Colleges are strange places. Ethnic and skin-color diversity are celebrated, but academic departments, administrators, and others actively and explicitly discriminate against people with diverse or different ideas. (E.g., I was on hiring committee recently in which the committee head said, “I don’t want to hire any more libertarians.” When the top candidate publication-wise turned out to be a libertarian and a Christian, he pushed to have the job description changed so that we hired a psychologist rather than a philosopher!) Though colleges are perhaps the least explicitly or implicitly racist places in the US, many students and faculty have become hypersensitive to racism, constantly searching for and calling out anything that could be interpreted by anyone as racist, or insufficiently deferential and respectful.

Check out this fascinating essay by sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning. Citing Donald Black, they claim part of the reason colleges have adopted a victim culture is that they have little intellectual diversity. Excerpt (emphasis added):

Environments with little diversity, Black says, give rise to a morality concerned with cultural purity. To be moral is to share the beliefs of one’s ancestors, one’s family, one’s neighbors. Given enough homogeneity, deviations may hardly occur — people either self-censor any deviant thoughts, or they are so like those around them they never have them in the first place. This appears to be the case in the most homogeneous societies, tribal societies. In more complex but still homogeneous societies, new ideas have a better chance to emerge, but they quickly become the object of rejection, ridicule, or worse. Heresy becomes a serious offense, possibly resulting in torture and execution. In many settings throughout human history, being culturally different was a serious crime.

Environments with a lot of diversity, on the other hand, give rise to a morality of tolerance. Free speech and freedom of religion become rights. Heresy is no longer a crime, much less a capital crime, and outside of smaller, more solitary groups, it is no offense at all. To be moral is to respect and even value others’ differences. Indeed, what is offensive is opposition to diverse cultural expressions and characteristics. Discrimination in the workplace based on religion or ethnicity is forbidden, and even in informal settings, ethnic slurs and the like result in shaming or shunning. In this respect the morality of diverse modern societies is exactly opposite that of most tribal and traditional societies. Condemning someone for being culturally different is itself widely condemned.

Read the whole thing, then check out their original paper.