RUTHFULLY YOURS

The University of Michigan is going to start using an “Intercultural Development Inventory” to monitor its students “cultural sensitivity levels” as part of its new $85 million diversity initiative — and it’s pretty clearly an irresponsible use of money.

The point of the inventory — which is explained in this very creepy video — is, according to the school website, to judge students’ “ability to shift cultural perspective and appropriately adapt behavior to cultural differences and commonalities,” give students a “customized learning plan and a variety of intercultural training opportunities designed to improve cross-cultural engagement by targeting specific areas for skill development and increased personal capacity” based on their answers, and then test them again later to see if they’ve “improved.”

According to an article in the school’s official newspaper, The Michigan Daily, the school plans to spend $85 million on diversity initiatives over the next five years — in addition to the $40 million it’s already allotted to spend annually — at a school where tuition has increased 3.9 percent this year.

Now, it isn’t clear how much of this money will be spent on the monitoring program itself, but the fact is that any amount would be too much. Not only is it obviously invasive and creepy, but it’s also just not going to accomplish what the school is hoping it will. Any student at U of M, “insensitive” or not, will probably be smart enough to figure out what answer the school wants and choose that answer. After all, choosing the “wrong” answer will brand students as a “racist” in the eyes of their school — and what’s more, as Reason’s Robby Soave points out, the fact that a student’s answers will determine his or her “individual learning plan” means that “students who are judged to be too insensitive might be given more work to do.” Who wants to do sign themselves up to do more work . . . especially when it’s work that’s so likely to be patronizing and pointless? Zero people. Punishing students for telling the truth about their opinions is the best way to ensure that real discussions about those opinions will never happen — which is hindering the exact kind of learning experiences that the school claims it wants to cultivate.

According to the Daily, other initiatives in the school’s new diversity push will include “campus climate-related training,” a new multicultural center and “new recruitment strategies.”

Are those good ideas? Maybe not. Dave Huber of the College Fix reports that he himself has had experience with the kind of training programs that will be at U of M . . . and that he found it to be far less than helpful. According to Huber, his trainer’s experience was limited to “a day or two-long seminar to become a cultural/diversity ‘facilitator,’” and it showed.

“She was lecturing yours truly on Hispanic culture . . . even though I had studied and lived in Latin America for quite some time,” Huber writes. “To say her lesson was full of laughable stereotypes would be an understatement.”

Yikes.

Look, I’m all for diversity and for people not being jerks. But spending millions on mandatory invasive programs? When there’s no indication that those programs will work, and several indications that they won’t? Call me a crazy, right-wing-nut-job racist, but I really do feel like that’s something I just can’t support.

— Katherine Timpf is a reporter for National Review Online.