double standards that have become the hallmark of campus diversity.

“I never really wanted the seat, and I didn’t think that I’d get it,” he said recently. If the Senate had acted on a nonpolitical definition of diversity and granted the seat to conservatives, Hertzberg said, “My only work in the student Senate would have been to work to repeal the diversity seat provisions from the student government constitution.”

Amherst is not the only campus where conservatives have tried to infiltrate the diversity system. At Tufts University, the editors of The Primary Source, “the journal of conservative thought at Tufts University,” petitioned for a “cultural representative” slot on the student government. Cultural representative seats are for groups that have historically been muzzled and abused.

Robert Lichter, an editor at The Primary Source, laid out the case that conservatives have almost no voice on campus, are harassed and have their newspapers and magazines destroyed. They demonstrably meet the criteria set forth for the slots.

But again, as with their fellow conservatives up the road at Amherst, the Tufts conservatives were turned away from the diversity table by liberal enforcers of a peculiar brand of “tolerant” orthodoxy.

The reality of diversity on campus is not to promote any true notion of diverse views – such as the founding fathers had in mind with full-bodied freedom of speech and an unencumbered and vibrant press – but to enforce a code of politically correct thinking. Diversity has become the enforcement arm of George Orwell’s prophecy of Big Brother watching over us, making sure people line up with the stylish fads of the elite.

Reserving government seats only for accepted minorities on an elected body corrupts true democracy. There were not, and never have been, any such provisions in our government for such degrading procedures. Not only is democracy left tainted, but the campus becomes Balkanized between those with special status and those without.

Of course there’s a danger with conservatives trying to enter the “underrepresented” lottery, even in fun. Actually seeking a diversity seat is a questionable maneuver on the grounds of climbing inside and using a device that conservatives on principle oppose. If any organizations were to succeed, that would give an additional stamp of legitimacy to the diversity regime and corrupt the conservative message challenging it.

Still, the actions may have built some momentum for challenging this particular aspect of diversity. Hertzberg won over Amherst student senator Ali Hassan as an ally to his cause. Hassan now calls the diversity seat arrangement undemocratic and “offensive” because it presumes people will vote prejudicially — i.e., they won’t vote for someone who’s a member of a minority.

We’ll soon see how many other people Hertzberg has persuaded. He’s collected the necessary signatures to force a student referendum in January on eliminating the diversity seats on the Senate.

Even if the referendum fails, these public endeavors have had the happy benefit of unmasking what may be the crowning hypocrisy on college campuses: the lack of intellectual and philosophical diversity, and a virtual obsession with skin color and sexual orientation. That alone is enough to make the efforts worthwhile.