When an appeals court ruled last month in Grutter v. Bollinger that the University of Michigan's affirmative action/quota policy was constitutional, a basic rationale was the need to promote diversity. But as the dissent noted, "diversity," as used by the university, simply meant that more black people were needed to fill a quota.
Unfortunately, if predictably, that's what the word "diversity" seems to have evolved to mean, in public as well as in legal contexts. In an otherwise bland story about my hometown, the Baltimore Sun provided this little gem:
Diversity is lacking at River Hill High School, where 78 percent of the students are white, 6 percent are black, 15 percent are Asian and 1 percent are Hispanic.Twenty-two percent non-white doesn't constitute "diversity?" Well, clearly it does, unless diversity is simply defined to mean "many black people." (Asians simply do not count, in this calculus.)