Diversity in higher education, most everyone would agree, is a positive. Janet Galligani Casey, who serves in the capacity of visiting associate professor at Skidmore College in New York, agrees with it, but she thinks that sometimes all the talk about it hides complicated realities, especially for the working-class student. This article describes the views and opinions of Casey regarding diversity in higher education and the working-class student. She says that diversity is simply difference, not something one must work to acquire but rather something one must work to recognize. It always exists, regardless of how homogeneous a given population may appear to be. Indeed, the problem is not that a given population lacks diversity, but that it may lack the particular kinds of diversity, usually racial or ethnic, that one desires. She is convinced that the nation's current discourse on diversity does not serve the working-class student well. She argues that attending to the special circumstances of lower-class students brings to the fore the many ways in which the nation's diversity rhetoric continues to gloss over certain forms of cultural difference, and continues, in an unreflective manner, to advance the middle-class ideology of the academy as the normative one.