Diversity

This comfortable community on the fringes of the Illinois prairie has a nice mix of homes, from new subdivisions to old Cape Cods, and a thriving commercial corridor with hotels and shops and restaurants. What there are not, however, are enough white residents to suit many people - both white and black - who live here. And so the town is in the midst of a $65,000 advertising campaign to attract new white families. The ads themselves don't say that. They simply celebrate the community's diversity.

I find this constant rush to judgment of Philadelphia School Superintendent Arlene Ackerman, a leader who has demonstrated that she is willing to make doing business in Philadelphia more inclusive, very troubling ("Don't trust public officials? Why not?" Sunday). With 44 percent of the city population being African American, 9 percent Latino, and 5 percent Asian, and with 80 percent of the students in the school district belonging in one of these ethnic groups, it would seem admirable to look for opportunities to make the dispersal of contracts more equitable.

A battle over University of Pennsylvania President Amy Gutmann's commitment to diversity has been playing out on the pages of the student newspaper this week. In a letter to The Daily Pennsylvanian published Wednesday, a group of senior faculty in the Africana Studies department blasted Gutmann for failing to add leaders of color to her administration, while she has touted diversity as an initiative. Their letter was prompted by Gutmann's decision earlier this month to appoint Steven J. Fluharty, who is white and had been senior vice provost for research and professor of pharmacology, psychology and neuroscience, as the new dean of the School of Arts and Sciences.

The country is tearing itself apart over "diversity. " Extreme conservatives have favorite causes they love to holler about. Why did Leonard Jeffries' race matter more than his nonexistent scholarship when CCNY - to its later chagrin - made him a tenured professor? Why is President Clinton even considering a radical like Lani Guinier to head the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division - could it be that she happens to be black? Anyone with common sense would agree that Jeffries and Guinier represent diversity gone berserk.

In one room, Kelly Vaughns stood with her paintbrush aloft, chatting with Mary Catherine McGinley and Elizabeth Formoso, who smoothed brown strips over a papier-mache head. In another, Charles Berry and Carlos Crespo shared a piano bench as they wound spools of yellow string into antique-style tassels. Li Troung studied a sign language interpreter's deft hands, reading her instructions for making wigs out of black yarn. Kyle Spencer, fascinated by the flawless translation, studied Troung.

Much of the study of African Americans and Jews relates to relationships between the two groups. But Lewis Ricardo Gordon, a Jamaica-born, Yale-educated author and Temple University professor, is studying African-Americans who are Jews. And he's not just talking about people of color who became Jews as a result of their parents' inter-marriage or conversion. The founder of Temple University's Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought and its Center for Afro-Jewish Studies, Gordon, 44, says Jews are among the most racially diverse people on the globe - and many don't even know it. Gordon traces his lineage to Jewish maternal grandparents from Israel and Ireland and describes himself as a secular Jew. Religious observances were not a big part of his childhood, but they are important to him now. And he counts himself among America's largely invisible black Jews.

Facing pressure from a civil-liberties group, officials at Bucks County Community College have withdrawn the question on the college's job application that asks potential employees about their commitment to diversity. The question has been protested by a college sociology professor and the Philadelphia-based Foundation for Individual Rights in Education Inc., both of whom labeled the diversity query a McCarthyist tactic that could stifle free speech. The college, which has argued that the question reflected its broad commitment to diversity in regard to race, sex and age, eliminated the query at the last Board of Trustees meeting.

YEARS ago, Willie Nelson warbled across America advising moms not to let their sons "grow up to be cowboys. " He might've been on to something. According to a recent study of admissions at elite colleges by two Princeton sociologists, Willie could also advise moms not to let their sons grow up to become members of high school ROTC, 4-H Clubs or Future Farmers of America. The study concluded that while most extracurricular activities enhance your chances of getting into a good college, these specific ones scream "Red America" and the biases of the gatekeepers at the elite schools come into play, making admission less likely.

DOMINIC MUNIZ, who runs the Barber Time barbershop in the lower Northeast, has seen the area flourish in diversity over the past decade. Most of his customers live in the Oxford Circle/Castor Gardens neighborhoods and are "Asian, Russian, Ukrainian, Albanian, Puerto Rican, white, black," he said. From behind the chairs in the barbershop he opened four years ago on Castor Avenue, Muniz, 24, has witnessed the neighborhood's changing landscape and demographics. When he was a child and visited his aunt, who lived in the neighborhood of modest, brick rowhouses and twins, the population was basically white.

After the staffing of the executive branch, a thinking person might have hoped that the word "diversity" would disappear from politics, somewhat in the way that a useless physical appendage eventually atrophies. Alas, this has not come to pass. After months of vigorous and largely nonsensical exercise, "diversity" can now make its way, unaided by thought, into virtually any public utterance, oral or written. Not only has the word survived, but like the plumage of certain birds, or secondary sex characteristics, it seems to have done so with no other purpose than to signal that the utterer is of the correct species.