Entertaining diversity with great books: a path forward for the humanities. From the editorial:

In 1850, when Herman Melville wrote that “a whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard,” he meant that he had been educated by the “miscellaneous metropolitan society” he found at sea—Blacks, whites, Native Americans, Pacific Islanders; believers and unbelievers; high-spirited adventurers and men laid low by poverty and squalor….

[R]egardless of what one thinks about how racial diversity has been pursued through college admissions, people of all political views should acknowledge that, once students enroll, most universities have done too little to make diversity an educational asset….

Diversity means the most in a “classroom environment” where students from different backgrounds and with different experiences come together to think about moral and historical questions. Such questions include how rights, goods and privileges have been distributed in the past and how they should be distributed in the future. Who draws the line between norms and taboos? What is justice or merit? How has race been used to sort human beings into favored and disfavored groups?

These kinds of questions belong to the humanities (history, literature, philosophy, the arts) and to what are sometimes called the “soft” social sciences (political science, sociology). No reasonable person would dispute that responses will differ according to who is in the room and that race is an important differentiator—though certainly not the only one.

But since the Bakke decision the room has been emptying out. The last few decades have seen a mass migration from the humanities into the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) disciplines and other fields such as business and economics that promise a straight path to a career…. As for the humanities, much of the intellectual energy has moved to identity-based fields focusing on gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity. These disciplines pay overdue attention to dimensions of human experience that were once marginalized in academic life, but they also tend to bring students into affinity groups insulated from one another….

What’s needed now is a fresh commitment to general education that assigns or attracts students to classes explicitly focused on broad human themes, with common reading lists and with peers whose origins, interests and ambitions differ from their own.

People who think of themselves as progressive tend to dismiss the idea of a common or “core” curriculum as retrograde or even reactionary—a throwback to the era when colleges were run by thundering clergymen who told students what to believe and how to behave. But in fact, such a curriculum—or at least one with some common elements—is the likeliest way to make diversity a real force for learning among students of different races, religions, origins, sexual identities and other forms of difference.