"Diversity and Dishonesty"

Ross Douthat expressed well a point that I've wanted to make, and that I think needs to be made, here.  Paraphrasing Peter Westen, it seems increasingly that the idea of "diversity" -- like "inclusive", or "open-minded", etc., etc. -- is, when it comes to views and opinions (I'm not thinking here about diversity in terms of socioeconomic or ethnic background) is not so much "empty" but entirely substantive and loaded.  He writes:

I am (or try to be) a partisan of pluralism, which requires respecting Mozilla’s right to have a C.E.O. whose politics fit the climate of Silicon Valley, and Brandeis’s right to rescind degrees as it sees fit, and Harvard’s freedom to be essentially a two-worldview community, with a campus shared uneasily by progressives and corporate neoliberals, and a small corner reserved for token reactionary cranks.

But this respect is difficult to maintain when these institutions will not admit that this is what is going on. Instead, we have the pretense of universality — the insistence that the post-Eich Mozilla is open to all ideas, the invocations of the “spirit of free expression” from a school that’s kicking a controversial speaker off the stage.

And with the pretense, increasingly, comes a dismissive attitude toward those institutions — mostly religious — that do acknowledge their own dogmas and commitments, and ask for the freedom to embody them and live them out.

It would be a far, far better thing if Harvard and Brandeis and Mozilla would simply say, explicitly, that they are as ideologically progressive as Notre Dame is Catholic or B. Y.U. is Mormon or Chick-fil-A is evangelical, and that they intend to run their institution according to those lights.

His point, I think, is that institutions (including religious hospitals, schools, social-welfare organizations, etc.) are usually not "neutral" when it comes to matters that connect closely with their charism, mission, character, etc.  Nor should they be, or be expected to be.  But, at the same time, they should pretend otherwise.