Over the last couple of decades, there have been many politically correct catch-phrases. Few have been more parroted, however, than “diversity.”

What exactly is the ubiquitous concept of “diversity?” By definition, something which is “diverse” is made up of distinct or unlike parts or elements. A portfolio is diverse if it contains investments from a wide range of business sectors. Diversity often leads to many positive diverse outcomes — a diverse portfolio is safer from bad investments, a diverse workplace provides a myriad of backgrounds and experiences with which to approach business projects. But what happens if you don’t have the experience to create a diverse portfolio or if you don’t have a diverse applicant pool from which to select employees?

Stanford’s Diversity Week is calling attention to a very real and important issue of homogeneity in academia. Monday’s op-ed by ASSU Executives Hershey Avula ‘08 and Mondaire Jones ‘09 called for “a more vigorous expansion of typical applicant pools and greater energy devoted to attracting underrepresented groups to Stanford.” It is a noble ideal and one that the Editorial Board supports whole-heartedly.

In the same editorial, Avula and Jones state that an integral part of promoting diversity is to “make departments — which are responsible for hiring faculty — accountable for their lack of diversity.” This well-intentioned idea, however, will lead to a forced diversity, which will ultimately do more harm than good for the Stanford’s academic environment.

Making a department “accountable” for a lack of diversity is equivalent to punishing it for its homogenous applicant pool. It is not the fault of a Stanford University department that applicant pools are skewed toward white males. While societal issues and cultural problems have lead to this problem with diversity, Stanford is not to blame.

Avula and Jones claim that they don’t wish to see “admission of a less qualified ethnic minority or female applicant into a graduate program or into the ranks of a given academic department over someone more qualified.” But then what kind of accountability are we talking about? If a department doesn’t have a qualified minority applicant pool, can it really be punished for not hiring them?

Punishing a department for not hiring minorities will lead to one of two things. If a department doesn’t fill its “diversity quota” — the concept of accountability appears to be nothing more than a reworked definition of a quota — then the department may lose funding. If it hires under-qualified employees, the quality of the program suffers.

In June 2007, the Supreme Court of the United States made a very simple, yet profound statement when ruling on public school programs which consider race. Chief Justice Roberts wrote in his majority opinion that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” This statement holds true and pertinent to any issue of diversity — race and gender should never come into the equation. Forcing the hand of employers to hire based on race or gender does nothing but cause harm to the industry in question.

Calling for an expansion of recruitment into the applicant pool in the hopes of making it more diverse is something that Stanford should work on as actively as possible. The concept of accountability or enforced diversity, however, should be thrown out much like the affirmative action and quota mandates of the past.