How small of all that human hearts endure,
That part that laws or kings can cause or cure.
Samuel Johnson

In case you missed it, Silicon Valley has a “diversity problem.” That, at least, is the view of the New York Times, which published an editorial earlier this month, lamenting the fact that most Silicon Valley employees are white and Asian men. “Among technical employees,” the Times noted, “few are women, and even fewer are Latino or African-American.” The editorial noted that there is “a lot the government needs to do” to address the issue, and it urged the technology industry to “start tackling its diversity problem right now,” implying that if the industry doesn’t fix problem, the government will.

We probably won’t read about it in the Times, but there are even more egregious “diversity problems” throughout the economy. For once you assume, as the editorial does, that any divergence between the demographic profile of the population at large, and the demographic makeup of a particular industry, represents a “problem” – why then, in the words of a famous Broadway hustler, “we’ve surely got trouble, right here in River City.”

If anyone wants to “start tackling a diversity problem right now,” they should start with the Cambodians. This ethnic group comprises 0.09% of the national population, less than one tenth of one percent. Yet here in California, 90% of the doughnut shops are owned by Cambodians. In other words, Cambodians are one thousand times over-represented in the doughnut industry, at least by the logic of the Times. That means that whites, blacks, Latinos, and all of us who are not Cambodian are dramatically under-represented in the doughnut business.

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Last week, one of the nation’s premier institutions of higher learning held its 40^th year reunion. Members of the Class of 1974 left their corner offices, boardrooms, television studios, summer estates, and – yes – even their comfortably ordinary jobs and homes, to reconnect with old friends and classmates.

The climactic event of the reunion was a series of presentations rather misleadingly dubbed “The Eureka Moment!”.  This was not the kind of Eureka moment experienced by Archimedes in the bathtub.  Instead, members of this distinguished company vied with one another to present the most distressing, depressing, and often intimate episode of their lives. The format was eerily reminiscent of the old “Queen For a Day” television show, where contestants competed to see whose life was the most pathetic, with the winner receiving a slew of valuable prizes.

What led these successful people to participate in this strange event?  Quite possibly, the same compulsions that made them successful in the first place. Continue reading →

It’s May, the season of college graduation ceremonies, when the college careers of seniors terminate at what are paradoxically called “commencement” exercises.

A great deal of attention will be paid to those invited to speak at these ceremonies, even though most of what they have to say will be rich in platitudes and eminently forgettable.  In fact, this year’s crop of commencement speakers will probably be better remembered for those who did not speak than for those who did.  Ayan Ali Hirsi, Christine Lagarde, Condoleesa Rice, Charles Murray, and Robert Birgeneau are among a growing list of interesting people who have been “disinvited,” or otherwise pressured to stay away, in a misguided campaign to shield undergraduates from viewpoints that might make them “uncomfortable.”

But for those interested in the state of education at America’s colleges, it may be less important to listen to what the elders have to say to the students than to what the students themselves have to say.

Two Ivy League student essays are worth examining, if only to note their starkly contrasting visions. One is an optimistic picture of a world in which success is possible to all, provided only that they are equipped with the right values.  The other is a grim picture where victimhood is inescapable, no matter how many blessings one receives.  It may be coincidence, but the fact that the first is written by a freshman, and the second by a senior, suggests a troubling explanation: the modern university may be deadening the spirit of its young charges. Continue reading →