This newly discovered need for schools to cultivate and manage cross-racial friendships among students points to a fundamental truth which is the antithesis of liberalism: that the necessary condition for genuine comity and friendship between respective members of a majority group and a minority group is the existence of a dominant culture and their shared allegiance to it. When the dominant culture is vital and confident, then some minority people will be drawn to its ideals and conform themselves to its norms, and on that basis there can be unforced friendship between people of different backgrounds. But if the starting point of any society or institution is the non-legitimacy or non-existence of a majority culture and the “equality” of all cultures and groups, then authentic friendship across group lines becomes impossible.

I hope this anecdote is useful in illustrating Mr. Auster’s point in practice: I know personally three students here from Pakistan. One, I had a falling out over September 11th due, in part, to his greater hold on his heritage. For example, he is one of the few Muslim students on campus to keep his beard, among other things. The other two I count as friends (although somewhat strained). But they had childhoods very much like my own; they watched the same tv shows, the same whathaveyou.

The comments by the diversity-friendly incoming UNH president capture the strangely obsessed, totalitarian mindset of professional liberals. For them it’s as though there were this single value in the world, diversity, and everything revolves around it, everything must conform to it. So, when she was in California, “one of the most diverse parts of the country … there’s no question it is a community where you live in an environment that’s more like the world in which we all will live.” But when she was in Utah, “we spent a lot of time trying to attract more diverse people.”

It’s odd, isn’t it? It seems logical though. Once you say there are no privileged values or way of life then the only value that can be publicly affirmed is the goodness of values and lifestyles simply as such. Celebrating diversity becomes the only possible moral content of public life. I do wonder though how long people will be able to keep up the synthetic enthusiasm and what happens when everyone gets thoroughly sick of it.