Thursday, September 30, 2004

Diversity failure is triumph

Last night, my technical writing class was discussing proposal writing. For an example, we reviewed an actual grant proposal submitted by the University of Colorado at Denver (UCD) in response to an RFP (request for proposal) seeking to fund new educational programs. UCD hopes to receive funding to offer a new certificate related to M.S. program I'm in.

One of the requirements of the funding organization was for the proposed program to involve women and minorities as part of a diversity initiative.

In their proposal the university sited a "diversity" statistic. Eighty percent of the graduates of UCD's technical communication program are women. That's 80%.

Remember back when there was a diversity failure if less than 50% of graduates were women? Now that it's 80%, that is advertised as a success. It seems more like a failure from my position. Overall, college enrollment is approaching 60% women. This hurts women as well as men.

How? Well, this is why well educated women are having problems finding dates. It's a fact, men are more likely to date women with less education than women are to date men with less education. That leads to a lot of single well educated women.

Back to the subject. Let's face it. "Diversity" doesn't really mean diversity. It means giving advantages to certain politically favored groups. Christna Hoff Sommers covers more about this in her book The War Against Boys.