Striving for political correctness, Wisconsin enters a gray area

There are times when efforts at political correctness become patently incorrect. Case in point: Last week at the University of Wisconsin, a student discovered that the admissions office had initiated and approved the doctoring of the cover photo for its 2001 undergraduate application.

The photo depicted a group of students — all of whom happened to be white — at a Wisconsin football game. The admissions office judged the homogeneity of the picture to be undesirable. But in a horrendously shortsighted and horribly misguided effort to correct the problem, the director of admissions himself asked his staff to paste a black face into the photo.

They did that, and then printed 55,000 copies, all of which have now been recalled. Why was the fake so easily detected? The game in question was evidently played on a cloudy day, and the black face they inserted into the photo was gleaming with sunlight.

In one sense, this incident is unbelievable simply because of the remarkably confused steps taken by the Wisconsin admissions department. But in a broader and more important sense, the incident is unbelievable because it sets out in harsh relief the incredible amount of pressure that universities feel to be politically correct — to put forward an image, even if contrived, of diversity.

Only 10 percent of the University of Wisconsin's 40,000 students are minorities, which makes it likely that one could take hundreds of pictures at a Wisconsin football game that would contain only white people. And one could surely also take photographs at that game that would offer a mix of races (though Wisconsin shockingly admitted that it could find no such diverse image in its files, which is an entirely different concern).

So why would the University of Wisconsin instinctively jump to "correct" an honest image of its football crowd? It was not wrong that the photo showed only white students. It was true. It was reality, albeit perhaps not an ideal portrayal of reality. What was wrong was the effort to doctor the photo. It was wrong not only because it was a lie, but also because it reflected the shortsighted attempt that we too often make to achieve token diversity.

While genuine diversity is invaluable, diversity simply for the sake of diversity, as in the Wisconsin photo, is artificial and is therefore meaningless. Those sorts of efforts, and the irrepressible need for political correctness, suggest that perhaps we have become oversensitized to issues of race. If we cannot offer an honest portrayal of race relations, then we will be unable to have honest conversations about race and will always struggle to achieve the interracial comfort necessary to truly tear down lingering racial barriers.

Of course, there's also another side to Wisconsin's problem: Having realized from their photographic records that their campus is fairly homogeneous, what could Wisconsin's administrators have done to diversify their campus? They chose to falsify an image of student life, ostensibly in the hopes of attracting more minority applicants.

But that begs a larger question — one that applies to Princeton, as well as to Wisconsin, as the University struggles to recruit a more balanced applicant pool. To what extent is it acceptable to misrepresent a school or any other institution in order to attract a more diverse crowd?

One could argue that the ends justify the means: If doctoring an image or otherwise exaggerating social integration makes the relevant minority more comfortable and therefore actually increases integration, then doctoring the image is perfectly acceptable. On the other hand, that policy represents a lie, and that lie, by virtue of its implicit effort to cover up the problem, may do more to create conflict than it does to provide resolution.

Institutions — Princeton included — ought to face problems of diversity head on. So far, Princeton has not fully done that. Let us hope that as our own administrators struggle to confront the University's diversity problems, they do not fall into the same kind of ideological trap that tripped up the administrators at Wisconsin. Alex Rawson is a history major from Shaker Heights, Ohio. He can be reached at ahrawson@princeton.edu.