As a white male Christian, the first thing I do every morning is remind myself of the evils people of my color, gender and creed have barbarously inflicted on millions of individuals who are different from them.

The next thought comes a few moments later. I wake up from dreamland, realize I live in a world where people are responsible for their actions as individuals, not as groups, and go on with my day free of guilt.

So when a position such as the University of Wisconsin's vice provost for diversity and climate becomes empty, as it just did, I have an answer to said emptiness: Don't fill it up. Let the Office of Diversity and Climate, along with a concept of diversity itself, which delights in collectivism, be put to rest once and for all. Start spending money on, just as a thought, education of the purposeful variety instead.

But of course, the university won't do that. Instead the final candidates for the job have been invited to Madison to tell faculty and students why they are the best qualified to waste the university's money. One of those finalists was Dr. Damon Williams, who visited campus last week.

Mr. Williams stressed in a meeting with students that accountability is the key, for if affirmative action were to have some form of immunity from criticism, a likely vaccine would be efficiency. On the surface this is an agreeable proposition, and Mr. Williams, who has served at both the University of Connecticut and the University of Michigan in related fields, seems ideally qualified to carry it out. However, the fact that this vice provost is accountable to an ideological system that inherently sets different ethnicities in opposition to one another brings into question not only the necessity, but the morality of the position's existence. By entrenching a narrow interpretation of diversity, university administrators, such as Mr. Williams and his competitors for the position, spend millions of dollars to create an environment in which the only differences between us that matter are skin deep.

Personally, I have more differences with my roommate — who also happens to be a white, libertarian male with similar religious beliefs as mine — than with anyone else I have met at this university. These differences are due to the fact that diversity is brought into being simply by virtue of thought. If a person can think and act differently from his peers, he is diverse, insofar as he can form himself into something distinct from the person next to him.

Whiteness, blackness and everything in between are merely side notes.

What the Office of Diversity and Climate, as well as Mr. Williams, is getting wrong is that the question is not who should apologize or "fix" the state of a society recovering from a time in which racism was federally mandated, but how every American can ensure that it does not happen again. You cannot expect euphoric compliance from a white high schooler applying to college when you tell him, "Sorry, but your position at a university, a position that your grades qualify you for, has been filled in the interests of compensating for the

underrepresentation of minorities."

Perhaps the Office of Diversity and Climate and the questions it raises wouldn't be so problematic if they did not waste so much money. Often times the immorality of an idea only assumes a more tangibly threatening nature when we realize that we are financing it. Plan 2008, the flagship program of Diversity and Climate that is scheduled to end next year, foresaw an estimated budget of more than $11.7 million over a decade. Students are seeing money that would otherwise be going to reduce rising tuition rates instead be diverted to yet another offering on the altar of the David Duke of diversity, Al Sharpton.

I may be the only one who thinks my color is the least significant part of my identity, but it does seem to factor unnecessarily into our admissions process and the distributions of our finances. I was therefore greatly pleased to read Ryan Masse's column ("A downside to diversity, an upside to change," Nov. 16) in which he asserted that emphasizing our differences in the interest of multiculturalism does us little good. The next step is to put that sentiment into action by eliminating the programs and the offices that are an extension of the ludicrous idea that color is really the only factor of value besides grades in determining an individual's worth to an institution. This is the only morally and fiscally responsible choice.

And yet the type of administrator that Mr. Williams personifies is not someone who I would ever consider personally disliking. No, it is not Mr. Williams who needs to go, but the position he seeks and the idea it perpetuates. The office of vice provost for diversity and climate and the Creating Community Initiative are only tiny examples of the many unnecessary gears in an apparatus of inequity that is turning the imaginary lines between us into chasms.

Sam Clegg ([email protected]) is a freshman majoring in English.