[Mr. Freeman]

I really don't understand why everyone likes to advertise how diverse their team/company/organization/etc. is.
My personal belief is that a team should be open to anyone who wants to join and put in the necessary effort, period. Race, religion, favorite ice cream topping, etc. should never be discussed in relation to admissions.

I believe that the best admission system is one in which the applicant has any personally identifying information on their application run through a hashing algorythm and talks through a mediator to the evaluator. Thus, the evaluator cannot be biased towards or against the applicant regarding their race, religion, etc.

Back on topic, let's take the following example:
Let's pretend a population is 25% Hispanic, 25% black, and 50% white. If EVERYONE is on the robotics team, then the team will be 25% Hispanic, 25% black, and 50% white.
Does this mean that the team is not diverse?
Of course not, but it looks that way on paper.

What happens if you kick out half of the white team members? Then the team is 33% Hispanic, 33% black, and 34% white. Does this mean that the team is more diverse?

When someone says that their team is made up of X% minority students, it really doesn't say anything. Is their team diverse because the population in the general area is diverse? Is it because they have a quota system (ruled unconstitutional for college admissions because it actively discriminates against majority students)? Is it because they simply don't give recruiting presentations to majority students and concentrate on the minorities? Is it because the majority students at the school aren't interested in robotics and the minority students are?

The truth is that there's no way to know why a team is diverse unless you launch a reasonably intrusive, impractical, probably expensive, and tedious investigation to determine the actual cause.

Denying people a chance to be on the team because it makes your diversity figures bad is pretty close to actively recruiting minority students over majority students. In both cases, you're trying to influence who will join, not because of their skill or merit, but because of their race, religion, etc. And I haven't seen a single argument that will make me believe that favoring a demographic of people (minority OR majority) is a good thing.