Googling "Diversity" with the NAS

The National Association of Scholars (NAS) is one of those nasty, right-wing, anti-academic think tanks that give me hives. On June 29, 2006, this group announced some truly shocking news about American universities: they apparently have "an obsession with diversity unparalleled in any other sector of American opinion leadership." On university websites, the NAS claims, "diversity" gets more play than "traditional American ideals like freedom, democracy, and liberty." In other words, academia is more concerned with keeping a bunch of non-white whiners happy than with good, old-fashioned, American values.

(I am curious to see the NAS's research on how American universities feel about mixed-race drinking fountains and miscegenation. They're probably out of step with "traditional American ideals" there, also.)

How did the NAS come to its shocking conclusion? According to their report, their method "involved googling university websites to look for the frequency with which the terms 'diversity,' 'freedom,' 'liberty,' 'democracy,' and 'equality' cropped up. We then compared those ratios with the results of similar searches of religious, media, political, and business websites so as to gauge the philosophic distance between academia and other institutional sectors."

Googling. With a methodology that time-consuming and precise, it's clear that they are in dogged pursuit of Truth. Content analysis, anyone?

Just in case someone mistakenly thinks that this approach yields worthwhile information, Inside Higher Education mentions a number of other people who have used the NAS's methodology and gotten, well, interesting results:

• Hiram Hover notes that the website for industry giant Halliburton mentions "diversity" 23 times as often as "freedom," and 253 times as often as "democracy." This means that, according to the NAS's methods, "Halliburton is [between] 15 [and] 82 times more left-wing than UC-Berkeley."
• According to a post at Free Exchange on Campus, references to "diversity" don't always, pace NAS, refer to clandestine attempts to establish Affirmative Action programs: in addition to links having to do with the racial/ethnic/religious use of the word diversity, a Google search of the Harvard website also brings back links to the “diversity of plants,” “technological diversity,” “the diversity of neutron stars,” not to mention the “diversity of thought.”

So what's the point? Why is the NAS in such a tizzy about a penny-ante four-syllable word? Some insight into this question appears in a post on the blog PrivatePapers by National Review reporter Victor Davis Hanson: "One of the more Orwellian aspects of the contemporary university [Hanson writes] is loud support from faculty members for such liberal causes as diversity, multiculturalism, and 'social justice.'" In other words, "diversity" and "social justice" are loony, radical, French ideas which no self-respecting, patriotic American has any use for.

Apparently, organizations like Students for Academic Freedom and the NAS prefer the world depicted in Dickens novels to the world in which Americans actually live--a world in which Borges and Marquez appear in the same literary canon with Shakespeare and Donne (not to mention Melville and Twain), and in which Indian removal and the civil rights movement, like it or not, are integral parts of American history. Some old-school leftists are hardline Marxists: apparently, the new thing is to be a hardline Dickensist, working against the loathsome dragon called Social Justice at every turn.

But that's a story for another day.