Counting Jews: In Pursuit Of Diversity
The City University of New York has carried the principle of group classification in the pursuit of “diversity” into new—or perhaps very old—territory. CUNY’s 2011 and 2012 Diversity Action Plans include a new category, “White/Jewish.” The category appears on page six of the 2012 report, and on pages 1-2 and 61 of the 2011 report.
Apparently the new category sat there unnoticed for a year but has now begun to attract attention. On June 3, the New York Post ran a story headlined “New Minority Label at CUNY: ‘Jewish.’” The Post quotes several CUNY professors who take umbrage at the classification. Hershey Friedman, deputy chairman of the finance and business management department at CUNY’s Brooklyn College said the category was “an insult and idiotic.” Another of the critics quoted by the Post is David Gordon, a professor of history at CUNY who also is treasurer of the National Association of Scholars’ CUNY/New York affiliate. Via David, I have some of the back story.
“White/Jewish,” according to footnote 8 in the 2012 report, “was added because a number of faculty, who would be categorized as White for federal reporting purposes, noted that a Jewish category would better represent their identity group.” The Post reports that the label emerged from the work of a steering committee that “ran faculty focus groups based on ‘identity.’” The committee came up with at least one other categorization that looks a little outside the usual run of “diversity” identity groups: “Italian-American,” added-by court order stemming from “lawsuits alleging bias.”
Diversity, of course, is a kind of spoils system. It is the rubric under which an identity group that claims to be the victim of past or current discrimination can lodge a claim for preferential treatment in admissions, hiring, promotion, and access to other social goods within the academic enterprise. The controversy in Massachusetts over Senatorial candidate Elizabeth’s Warren’s claim to be 1/32 Cherokee turns on whether she used this identity group affiliation to gain a leg up in her job applications for faculty positions at the University of Pennsylvania in 1987 and Harvard Law School in 1992.