(John Cauthen, a former naval officer, graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 2002 and returned to teach in the History Department from 2007-2010. While piloting helicopters he made two deployments to the Western Pacific aboard the USS ABRAHAM LINCOLN and has deployed to Afghanistan in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. He currently resides in California with his wife and two children.)
The method at the Academy, it seems, is to craft preferences for various groups based on ethnicity and gender—a policy of “affirmative action.” During the summer of 2006, then Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Mike Mullen stated that “diversity is a strategic imperative.” His successor, Admiral Gary Roughead, codified this imperative in a Navy-wide Diversity Policy, which led to innumerable programs, outreach efforts, and new bureaucratic positions structured to increase diversity. Those actions quickly found their way to the Academy.
Unfortunately, affirmative action leads to the admission and retention of midshipmen (students) who are under-qualified or even completely unqualified, in the name of balance or fairness. Diversity initiatives thus ensure that preferences are granted to pre-selected groups at the expense of otherwise qualified individuals. Doing so is neither neutral nor harmless.
These policies and initiatives make it impossible to reconcile preferences with merit. Preferences are arbitrarily bestowed upon favored groups, and merit becomes untenable in a system no longer defined by standards of individual achievement. Institutions governed by two or more systems lose credibility and the erosion of impartiality will inevitably weaken them.
The irony is that expanding diversity in search of greater “fairness” actually institutionalizes a system of bias. Using diversity to manufacture demographic proportionality necessarily becomes insidious and counterproductive.
As a former history instructor at the Naval Academy (from 2007-2010), I witnessed the failings of the diversity initiative first hand. The poisonous atmosphere it created among midshipmen, faculty, and staff in non-academic and academic settings was detrimental to the cohesion of the institution. Unfortunately, once the diversity fetish is infused into an institution, it is nearly impossible to eradicate.