Editorial: In search of diversity

UNLV has a new dean at its College of Liberal Arts — and this week he made one of his priorities clear.

“We have to make sure we have a culture where diverse faculty feel valued and supported,” said Chris Heavey, who has taught at UNLV for two decades and will assume his new $205,000-a-year position on July 1.

Mr. Heavey said on Monday that he believes the school’s student body — minorities constitute more than half of UNLV’s undergraduate population — would be better served by ramping up faculty diversity at the liberal arts college. The college, which educates almost 12 percent of the UNLV student body, features a faculty that in 2014 was 81 percent white.

None of this has escaped campus activists, who last year held a November rally to demand that UNLV officials more fervently embrace multiculturalism. Mr. Heavey was obviously paying attention.

It’s interesting to note, however, that diversity in this case seems to mean only one thing: skin color, gender and ethnicity. Nowhere is there a commitment to hiring professors of varying political philosophies or beliefs to offset an environment traditionally dominated by progressive dogma.

This is not a fault confined to UNLV. In a March 31 Wall Street Journal commentary, “The One Kind of Diversity Colleges Avoid,” Georgetown professor John Hasnas writes that, “In my experience, no search committee has ever been instructed to increase political or ideological diversity.”

He goes on. “The advocates of diversity in higher education claim that learning requires the robust exchange of ideas, which is enhanced when students and faculty have the greatest possible variety of backgrounds. ... These are good arguments. But surely the robust exchange of ideas is enhanced by exposure to and interaction with people who have diverse political and philosophical viewpoints, not only cultural or ethnic backgrounds.”

Perhaps our college campuses need more diverse thinking on diversity.