Applying For Admission To Michigan
By Charles Cole (09/27/03)
After the Supreme Court ruled that the University of Michigan could not admit students based on their race, this bastion of educational excellence wasted no time in finding an alternate method to achieve the same objective. Applicants are now required to write a 250-word essay on one of the two following topics:
(1) “At the University of Michigan, we are committed to building an academically superb and widely diverse educational community. What would you as an individual bring to our campus community?”
(2) “Describe an experience you’ve had where cultural diversity – or a lack thereof – has made a difference to you.”
Discounting out of hand the second option above as totally infantile, it would be very interesting to see a university reader’s assessment of the following applicant essay:
“I graduated from a high school which has been consistently rated in the top ten in my state. I was in the Honors, Advanced Placement program all four years, graduating with a GPA of 4.0. I was the President of my graduating class, and received the following awards:
- the Clarence Darrow Award as the best debater in my state debate contest;
- the Albert Einstein Prize for the best submission in the state mathematics contest;
- the Helen Keller Award for academic achievement by a disabled student;
- the Martin Luther King Award for outstanding achievement by a minority student;
- first place in the Ronald Reagan Conservative Student Americanism Essay Contest.
I believe that, as an African American conservative, my participation in classroom discussions at Michigan would greatly enhance the diversity of your political science, history and language arts programs since, from all indications, conservatives are seriously under-represented among your student body, not to mention your faculty.”
Imagine the transition which a university reader would undergo, from glee at the beginning of this essay, to shock at the final “award” listed, to abject horror after digesting the final paragraph! Then imagine the hoops through which the university admissions director would have to jump to prevent this applicant from infecting the “culturally diverse” student population with – horror of horrors – conservative ideas from a minority student!
In point of fact, Michigan’s “new” essay requirement is nothing new. Academia’s leftist orientation has been documented in study after study. Their idea of “diversity” is limited to the skin color and ethnicity of its students. Any suggestion of political diversity is anathema to them.
Syndicated columnist and author George F. Will has summed up this phenomenon quite well by describing it as enforcing conformity in the name of diversity. One wonders how long it will take before the parents who foot the bill for political indoctrination disguised as “education” to say, “Enough”! There are still colleges today where students can pursue a meaningful education without all of the leftwing, political brainwashing so typical of places such as Michigan. Parents need to become informed consumers by carefully studying the choices available to them.
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