Last week, Inside Higher Edreported on the University of Oregon's Orwellian proposal to make" cultural competence" a key factor in all hiring and promotion decisions. As Boris Botvinnik, a math professor, noted, the plan seemed designed to"tell us what to do in terms of research in mathematics." The implications for History professors would be equally grave: taken literally, the diversity plan would allow the hiring and promotion of only specialists in race, class, and gender.

This morning's University Diaries follows up with a critique of U of O president Dave Frohnmayer's response to the public outcry."To me," Frohnmayer muses, cultural competence"means that we are able to effectively reach all of the students who have demonstrated their competence to be in the university but for whom, because of cultural background, traditional techniques of teaching may not be as effective as others. A good teacher is always open, I hope, to ways to increase teaching effectiveness." I assume that the U of O, like just about every other institution of higher learning, already measures teaching effectiveness in their personnel decisions. (If they don't, this diversity draft is the least of their problems.) And, of course, Frohnmayer obfuscates the proposal's call to evaluate the research interests of professors according to a" cultural competence" standard.

Even a defender of the U of O's proposal, history professor Matthew Dennis, admitted that"the plan gave the impression that cultural competence was going to be the chief criterion for salary increases." (Dennis himself wouldn't be harmed by the new criteria, since his specialties include environmental history and the history of American Indians.) But the outcry nationally and on the U of O campus suggests that there might be some limits to a"diversity" agenda.

This morning's Inside Higher Ed offers another interesting take on the issue. Scott Jaschik reports on a new study that suggests that Asian-American students are the chief victims of affirmative action policies in college admissions. The authors of the study--Princeton's Thomas Espenshade and Chang Chung, a senior staff member in the university’s Office of Population Research--are clearly sympathetic to affirmative action. To them, the study's “most important conclusion is the negative impact on African American and Hispanic students if affirmative action practices were eliminated.”

The figures, according to Jaschik:"without affirmative action, the acceptance rate for African American candidates at elite colleges would be likely to fall by nearly two-thirds, from 33.7 percent to 12.2 percent, while the acceptance rate for Hispanic applicants probably would be cut in half, from 26.8 percent to 12.9 percent." White admission rates, however, would be essentially unchanged (23.8 percent with affirmative action; 24.3 percent without.) The biggest change comes with Asian students. Again quoting Jaschik,"Their admission rate in a race-neutral system would go to 23.4 percent, from 17.6 percent. And their share of a class of admitted students would rise to 31.5 percent, from 23.7 percent."

Although in the aftermath of the University of Michigan Supreme Court decisions the official justification for affirmative action became the promotion of"diversity," the moral justification for the concept comes in its use as a tool to rectify past discrimination. In this respect, if the figures from this study hold up (and further data, obviously, is needed), the moral case for affirmative action becomes much shakier--since the students most directly harmed by the policy would come from ethnic groups that suffered long-term discrimination from state governments and (in the case of Japanese-Americans) the federal government.

This issue has already played out to some extent in California, most notably when a group of Chinese-American parents filed suit against the San Francisco School Board over the affirmative action program at Lowell High School, the city's top public high school. (As a magnet school, Lowell required admission tests, for which Asian students had to score substantially higher than blacks or Hispanics and higher than white applicants.) The case was settled with cosmetic changes in Lowell's policy. But both the Lowell case and the Espenshade/Chang study suggest that affirmative action in higher education might increasingly be played out as an issue in which the chief targets as well as the chief beneficiaries are minorities.