(FORTUNE Magazine) – The politics of the campus never fail to amaze these days. We use the term ''campus'' a bit warily here, for older collegians tend to associate that term with ivy-covered walls and slate walks crisscrossing expansive lawns, while we are proposing to write about certain events centering on the ivyless East 20s in New York City. The neighborhood in question is home to Bernard M. Baruch College, which has one of the largest undergraduate business schools in America and is a major ornament of the City University system. Politics at Baruch are fascinating these days because they have brought onstage a new and potentially powerful weapon of the academic left: the power to force change via the accreditation process. Why does anybody bother to ''accredit'' colleges? Obviously, to separate real colleges from diploma mills. But still, what is a real college? That question used to be answered by referring to academic standards as embodied in, say, professorial qualifications and the contents of labs and libraries. The big new zinger from the left is that real colleges must also manifest diversity. The operational meaning of this increasingly cant-laden term is now well understood: ''Diversity'' means endless rounds of affirmative action in faculty hiring; it also implies a curriculum that goes easy on courses studying the works of dead white males. So far, two of the six major regional accrediting groups -- the Western and the Middle States associations -- appear to have been taken over by diversity fanatics. It was the Commission on Higher Education (CHE) at Middle States that landed on Baruch. For a while last year, it seemed that Baruch might actually be disaccredited as a result of the CHE's ''new direction'' (the phrase of executive director Howard Simmons) on diversity. In the end, the college got by, but only for the time being; its performance on the diversity front will be reviewed again by CHE next year. Some strange things happened in Baruch's examination by the CHE team. The weirdest sequence of all concerned the chairman of the team, T. H. Bonaparte. A Jamaican-born black, Bonaparte himself wrote the report, which suggested, among other things, that ''additional black and Latino administrators should be actively recruited'' by Baruch. About a month after thrusting this document on the college, he himself applied for the job (then open) of provost -- an incredible conflict of interest. Bonaparte withdrew his application only after James F. Guyot, a combative professor of political science and public administration at Baruch, made an issue of the conflict in a letter to CHE. Guyot also pointedly noted the presence on the commission of a member who turned out to be a consultant to institutions needing advice on ''management of cultural diversity'' -- advice that colleges would presumably need a lot more of by the time CHE got through evaluating them. We do not wish to imply that nest feathering has been central to the pressures on Baruch. All things considered, ideological fanaticism would seem a more parsimonious explanation of the pressures. Only committed ideologues would be putting this particular college through the wringer on affirmative- action grounds: Something over 20% of its full-time faculty already consists of minority-group members. An interesting question is where the Bush Administration stands on all this. The Administration is inescapably involved because of federal loans and grants to students, all of which long ago got the Office (now Department) of Education into the business of certifying the qualifications of accrediting associations. So now, while the Middle States Association is menacing Baruch and other institutions, DOE represents a threat to the association itself. Education Secretary Lamar Alexander has expressed concern about the association's diversity standards; however, he has also managed to avoid taking any action for the next six months -- during which a departmental committee will study the issue. We have a proposal of our own for some research by this committee. We would like it to find one credible study demonstrating that ethnic diversity at the faculty and administration level makes the slightest difference in what students learn.