NEW HAVEN -- THE NEW academic year has ushered in a barrage of affirmative-action initiatives at Southern Connecticut State University. One of these is achieving racial and ethnic diversity in the SCSU faculty.

The rationale for this is that a diverse faculty is a more competent faculty, better able to teach Black, Hispanic, and female students who would otherwise be taught by white males.

They assume that each minority groups has its own viewpoint and that minorities are victimized and being deliberately excluded from specialties dominated by white males. For that reason SCSU faculty must make racial and ethnic diversity a top hiring priority; they should ``borrow'' minorities from other departments for their search committees; and should also consider ``candidates of opportunity'' who are unqualified but possess ``other exceptional qualities.''

Additional requirements imposed by the university include the need to record the race and gender of every candidate we wish to interview.

But hiring faculty in the name of ``diversity'' does not help faculty hiring committees bring better scholar-teachers to SCSU. Instead it institutionalizes discrimination against worthy candidates who happen to be white, male, heterosexual or politically conservative while lowering teaching and scholarship standards.

Indeed it causes universities to break the laws of the land, including the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and all federal and Connecticut statutes that prohibit discrimination. An article in a recent issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education notes that diversity preferences in faculty hiring are very difficult to defend; diversity policies could make Southern far more vulnerable to lawsuits than the supposed unfair hiring standards now in place.

Besides being illegal, such practices hurt minorities by reinforcing prejudice and misconstrue the needs of the most important university population - the students. They know the difference between a member of a preferred group who meets our "minimal qualifications" and the high-quality professors of all backgrounds that SCSU has successfully attracted in the past. These students also know that this affects the quality of the education they receive, the value of their degrees, and their future employment prospects.

Hospitals do not hire ``minimally qualified'' doctors for the sake of diversity; don't our students deserve the best professors we can hire?

What motivates all the new rules? The new policy statements suggest a vision of social justice to make faculty resemble the inhabitants of the urban center of New Haven, as it assumes do our students.

But the idea that in a just world faculty demographics would necessarily match those of the New Haven community is absurd. A sizable percentage of our students do not even come from the urban center, they are from small, provincial towns in the region.

Southern Connecticut admirably helps New Haven address its many social pathologies but any attempt to reflect these realities would help no one. If SCSU were to follow a real policy of non-discrimination, faculty demographics would represent those of the applicants for faculty positions, not those of the community they are teaching in. These are dictated by individual preferences, not race-driven quotas.

Perhaps the worst thing about this obsession with ``diversity'' on college campuses is that its objective is really a political one. Most diversity proponents are pursuing a political agenda that seeks to homogenize not diversify perspectives. It is one designed to attract liberal Democrats who have almost identical political positions despite their racial and ethnic diversity.

There is nothing in these policies that promotes one of the most important kinds of diversity in academia - intellectual diversity. The list of recruitment sources we were given does not include a single conservative organization. Discriminating on the basis of race and gender does not guarantee different perspectives.

Rather, it is far more likely to produce a group of faculty having similar values, views of human nature, and perceptions of a just society. It is dangerous for any institution, but particularly for an educational institution, to seek a monopoly over the truth.

While academic departments at SCSU may only be encouraged to achieve diversity, institutional pressure to conform will discourage "infidels" on search committees from listing white males as finalists for positions even if they are by far the best candidates.

Instead of selecting faculty on the basis of merit, faculty hiring committees in specialties dominated by white males will be looking not for the best-qualified candidates for members of ethnic minorities who are "minimally qualified.''

In the alternative, many departments will start to hire in specialties with a political agenda that have a higher proportion of minorities - feminist and ethnic studies, for example. In time, we will only be able to interview one or two of our best candidates and the rest will have to be minimally qualified or from highly politicized specialties in an effort to meet these unjust and discriminatory diversity goals.

This is not justice, it is injustice. And the result is universities where the students it purports to teach receive an inferior education. If Southern Connecticut would limit its focus to the pursuit of excellence, listed as its primary value, and had a little more faith in minorities and white males, everybody would be better off, especially our students. And diversity would likely be one of the results.

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Patricia Olney is an associate professor of political science at Southern Connecticut State University, in New Haven.