Most American colleges and universities are in the grip of an obsession — an obsession with what’s now misleadingly called “equity.” What that really means is eliminating any differences in group outcomes. If, for example, black students do less well than other groups in some field, that’s a problem for the institution to solve. Such disparities are always attributed to something called “structural racism,” since that eliminates all other possible explanations.

In today’s Martin Center article, Ashlynn Warta looks at the crazed search for “structural racism” at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The impetus for it clearly comes from the university’s chancellor.

How did the various academic units within UNC respond? Just as you’d expect, with the same silly ideas that have been dominating the academic world for decades. Warta reports, “To combat supposed problems like ‘white supremacy’ and ‘implicit bias,’ 13 respondents suggested requiring DEI trainings for faculty and staff or shared that they already had such requirements. Some shared that they wanted to create a requirement (or already had one) that all students in their school take a DEI course at the start of their program.”

Those responses show a belief that there actually is “white supremacy” at work in UNC and that diversity training will do something to end it. Those ideas cannot be questioned.

The diversity mania is destroying academic standards across the nation, and UNC has a particularly bad case of it.