Ridiculous and clumsy in its choice of causes, quasi-literate in its pronouncements, MEChA’s greatest achievement to date has been in making it difficult to celebrate Columbus Day on West Coast campuses. And yet MEChA is representative of much that is wrong with the contemporary university scene. Not only is the group not discouraged in its frequent outrages against civility, good taste and university conduct codes — it is in fact accorded special protections denied other student groups. What’s more, on many campuses it benefits from lavish grants of student activity fees and university resources. MEChA’s success, like that of so many other groups devoted to the promotion of minority grievance, owes more than a little to the collusion of university administrators.

But what makes such groups appealing in the first place? Why do so many students — especially minority students — share the grim vision of American history and society sponsored by MEChA and its sister organizations? Innocent and well-adjusted when they enter college, such students graduate knowing how to do little else besides despise their country and hate their fellow citizens. It is a remarkable fate for the freest, wealthiest and most tolerant society in human history that some of its worst enemies should be its own children.

A recent report issued by the New York Civil Rights Coalition (NYCRC), a left-leaning civil-liberties group (its board has included U.S. Congressional delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton and the late feminist congresswoman Bella Abzug), holds a key. The report, entitled “The Stigma of Inclusion: Racial Paternalism/Separatism in Higher Education,” examines patterns of ethnic exclusion and separatism on 32 prestigious college and university campuses. The report’s conclusions would be startling were they not so obvious.

“Race and ethnicity considerations,” the authors write, “permeate almost every facet of campus life. Both public and private colleges, from CUNY Queens to Princeton University, have fostered this kind of racial and ethnic separatism. In so doing, college officials who ought to know better confuse the goal of ‘diversity’ with the deification of race as a factor for treating students differently. These colleges abuse academic freedom and the open pursuit of knowledge by funding separatism and by placating or empowering students who advocate and practice separatism.”

The report proceeds to detail the numerous ways in which minority college students are goaded into the separatist mentality. These include separate events and programs for minority students; special administrative positions and offices that provide separatist organizations with facilities and funding; remedial education programs for supposedly “disadvantaged” (i.e., nonwhite) students; and identity-studies departments (Asian Studies, African-American Studies, Chicano Studies, Women’s Studies, etc.) devoted to indoctrinating students in the ideology of grievance, multicultural centers and special-interest housing for minorities.

Such programs place tremendous pressure on minority students from their first day on campus — indeed, often before they even arrive. Aggressively recruited by public and private universities alike, students from “historically under-represented groups” (that is, everyone except whites and, sometimes, East Asians) generally benefit from affirmative action and other preferences in admissions. As soon as such a student has accepted an offer, he is bombarded with material from his college’s administration. He is given a special welcome from the dean, asked to join one or more campus identity groups, invited to special, minority-only orientation events and informed of the various possibilities for segregated housing on campus.

Nor does the pressure let up once school is underway. As the NYCRC report notes, “while only 8 of 16 SUNY campuses surveyed by the National Association of Scholars required any courses in Western Civilization for a liberal-arts degree, all 16 had required courses in ‘multiculturalism.’ ” Such courses, typically taken during a student’s freshman year, serve both as recruiting points for identity-studies departments and helpful introductions to the discourse of grievance that will dominate campus discussions of politically sensitive issues for the remaining years of the student’s undergraduate career.

Minority students who somehow manage to resist the relentless pressure to put their racial identity before all else run the risk of being stigmatized as “traitors” by their co-ethnics. Not surprisingly, few students choose this path. More typical is the case of a Latino male quoted in an Amherst College pamphlet: “For me, there’s more consciousness of my background as a Latino male. Before I came to Amherst, I wasn’t thinking about race or class or gender or sexual orientation, I was just thinking about people wanting to learn.”

That the irony of such remarks has apparently been lost on both the student and the Amherst administration is perfectly typical of today’s campus environment. Today’s college campus is really two campuses in one. On the one hand is the traditional campus, a place where young people go, above all else, to learn. On the other hand, there is what University of Pennsylvania Professor Charles Alan Kors has termed the “shadow university”, a place where, under the cover of a “socially progressive” agenda, minority students are pushed into the pre-fabricated ethnic ghetto of identity studies departments, multi-cultural student centers, and racially segregated graduation ceremonies.

To some, this sort of coddling may seem like a golden opportunity. But in fact it is a disaster — for the students, for the university, and, more generally, for American society. Taught from the age of 18 to put their racial allegiances before all else, many minority students today graduate with a fully formed victim’s worldview according to which American history is nothing but one long outrage perpetrated against gays, women and minorities. Little surprise that so many of these students should choose to join MEChA and other extracurricular hate groups — that, after all, is what they been trained for.

Minority students are not the only ones harmed by the new wave of racial segregation on campus. White and (to a lesser degree) Asian students also suffer from its effects. Constantly exposed to the massive and costly efforts of university administrations to recruit, retain, and privilege minority students, majority group students quickly come to realize that they are second-class citizens on campus. While they may or may not take advantage of the educational opportunities available in college, they can’t help but notice that their success is a matter of official indifference. Over time, this racist double standard can give rise to a quite justifiable sense of resentment.

Segregationist policies are a betrayal, not just of the university’s mission, but also of the civil-rights movement whose interests so many university administrators pretend to serve. “Through color-coding, today’s institutions of higher education have done a disservice to both minority and non-minority students,” write the authors the NYCRC study. “Segregated housing, courses, and programs disseminate poisonous stereotypes and falsehoods about race and ethnicity. They limit interaction between minority and non-minority students, and reward separatist thinking. By discouraging whites and, sometimes, Asians from minority-specific programs, they deny equal interaction on campus. Although they claim to have minorities’ interest at heart, these colleges in fact take the civil rights movement giant steps backward.”