dailyBooks - The Diversity Delusion--How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture by Heather Mac Donald​​​​​​​ | Conversation Starters

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Heather Mac Donalds

The Diversity Delusion

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Introducing The Diversity Delusion

T he Diversity Delusion : How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture is a book written by Heather Mac Donald criticizing academia for its modern liberalism and the damage it has done to America's educational system.

The book claims that American universities are in crisis for undermining humanistic values that further cause divisions among its citizens. Mac Donald says the ideologies against racism and sexism are promoted in college campuses as professors overlook Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare, and American history in favor of identity politics and ideology. What results are college graduates who ignore human commonalities and prefer to define themselves according to sexual preference, gender, and skin color. Any challenge to these beliefs does not go unpunished. Mac Donald asserts that this problem is traced to academia's belief that America is deeply racist and sexist. This has led to the creation of a bureaucracy that propagates the diversity mentality. This bureaucracy denounces meritocracy, requires quotas for hiring, and make students and adults think in terms of victim mentality. The country is producing citizens who think there is always a reason for grievance, and this does not bode well for America. The author, however, thinks that all is not lost yet. The country's artists, authors, and composers continue to provide inspiration. Mac Donald says we can still return to our classical liberal orientation and practice "open-minded inquiry and expression" in order to discover our "common humanity."

Mac Donald cites that the university's purpose is to transmit knowledge and widen the students' understanding of humanity. This, however, is now lost on many professors as a fixation on ideology has become the paramount goal of education today. To show how serious the problem is, Mac Donald tells stories of incidents on campus. She relates how students of color have demanded that they be exempted from academic requirements like class attendance because they are going through race-related stress, trying to stay alive in the campus where they feel their lives are in constant danger. Mac Donald says investigations have shown that no students on campus have reported being threatened or endangered for going to class. Many other incidents involving students becoming rude and violent for feeling threatened by ideas other than what they believe in were cited by the author. She highlights the role of professors who encourage "victimology" among the students in their efforts to be politically correct.

The author explains how the attacks on classical literature have been happening since the 1980s but these have become more militant in the past few years. Required reading of Western greats like Milton and Wordsworth has been criticized by students and professors who think these works are "hostile to students of color." She gives the ironic historical roots of identity politics, explaining the works of 1970s philosophers like Jaques Derrida and Paul de Man and their deconstruction of Western works of Plato, Proust, Rousseau, among others. She explains how the ideology of multiculturalism is wreaking havoc, and how it has become an excuse to trash Enlightenment principles and the Bill of Rights. She also says science is not spared from this victimology thinking. "...victim ideology encourages ignorant young adults to hate the monuments of Western civilization without bothering even to study them," she writes.

The book is compared to Alan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind as it criticizes modern liberalism and its eroding effects on Western culture. The book is written from a first-person perspective as she gives an account of her experience of undemocratic and uncivilized treatment given by university students and professors. She tells how she was harassed by students and prevented from presenting her book. She was accused of fascism for "trying to give voice to the millions of law-abiding minority residents of high crime areas who support the police..." The first chapter is a lengthy first-hand account of how university students were violent, unruly, and unreasonable as they protested against her and her ideas.

Mac Donald has documented academias damage to liberal education, with a large amount of data and information to support her claims. She presents facts and statistics that academic offices are known to hide. She also quotes newspaper reports to present examples, views, to elaborate her points or to support her accounts of particular incidents.

She is commended by critics for her compelling manner, her strong language and wit, described as spitfire writing and scorn for nonsense. Her book is described as brilliant...(with) tons of guts. Some critics also agree with her as she defends the western canon. They believe that there still many citizens who want their college children to study classical liberal arts education even if universities are not so open to offering these courses anymore.