Two weeks ago, Chronicle reporter Peter Schmidt penned an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal that is one of the strongest statements you can find about the benefits of diversity in the college classroom. It’s entitled “America’s Universities Are Living a Diversity Lie,” but Schmidt doesn’t argue against the basic human good of diversity. Instead, he targets the most popular defense of race-based admissions in higher education: namely, that a multi-racial classroom produces better academic outcomes for students. Proponents of affirmative action in college admissions affirm the learning advantages of a diverse classroom as if it were patently true, and a small industry of “diversity research” has developed to back them up.

It wasn’t always so, though. Back in the 1970s, when affirmative action hit the courts, the educational rationale for diversity was a minor one. Schmidt writes: “In the mid-1970s, when colleges talked about the educational benefits of race-conscious admissions, what they had in mind were the benefits reaped by minority students. And tellingly, the University of California had said nothing about the educational benefits of diversity in defending the UC-Davis medical school’s strict racial quotas against the lawsuit brought by Allan P. Bakke, a rejected white applicant.”

Several schools weighed in on that case, and “Justice Powell would come to rely heavily on one of those briefs, in which Columbia, Harvard, Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania joined in arguing, without any empirical evidence, that diversity ‘makes the university a better learning environment.’” Accepting the “learning environment” position, Powell provided an opening for admissions policies. It was left to researchers to ground it in science. Schmidt: “Over the next several years, education researchers scrambled to find such proof and repeatedly met with college leaders to discuss their progress. Their work took on a sense of urgency, on the expectation the Supreme Court would soon be revisiting Bakke. Yet again and again, their studies were shown to have gaping holes and deemed too weak to hold up in the courts.” They could not demonstrate that kids in a multi-racial classroom learn math, reading, science, or French better than kids in an all-white or all-black classroom. Racial and social attitudes might have improved, and we should hail that result, but knowledge and skill levels couldn’t be tied to diversity.

Nevertheless, it’s a central assertion reiterated all the time, nowhere more significantly than in the Supreme Court case in 2003, Grutter v. Bollinger. There, “The opinions revealed that the majority of justices had been swayed by a barrage of friend-of-the-court briefs spinning and exaggerating what the research said about the alleged educational benefits of diversity.”

That’s the “lie” Schmidt identifies. We have a solemn discourse about the learning benefits of diversity that simply doesn’t have a foundation in solid inquiry. If it did, then we would have to say that Spelman College, which is all women and in 2003 reported 1 white and 1 Hispanic student in a population of 2,121, and Morehouse College, which tallied 4 Asians, 8 Hispanics, and 3 whites in a student body of 2,770, operate at a disadvantage — which certainly isn’t the case from what I’ve seen on visits there.