The Diversity Principle

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The surprising two-hundred-year history of diversity in education, commerce, and science from the scholar the New Yorker dubbed America’s “diversity detective� As a war on diversity upends government, corporate, and education policies, the history of the idea of diversity has never been more important. In this contrarian book, David B. Oppenheimer, a diversity skeptic turned admirer, chronicles how diversity became a foundational value of higher education over the last two hundred years, how it evolved as it was adopted in commerce and science, and the implications of the current backlash. The diversity principle—the idea that people with different backgrounds, experiences, identities, and viewpoints produce better work by engaging with one another—was a core tenet of the first modern research university, founded in Germany in 1810. It was the inspiration for John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty , a touchstone of