Citizen Sviggum, a rebel for our times

It's become perfectly clear that there is "too much diversity" at the University of Minnesota.

Oh, relax. I don't mean that there's too much diversity at the U campus in Morris — or at any other campus. Every Minnesotan who knows what's good for them has lately learned better than to let such crime-think even cross their mind.

No, I mean that there is, or has been, altogether too much diversity for many tastes on the Board of Regents. Too much ideological diversity, that is — more diversity of opinion than today's advanced thinkers are comfortable with.

But it apparently won't be there for long.

You know the story. As related in the Star Tribune's account last week:

"University of Minnesota Regent Steve Sviggum stepped down Tuesday as vice chairman of the board that oversees the statewide system amid growing outrage over ... comments he made almost two weeks ago at a public meeting. In talking about declining enrollment at the Morris campus, Sviggum asked acting Chancellor Janet Schrunk Ericksen whether from a marketing standpoint the campus was 'too diverse.' "

When, several days later, Sviggum apologized "unequivocally" you knew he was a goner.

Declared a leader of a coalition of American Indian groups: "We are not entertaining apologies in this day and age ... ."

We're better than that, it seems.

It's worth noting that the Board of Regents has had difficulty entertaining more than one point of view, much less impolitic questions, for quite some time — witness the banishment of discomforting former Regent Michael Hsu just last year.

It's not hard to fathom how Sviggum's forbidden thought might have occurred to the former Republican Speaker of the Minnesota House — even apart from several letters he says he's received from parents uncomfortable with the level of racial diversity on the Morris campus.

According to U data, the Morris campus has seen enrollment drop every year for a decade, sinking 45% in all. That's not a sustainable trajectory, even in government, and it's more than twice as sharp a decline as the 19% drop at the Crookston campus in the same period — more than three times the 14% shrinkage in Duluth.

White enrollment at Morris has plunged by 55% in 10 years, while other domestic racial groups have changed only modestly, except for American Indian enrollment, which jumped 31% since 2011.

Other outstate campuses have seen less striking racial patterns in their enrollment changes. Although Black enrollment in Duluth has more than doubled in 10 years, white enrollment there fell well less than half as fast as it did in Morris, at 23%. In Crookston, white enrollment dropped only 3% in a decade (but the data is noisy there, with large "unknown" enrollments).

Anyway, there seems to be something distinctive going on with enrollment declines at Morris, and a particularly diverse student body seems another hard-to-miss distinction.

If one didn't know that it is taboo, a firing offense, to even consider the possibility that some people, however benightedly, may not find ever greater diversity, more diversity than they're accustomed to, to be a big attraction — well, in that case, "from a marketing standpoint," the question Sviggum asked seems within the spacious boundaries of unfettered inquiry in the "search for truth" one might have thought the University of Minnesota stands for.

Interestingly, many of Sviggum's critics don't really deny that he's onto something suggesting that white "discomfort" with rising diversity is inspiring enrollment declines. They just label that discomfort "racism" and declare victory.

But as a solution to the "marketing" problem, how does this work? As a sales pitch, "Seek your education at U of M-Morris! If you don't, you're a racist!" seems a little shaky.

Anyhow, endorsing the pursuit of facts, whether we like them or not, is not just crime-think nowadays, it is old-think — it is Enlightenment, not "enlightened," thinking — and not just at the U. This is revealed in an essay published this month, purely coincidentally, by a U scholar.

"A policy of deliberate ignorance has corrupted top scientific institutions in the West," writes James Lee, a behavioral geneticist at the U, in the Oct. 19 edition of City Journal, a publication of the Manhattan Institute.

In "Don't even go there," (brought to my attention on the always splendid Marginal Revolution blog), Prof. Lee protests that "it's been an open secret for years that prestigious [national] journals will often reject submissions that offend prevailing political orthodoxies — especially if they involve controversial aspects of human biology and behavior — no matter how scientifically sound the work might be."

Now, Lee says, American geneticists face a "more drastic form of censorship: exclusion from access to the data necessary to conduct analyses ... . The National Institutes of Health now withholds access to an important database if it thinks a scientist's research may wander into forbidden territory."

It seems Lee's work on "the relationships among intelligence, education, and health outcomes" has sometimes strayed onto "forbidden" ground by looking at the "genetic basis" of various traits and outcomes — a potentially "stigmatizing" type of inquiry in NIH's trendy new perspective.

Sviggum's problems and Lee's frustrations are different in many ways. But one can detect what we might call a common genetic basis — a powerful, resurgent, almost medieval instinct among America's ideological factions (in these cases, fashionable progressive elites) to banish, silence and anathematize any ideas, realities or even questions that threaten their dogmas.

Righteous intolerance is a frighteningly powerful force, but Lee believes, optimistically, that the institutions recently fallen in thrall to it may ultimately be its victims.

"NIH has historically enjoyed high levels of public confidence in its professionalism and integrity," Lee writes, in words that might equally apply to other long respected organizations. "That trust is now deteriorating."