University-sanctioned "diversity" has backfired in many ways. By encouraging students to obsessively focus on racial and ethnic difference, it creates or increases tensions rather than diminishing them. At the same time, it fosters the idea that every group has its own, mutually exclusive "perspective," a ghetto mentality that's fundamentally at odds with what's supposed to be a university's educational mission. Instead of fostering brilliance, open inquiry or high academic standards; it's a recipe for groupthink. And groupthink is what we have gotten.

I have long suspected that a lot of university staffers share this opinion, even if few dare say so. And who can blame them? Many have families, want to make tenure , want to keep the esteem of their colleagues. To make it in the academic world these days (especially in the highly politicized world of the humanities and social sciences) intelligent, non-ideological people have to put on a constant show of leftist piety when confronted with views they find absurd or pernicious. Just play along and don't make waves.

Fortunately, not everyone plays along. Indeed, as two recent books demonstrate, there are still independent minds on our not-so-diverse campuses.

University of California-Berkeley linguist John McWhorter first made a name for himself beyond the university two years ago with the publication of his Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America. Losing the Race was a surprising book, not least because McWhorter, who is himself black, did not shy away from taking controversial stands on such issues as affirmative action and the continued under-performance of African-American students. According to McWhorter, the difficulties that plague black students in American schools stem less from white racism (by now, a knee-jerk response to any and all evidence of black academic failure) than from a culturally ingrained tendency among blacks to regard academic excellence as "a white thing."

McWhorter's latest book, Authentically Black: Essays for the Silent Black Majority, picks up where Losing the Race left off. In Authentically Black, McWhorter draws attention to what he terms a "New Double Consciousness" among African-Americans. "Since the late 1960s," McWhorter writes, "blacks have been taught that presenting ourselves and our people as victims when whites are watching is the essence of being 'authentically black'." While many blacks are privately confident of their past achievements and prospects for the future, there's a strong inclination (indeed, nearly a sense of obligation) to rail against white racism in public.

According to McWhorter, this siege mentality directly contributes to black academic failure. For many black students, McWhorter writes, "black 'authenticity' means hunkering down behind a barricade glaring hatefully at the white 'hegemony' on campus. Black students typically cluster in their own section of dining halls, throw their own parties, often have their own theme houses, and are in general ushered into a separatist ideology that they often did not have when they came to campus." Not surprisingly, this attitude carries over into the classroom, where signs of effort are often perceived as a kind of betrayal of the race. (I've seen this myself. In a course I took some years ago, I overheard a black female who had contributed in class discussion being accused afterwards by a black male of trying to "get it on" with the white instructor. Though she continued to attend section, we never heard from her again.)

Black students are of course not alone in promoting on-campus segregation. Indeed, much of the responsibility for the worsening racial climate on American campuses must be laid at the feet of well-meaning white administrators and staff who believe that, by encouraging blacks and other minorities to set themselves apart from the student body, they are Doing the Right Thing. "White guilt is a dangerous and addictive drug," McWhorter writes. "The 'diversity' notion these people have been taught to espouse is a craven, disingenuous, and destructive canard, antithetical to interracial harmony and black excellence."

The danger here is not only that black students will continue to lag behind students of other races but that affirmative action and other programs intended to paper over these racial disparities in educational performance will increasingly lead to resentment amongst majority group students. As Vanderbilt Law School professor Carol Swain points out in a new book, The New White Nationalism: Its Challenge to Integration, this danger threatens, not just our universities, but our society more generally.

As an observer of contemporary American social life, Carol Swain is unusually well-placed. Born into a family of 12 in an impoverished corner of rural Virginia, the future seemed to hold little promise for Swain. Several years and many odd jobs later, she had not only graduated from high school (the first in her family ever to do so) but had succeeded in amassing five university degrees, including a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina and a law degree from Yale. In the space of a generation, Swain had advanced from social dead end to middle-class respectability, material comfort and high academic credentials. For the young Swain, a black woman with little money and no connections, it was proof positive of the success of the civil-rights revolution.

Now, in her latest book, Swain warns that race relations in the United States are about to take a giant step backwards. From the pages of The New York Times to Hollywood to the campuses of our nation's most prestigious universities, the cultural left monopolizes discussion of racially sensitive issues. At the same time, Swain argues, increasing numbers of white Americans feel they have been cheated by the civil-rights movement. Instead of the colorblind and egalitarian society promised by the movement's early leaders, many whites perceive an across-the-board double standard on racial issues.

The result has been to drive white grievance underground, and sometimes into the arms of white nationalists. Frustrated by the failure of mainstream figures to address their concerns over affirmative action, immigration, and a number of other issues, Swain warns that increasing numbers of ordinary white Americans will be drawn into the orbit of white nationalist groups. But if the white nationalist movement continues to grow, Swain argues, the American elite will only have itself to blame.

The New White Nationalism, it should be noted, is intended for an academic audience and reads like it. It's not the sort of work most people are likely to want to take on the plane with them. Authentically Black is another story. McWhorter has a crisp style and iconoclastic bent that easily hold the reader's attention, and the subjects covered in his book, from the "diversity rationale" in university admissions to blacks on American television to last year's Cornel West fiasco at Harvard, make for a diverting read.

Despite these differences, The New White Nationalism and Authentically Black have more than a little in common. Swain and McWhorter write as insiders of an academic universe dominated by a politically correct orthodoxy on racially sensitive topics. Both have broken with this orthodoxy in offering original and important assessments of the current state of American race relations. In so doing, they give fine examples of just how little race and "perspective" have in common after all.

Just as importantly, one senses in both works a common dissatisfaction. While African-Americans have made great progress over the past 30 years, the way in which we talk about race continues to lag far behind. Today, America is a changed society, one that bears little resemblance to our racially segregated and increasingly distant past. As both Swain and McWhorter make clear, we'll all run a grave risk should we carry on treating that past as if it were just yesterday.