Diversity, Why?

Diversity is all the rage these days. And since the Supreme Court struck down Affirmative Action weeks ago, it's literally causing rage amid some sectors of the population. The opinion section of today's New York Times is devoted to the subject, shouting on its front page, "THE SUPREME COURT BANNED AFFIRMATIVE ACTION IN HIGHER EDUCATION. BUT THAT DOESN'T MEAN THAT AMERICA HAS TO GIVE UP ON DIVERSITY: HOW TO FIX COLLEGE ADMISSIONS NOW" is the full title, as if they are broken and need repair.

When did they break? They were perfectly fine when I attended New York University in the 60s, with students of all races and ethnicities in all of my classes. We didn't think of our school as diverse, we thought of it as normal. Nobody cared who was what. Still, I can't recall how anyone "of color" enriched my learning experience. I went to class, studied  hard and did the work that was required. Having non-white classmates didn't make it any easier or harder for me to graduate.

I then moved to Washington, D.C. and lived there for the next 30 years. It was very diverse, and for a time was dubbed "Chocolate City" because there were more black than white residents. There was nothing unusual about it. I never thought about it. When my son went to Woodrow Wilson High School there he was well in the minority, with only 15% of the 350 students in his class white. Still, I never thought about "diversity" and how his black and Asian friends were "diverse."  (FYI, the school's name has recently been changed because apparently Woodrow Wilson was a racist -- who knew?--  so it's now named for two black teachers nobody ever heard of so I don't remember the new name.)

But now, living in Maine, the country's whitest state, I have to think about diversity every damn minute, and how I am living on the stolen land of the Wabanaki, and how there should be more diversity everywhere, especially on college campuses. 

What I wonder is why: How does diversity help? What does it do? Is it to learn about new cuisine, hear different music or wear different clothing? What, exactly, is so important about it that now every single college campus has to be diverse or it's considered broken? Does that include MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)? Because what I hope is that it keeps turning out the very best engineers by accepting the very smartest students, no matter their skin color, to build our roads and bridges so they don't collapse while we're driving on them.

Just asking.