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Opening Arguments

Vets for diversity

Good for him:

Diversity has long been the watchword in college admissions, and among elite schools in particular.  Yet as Princeton professor Uwe Reinhardt writes, diversity advocates tend to focus on race and ethnicity to the exclusion of differences in class and culture. Reinhardt, whose son graduated from Princeton and joined the Marine Corps in 2001, notes with dismay that the school currently has just four veterans out of a campus of 5,249 undergraduates and 2,610 graduate students. Veterans, whatever their skin color, bring a dramatically different perspective to campus:

Boy, that's a really low number. Ball State had way more of us Vietnam era vets, and, remember, they didn't even like us. I'd like to think we added value for our classmates, since we had had some experiences they didn't. And the relationship between the vets and the other students was a lot more amicable than the contemporary press accounts described.

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