The Kaleidoscope Fund, President Ruth Simmons' effort to bring intellectually diverse speakers to campus, has already yielded benefits. Conservative author Dinesh D'Souza, the first speaker to be invited to Brown using Kaleidoscope money, gave a passionate and intriguing speech in which he carefully defended his arguments rather than rushing through them. After a series of liberal speakers who assumed that audiences here would take their words as gospel, there's no question D'Souza brought intellectual diversity to this stop on the campus lecture circuit - if intellectual diversity could ever be quantified.
Simmons will be the ultimate arbiter of which proposals to fund, according to her assistant, Marisa Quinn. And Simmons appears to be willing to support speakers with whom she may personally disagree; in her February letter to the student group Anti-Racist Action, in which she rejected ARA's Israel divestment proposal, she suggested the group make use of the fund.
We encourage Simmons to exercise caution, because any time officials make judgment calls about the validity of arguments, they open themselves to accusations of censorship. How extreme is too extreme a viewpoint for a Kaleidoscope Fund speaker? We don't expect to see any neo-Nazis or white supremacists sponsored by the Office of the President. But what about potential borderline cases?
At the same time, Simmons will have to support liberal speakers, even if that makes her efforts redundant; otherwise, she may as well call it the Conservative Fund. An intellectual diversity fund that brought only conservative speakers to campus would be both an insult to average conservatives, by suggesting that token representation is a sufficient remedy to an institutional slant, and a capitulation to zealots who call for intellectual diversity only to make themselves heard.
With all these constituencies to satisfy, Simmons may find her $100,000 of initial funding is capable of disappearing quickly. She will have some difficult choices ahead. We do not argue that a selection committee would better serve the needs of the Kaleidoscope Fund - committees can often work too slowly, misrepresent the community they serve and be accused of censorship anyway. But Simmons will have to make sure each of her selections is disparate for maximum impact. Unless you change the focus of a kaleidoscope, it only reflects the same thing, repeated over and over again.
